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De-Googling my phone

piware.de

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Re: De-Googling my phone

#71

Post by ggm »

gcb0 wrote: post #68
ggm wrote: post #6

Your increased trust in these stores is motivated by .... what governance and audit structure? yes, its a devils-advocate position. You might (for instance) have high trust because you know them from hacker traeff you've been on, f2f. I can't have this a-priori knowledge. From here, this looks no better than "trust google" and in some dimensions looks significantly worse. Of course for the primary goal of "distrust g…

that's a big falacy, akin to saying "you might now those debian people, but it's safer to just use windows"

no, its "you might know those debian people but I know those google people, and don't know those debian people"

its "if you know people, maybe you are safe to use what they do" not "because you don't know x use y, you don't also know.

ie, I "know" as much about google, as I do about debian people

(btw, I run a lot of debian hosts. I also run google cloud hosted stuff)

Re: De-Googling my phone

#72

Post by nefariousoctopi »

firic wrote: post #46
zoom6628 wrote: post #19

For who ever is interested.... I live in China and have lived in a "google free" microcosm for some time forced on me by the government. Generally do not miss anything at all - at least I dont miss anything i dont know about. FTR i dont game or media watch on my phone. For me a phone is a mobile device for getting things done when im not at my desk. I use a Blackberry DTEK60. The apps I use: APKpure for getting apps…

Is there a way to verify that the apk on apkpure is the same as the one on Google play? Or is that site very reliable by itself?

I was having the same issue. If you are fine with something more homegrown you can use gplaycli[1] to download the apks directly from Google Play. I use it in combination with rsync, but it should be possible, at least in theory, to host your private f-droid repository with the downloaded apks.

Unfortunately, this does not solve verification of the apk signature. As far as I understand it, Android uses something similar to "trust on first use" [2] with apk signatures, so verifying the signature before first installation should be sufficient for most people.

[1]: https://github.com/matlink/gplaycli [2]: https://developer.android.com/studio/publish/app-signing

Re: De-Googling my phone

#73

Post by didsomeonesay »

evjim wrote: post #57

I used k9mail for awhile until I realized it had sent every temporary draft of an email as I revised something and changed between apps. Was super embarrassing. Hard to trust it now even though the ui seemed great.

This appears to be still an open issue. https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/2060

Re: De-Googling my phone

#74

Post by cJ0th »

m4lvin wrote: post #65

The Deutsche Bahn navigator mentioned in the article runs fine without Google Play Services. The only thing missing is the map view. And you can use yalp to install and update it.

I downloaded it from uptodown a few weeks ago and can confirm that it runs fine without google play services. It only gives you an error message on some occasions which you can ignore. However, I don't really trust uptodown. When I asked them where they sourced their apps from I didn't get a reply. I also mailed DB and they said they publish to Google Play only. Now I've checked the apk file with various online tools but I still feel slightly uneasy about it.

I really hope that one day institutions like public transport operators and public service broadcasters publish they apps in google-free stores. I don't want to depend on the Google Playstore one day because there's no other way to purchase an electronic ticket or to use tv on demand services.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#75

Post by distances »

cyphar wrote: post #39
greenhouse_gas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F-Droid doesn't package Binary drivers. They don't package drivers altogether, and they don't package anything they don't compile. They used to package upstream Firefox, but they don't seem to do that anymore.

They don't package upstream Firefox, but you can get GNU IceCat Mobile (which is the GNU fork of it). And they also package Firefox Klar (which is the European edition of the "always incognito" version of Firefox they released last year, with all the telemetry disabled).

Firefox Focus elsewhere I think? I really like the concept, I've made it the default browser for opening links and switch to Firefox mostly just when something doesn't render properly (scripts blocked perhaps?)

Re: De-Googling my phone

#76

Post by chupasaurus »

codetrotter wrote: post #50
cyphar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purism is planning on fixing that[1]. The funny thing is that we've actually reverted backwards, you could install a Debian-based distro on the Nokia N900 -- not really possible on newer phones (though you do have stuff like Ubuntu Phone). [1]: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

Speaking of Ubuntu Touch (aka Ubuntu Phone), it should be noted that though Canonical shut down support for it, a community of people calling themselves UBports are keeping the project alive. I recently bought a Nexus 5 for the purpose of running Ubuntu Touch. It arrived yesterday and I look forward to try Ubuntu Touch on it.

And UBports will support Librem 5, which was announced a week ago.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#77

Post by tehsurf »

Thanks for the great blog post! I did exactly the same a couple of month ago. Instead of using my own server for contacs and calendars, I used posteo.de for syncronisation. By the way, the DB-Navigator works fine without google. I installed it with the amazon market app.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#78

Post by greenhouse_gas »

ISL wrote: post #38
ggm wrote: post #6

Your increased trust in these stores is motivated by .... what governance and audit structure? yes, its a devils-advocate position. You might (for instance) have high trust because you know them from hacker traeff you've been on, f2f. I can't have this a-priori knowledge. From here, this looks no better than "trust google" and in some dimensions looks significantly worse. Of course for the primary goal of "distrust g…

Something I haven't yet understood -- why hasn't a ~Debian of Android-compatible phones emerged? Are we lacking a UI? Kernel? Apps? Interest? Interface with existing closed-source apps? Is stock Android too good?

The real problem is that you can't get a phone [1] which can run upstream kernel. So while there's postmarketOS and Replicant (both trying to port regular Linux (for lack of a better word[2]) to phones), very few phones work properly (and most are fairly old and not sold anymore, IIRC Replicant's newest phone they support is the European S3 - guess how old that thing is).

So now, for each device, you have to port desktop Linux [3] to whatever generation kernel it came with.

Debian, in contrast, can assume that you're using the standard modern kernel.

[1]. I mean that it should work as a phone, not just a small tablet. So if it can't make phone calls, it ain't a phone. All the more so if you want a working GPS and Camera.

[2]. I would have said Gnu/Linux but postmarket is based on Alpine which is based on busybox/muslc and not gnu.

[3]. Anything which issues syscalls is fair game, so, for example, if your oldest phone you want to maintain is six years old, then you have to back port every single program (and library!) to work on a random seven year old kernel.

Even back porting android user space (which is mostly Java and doesn't interact directly with the kernel) is a huge pain (and sometimes is actually that hard that the maintainers just give up). Porting back Debian?

Re: De-Googling my phone

#79

Post by greenhouse_gas »

gcb0 wrote: post #69
ISL wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I haven't yet understood -- why hasn't a ~Debian of Android-compatible phones emerged? Are we lacking a UI? Kernel? Apps? Interest? Interface with existing closed-source apps? Is stock Android too good?

drivers. really. we are back to being limited to one OS because of drivers. this is also the reason lineageOS and other android roms can't just keep updating older phones to new releases. they need the oem to upgrade so they can extract drivers from the binaries.

They can and do. For example, you can get Marshmallow on the Samsung s2, which didn't officially didn't get even Lollipop.

Re: De-Googling my phone

#80

Post by maccard »

as1mov wrote: post #51
psergeant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing option: Apple iPhone. Just works, aggressive security team.

Cons: You end up in Apple's high walled closed source garden. And have to deal with whatever they remove from the next iteration of the device based on their whims and fancies. And the exorbitant price tag.

> You end up in Apple's high walled closed source garden.

Google’s ecosystem is just as negative as apples walled garden. If you want, you can build and sign your own apps and put them on your device on an iPhone.

> And have to deal with whatever they remove from the next iteration of the device based on their whims and fancies.

I presume you’re talking about the headphone jack, which google followed up by removing from their pixel phone 12 months later? Why does apple get the hate here and not google?

> And the exorbitant price tag.

An iPhone 8 is £699 new right now, and a pixel 2 is £629. An 8 is £48 a month, and a pixel 2 is £53/month on contract (I’m sure there are better deals but I’m on a phone) - it’s disonfeuous to call apple out for having expensive Hugh end devices when the google equivalent is just as expensive.

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