Long-term free software user Phil Thane on the final frontier, the Android phone
There are many reasons why you might want to avoid Google and all its works. High on many people’s lists would be Google’s continuing quest to find out everything it can about you, collate your browsing, purchasing, video-watching, emailing, calendar details, contact lists and map searches so as to get a better price when it sells you to an advertiser. You might object to its tax avoidance, copyright infringements, its proclaimed desire to digitise all the world’s information, with the unmentioned corollary that the company will then control all the world’s information.
A lot of Google’s activity is easy to dodge. There are other search engines such as DuckDuckGo and IX Quick. There are other email providers – your ISP for one. There are free office suites to rival Google Docs and plenty of online storage options instead of Google Drive. You can even use OpenStreetMap. One Google product that hasn’t been so easy to avoid until recently has been Google’s Android OS for smartphones and tablets.
Android is based on a Linux kernel and uses various other free software tools and libraries. At heart it is an open source, free software project, but most of the development work is done by Google. When Google uses and improves a free software component, it’s required to make the modified version available to the open-source community, but some of the Google software is developed purely in-house so not necessarily released as free software. AOSP (the Android Open Source Project – led by Google – source.android.com) is where all the free software in Android is hosted, and anyone who knows how is free to use that code as a basis for their own version of Android.
Some of the cheapest smartphones use home-brewed Android versions, generally on low-spec hardware that Google has not authorised for use with its official version, but other people can use it too. Cyanogen (www.cyanogenmod.org) began as a oneman Android hacking project that attracted hundreds of volunteer contributors. The group releases CyanogenMod, a bloatware free operating system for a wide variety of devices using a combination of manufacturers’ own drivers and AOSP.
Installing CyanogenMod is not for the faint-hearted. If the phone is new it will invalidate the warranty, and if you do it wrong, the phone may not boot at all. Despite that, many people do it, often converting cheap phones stuffed with bloatware by a phone company into something slicker and less annoying. Now there’s an easier way: CyanogenOS.
CyanogenOS (cyngn.com) is a commercial spin-off from the CyanogenMod project that develops operating systems for OEMs. Microsoft has invested in Cyanogen, probably just to annoy Google, and Microsoft is collaborating on new ways of allowing apps to interact with the OS and each other, such as integrating Skype into the phone app so that in future you’ll be able to choose to connect via the phone network or use wi-fi and VoIP from the same app. The first phones in the UK with CyanogenOS installed are the Wileyfox Swift and Storm (www.wileyfox.com).
Wileyfox is a new company, which released the Swift early last year and the Storm just before Christmas. Both phones are positioned at the cheaper end of the market but offer pretty good performance. The big selling point, though, is the extra security provided by CyanogenOS.
Google-free?
The Wileyfox Storm we tested comes with the Google Play app installed, plus Chrome, Music Player and a handful of other Google ‘system apps’. System apps are tightly integrated into the OS and are tricky to remove (more on that below) but you can at least remove the icons from the home screen. On first boot it pops up two registration screens, for Cyanogen and Google. We registered with the former and not the latter.
If you aren’t going to use Google Play, then you are going to need a different app store. The first place to look is Fdroid (f-droid.org) which hosts free, open-source aps for Android. The Fdroid app, similar to any other app store, is downloadable from the web page. On our test phone ‘Install from other sources’ was already enabled, and clicking on the download notification ran the installation. On some phones you might have to enable ‘other sources’ in the settings menu.
If you’re determined to remove all traces of Google, then ‘/system/app mover’ from Fdroid allows you to convert system apps to user apps, which can then be removed. The phone needs to be rooted and have BusyBox (a terminal emulator) installed. Some system apps may be so tightly enmeshed with the operating system that removing them will prevent the phone working. Presumably this is why Cyanogen left them in. REMOVE SYSTEM APPS AT YOUR PERIL. Much safer to delete the icons and just forget the app is there.
Other Sources
Fdroid is the geek’s choice and offers a lot of apps to do things many users would never think about, but it doesn’t host many mainstream apps for the simple reason that their developers haven’t released them as open source. Android apps are packaged as .apk files and a few moments on your preferred search engine will reveal dozens of sites hosting .apk files, but not all of them are trustworthy. Before downloading any app, try searching for warnings about it and for the site you’re using. CyanogenOS is better than Google’s Android at telling you what an app is going to do to your device, which files it might access, which data it shares with whom and which networks it connects to. But that isn’t a guarantee.
Some we have used without problems are: GetJar (www.getjar.com), which is often installed on cheap imported phones. Advertising can be intrusive. Aptoide (www.aptoide.com) is an open-source installer, but the apps it hosts are not necessarily FOSS. Fdroid is actually a fork of Aptoid using the same code base but only hosting FOSS. Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk) hosts its own shopping app, and with that installed you can also access Amazon Underground and download music and videos. Whether Amazon is any more desirable than Google is another matter.
Pack Your Own
If you already have another Android device with useful apps on it, then before you ditch it, install APK Extractor from Google Play or Aptoide and use that to make .apk files of your favourite apps. The files are stored on the SD card and can then be transferred to the new device and installed. We tested it with the Guardian app, and it pops up a message claiming that it won’t run unless Google Play is updated. Ignore the message, though, and it works okay.
Before you go to a lot of trouble, check if you really need an app; many company sites these days automatically adapt to mobile browsers and work very well. A few provide their own app download site, though most just link to Google Play.
Music
It’s easy to give Google Play a swerve when looking for music. For streaming, Spotify and Napster are pretty unbeatable, and both their apps are available from Aptoide. For downloads, try Amazon (see above) or 7 Digital (www.7digital.com). Tesco (www.tescoentertainment.com) has an uninspiring selection, but you do get Clubcard points if that’s your thing. Emusic (www.emusic.com) makes a point of being staffed by people that like music, so it has a better selection of esoteric tracks than most sites.