Leave Google, leave Apple

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The articles of Cassandra Crossing I'm under license CC BY-SA 4.0 | Cassandra Crossing is a column created by Marco Calamari with the "nom de plume" of Cassandra, born in 2005.

Cassandra talks about her experience of degoogling (and deappleization). We also leave you some of our articles on the topic where we talk about the /And/ cited by Cassandra, but also by iode and of GrapheneOS.

This article was written on June 18, 2023 from Cassandra

Cassandra Crossing 547/ Leave Google, leave Apple

Leaving Google or Apple becomes easier, there are now no practical reasons or technical difficulties to use to self-absolve; Plus, here's a quick little guide on what to do and how to do it.

The 24 indefatigable readers, but not only them, are now aware of the long journey that led Cassandra to abandon proprietary operating systems for smartphones, greatly reducing the damage to her privacy suffered, reluctantly, in order to use one.

Three years have now passed, and the only difficulties encountered were having to deal with replacement applications for Search, Maps and things like that.

The stability of the /e/ environment (now renamed “Murena” almost everywhere) is impressive. Monthly updates for various bugs, updates for Android version changes (from 10 to 11 and from 11 to 12) done automatically and without any problem. Reliability equal to or greater than Googled Samsung and Huawei phones previously owned by Cassandra.

Anyone who reads these pages certainly doesn't need repetition on why using smartphones with commercial operating systems is an unhealthy practice, bordering on self-harm.

For her part, Cassandra, for once, is not willing to listen to the complaints and jeremiads of those who are afraid of taking such a step, of those who don't want to bother even the slightest, of those who are not willing to give up "designer" objects ", whose "I have nothing to hide anyway”.

These people, who still deserve attention, are referred to a careful reading of Cassandra's previous articles that you find in this list. There you will find both Cassandra's opinion on why you should do it and help on how to do it.

But let's try to summarize everyone here, also doing a bit of history to better understand the situation.

The solution of installing Linux on a smartphone, at least for now, unfortunately does not work. Not that it's impossible, in fact there are many distributions and even phones pre-installed with GNU/Linux, i Pinephone, but the lack of usability makes them unusable, except as a technological curiosity. This unfortunate fact depends largely on the secrecy of the specifications of the hardware components and the "baseband", the "piece of software" that lies between the phone's hardware and the kernel.

After this technological excursus let's return to us.

The big problem with today's smartphones is the amount of data that they send, directly or through the apps, to the operating system manufacturer and, to a lesser extent, to the phone and app manufacturers.

All the various brands of cell phones, despite their major differences, behave essentially in the same way.

The solution to these problems, paradoxically, is offered by the largest manufacturer of commercial operating systems for smartphones, namely Google.

Indeed Android, currently the most widespread operating system for mobile phones, produced by Google, is based on Linux, and is made available free of charge as Open source to anyone who wants to use it to produce a smartphone or another product that wants to use it (smartTV, IoT objects, etc.). In fact, “pure” Android is just another version of Linux, and contains nothing that intercepts or exploits personal data.

It is Google that, by making agreements with individual manufacturers, adds software components to Android on their smartphones (mainly Google Play Services) but also apps and widgets, intended to intercept and use data, including personal data. Using "pure" Android to build a version that makes normal apps work so as not to intercept data is the solution.

The first necessary component is LineageOS, which is precisely such a version of “pure” Android.

The second necessary component is microG, a fictional version of Google Play Services that "tricks" apps into believing they are running on a normal Googled smartphone, but which does not transmit data to Google.

The third component is Aurora Store, a Repositories which takes apps from Repositories official Google Play and redistributes them, always without transmitting personal data to Google. It is obviously possible to use others Repositories free as F-Droid without any problem, or do sideloading, i.e. install apps in .apk format.

These three components, Android, microG and Aurora Store, are brought together by e-foundation in a privacy-friendly distribution called /e/, which can be freely downloaded and installed on a wide range of standard smartphones.

/e/ also includes a selection of free apps Open source, already installed so as to be as similar as possible to those present on a normal Android smartphone, but which do not use Google resources, in order to avoid tracking. For example, Google Maps is replaced by Magic Earth, and its maps by those of Open Street Map.

/e/ is freely available, but the e-foundation also sells cell phones with /e/ pre-installed, both used and refurbished and new. Among the cell phones sold there are also Fairphone, which add repairability to the other "features" of a "de-googled" smartphone.

e-foundation also provides cloud services such as email and disk space, free at a basic level; for more details you can visit the website e-foundation.

To find out the status and future evolution of /e/ you can read this encyclopedic post by Gaël Duval, principal developer of /e/.

Your personal recipe for a healthier relationship with your smartphone is ready.

If your smartphone is among those supported, you can then load the /e/ ROM onto your smartphone, either by yourself or through a competent friend.

Or you can buy a smartphone with /e/ already installed, used or new, or even a Fairphone, directly on the e-foundation shop (now renamed “Murena”).

Finally, you can choose to continue your activity as a 24×7 supplier of your personal data to GAFAM. But even laziness will no longer be among the excuses that can be used to justify it

Marco Calamari

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