Category: Geekery

The purpose of a modern phone is of course communication: not only via the cell radio, but over the internet.

Naturally, this is a vital tool for the user. But the predominance of always-on network connectivity has lead to increasing abuse by providers of phone software: both Google and other creators of the operating system, and third-party app creators. As far as they are concerned, the phone’s true purpose is to (i) gather information about their users and (ii) serve advertising back at them based on this information.

Both these functions – antithetical to the users needs and wishes – rely on the internet. The baleful combination became possible with the rise of widespread mobile internet. In this post we’ll take control back over our network functions, so only the components we says can ever send or receive data on our phone. After all, we pay for it!

with microG, F-Droid and Aurora

Don’t Be Evil is now long forgotten. It’s almost a truism that the purpose of Google is to harvest our data so we can be advertised to. But are we stuck with Google on Android?

We all know that Android is a Google project – but things are a bit more complicated than that. Google does not in fact control Android; rather it is an open source, and freely licensed, project worked on by a consortium (and is merely sponsored by Google). In fact, the majority of Android and the applications it runs is built from open source code and tools.

Unfortunately, Google have in practice made it as difficult as they possibly can to use Android without involving the Google ecosystem.

Google have attempted to insert themselves into almost every process in your phone, hoovering up as much data as they can, and claiming everything will break if they are removed.

This isn’t true. Let’s de-Google Android.