I hate smartphones
It’s really true. And I refuse to be dictated to by the silly whims of their operating systems and touchscreens.
A phone to me is a reliable communication device – I do all my computing elsewhere. After a long odyssey, I’ve found just the perfect hardware and software combination for me: the Xioami Qin F21 Pro.
Of course, software is just as important as the hardware. These series of posts is a detailed guide on how to create a powerful, secure, private and trustworthy Android installation that the user fully controls and is completely free of Google, the information octopus that has been strangling the internet and our discourse.
The guide was written for the Qin F21, but many of the points apply to any Android 10+ installation and so are hopefully useful elsewhere.
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Post Series: Taking control of Android on the Qin F21
A series of blog posts going into great detail on how I left behind large-touchscreen smartphones and Google – and set up a lightweight, reliable but powerful Android phone that works for me rather than vice versa. Notes on the philosophy behind this … and what you can expect to get as the end result…
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Some Backstory
For a long time now I’ve been fairly comfortable simply stating I plain don’t like smartphones I’ve gone into this in more detail elsewhere – but the short version is: They’re very poor mobile computing devices They’re very poor telephones They’re designed to actively work against (and spy upon) the user However, I need a…
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Outsmarting your Phone
Secure, private & trustworthy Android That you (not Google) controls – and which works well as a phone I’m a later adopter to smart phones. My early experiences confirmed just about every bad thing I’d heard about them. I was astonished, for devices of such putative hardware power, just how ridiculously and deliberately limited they…
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Qin F21: backup, unlocking, rooting and replacing stock firmware
As I described in the backstory, hardware-wise the Xiaomi Qin F21 Pro was the perfect form factor for me. The power of a smartphone, but actually designed to be a focused communication device, rather than a hamstrung computer. There are thoughtful debates about the security pros and cons, but the prerequisite for this level of…
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Google’s Stranglehold on Android
Six ways in which Google make it as difficult as possible to avoid using their products in on your Android mobile device:
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Android: Eliminating Google Dependencies
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…
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Android: Firewall, DNS and Advert Elimination
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,…
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Qin F21: T9 Text as good as 90s Nokias
One of the main reasons I ditched the CAT B35, and KaiOS more generally, was the fairly woeful implementation of predictive text. On a phone with a keypad the main mode of text entry – for SMS, but also in the browser and more widely in the phone operating system – will be some form…