Yes this is what I understand the term free software to mean, however the freedom from the burden of needing skills to so that I can remove unwanted apps and customise is very attractive. I.e a totally customisable. This gives the user a sense of not being constrained and hence free which I think is what most people want from a phone. Most people don’t want to mess with the code.
Fairphone are in the business of selling and so the Freedom to customise is a priority after all anyone with the required skills can change the software. But as said before, Fairphone don’t have the resources to sell more than one OS as that would require supporting that OS and they have a difficult enough job with Android 10
/e/ uses one proprietary application so it is like Sailfish OS : almost free but not totally (I don’t talk about blobs even if we should but then FP3 is not a solution).
I disagree with you on what people want. They want to find their contacts, their photos, having Android Auto working, etc. and they don’t care about privacy or choice.
They prefer to lose a bit of freedom if they can have an easier life. It is sad even if it is how it is. Only education will be able to change it and not just the opportunity to buy a phone or a computer with free software
It’s not just a question of tinkering with the source code. Software freedom is about ownership and power relations in the software vendor/software user relation, and hence it is interesting also for people who don’t have technical skills.
In relation to Google, I’d say that there’s very much also the freedom to easily avoid Google’s ubiquitous surveillance. I think that should be easy to choose also for people w/o technical skills, not least in a phone that considers itself “fair”.
I respectfully disagree. IMHO, without Google sponsoring the Android development (inlcuding the AOSP) and ecosystem, a project like Fairphone would have never happened - a small startup simply could not afford the OS development. Same goes for pretty much all of the custom ROMs and alternative OSes.
And therefore I think that Fairphone should sell their devices with Android and leave the extra mile for people - let us call them a conscious minority - who want to live their mobile life without Google.
Calling Google’s services spyware is ideology and FUD from my of view. You can well use them in a sensible and data avoiding manner. I try to use alternative apps where possible and to support small, independent developers. And I prefer a well designed closed source app over an ugly FOSS UX nightmare (prejudice, I know).
To be honest, my first thought was that Fairphone would naturally prioritize selling through their own webshop. But on a second thought, Fairphone already links to “Local stores” in their own webshop now, so I would support your suggestion. The button could be renamed to “Dealers” (even now, the “Local stores” will often not stock Fairphones in their actual street shops) and the range of options it lists could always include /e/.
Well, a couple of years ago Google were busted (along with Apple) for hiring people to transcribe people’s private conversations, grabbed without consent using the unremoveable Google Assistant (OK, maybe consent is hidden on page 1483 of the TOS) in order to improve their speech recognition algorithms. Whistleblowers complained that they were actually having to transcribe married people having a row, recorded without their knowledge, and similar privacy violations. And that’s just one example. It is possible to close your eyes to the extent of that surveillance, but that doesn’t make it go away. Google is a very data-hungry company.
It’s kind of a non sequitur. I also prefer a well designed free software app over a proprietary UX nightmare (and this situation does exist). These questions are orthogonal.
Keep in mind that this was more by accident as the company didn’t manage to get the Google certification in time.
See Fairphone im Kurztest | heise online (German only, sorry)
Hi Carsten,
as you are part of the FOSS community, you are surely aware of the fact that currently there is no option to buy a privacy respecting phone. Smartphones per se are a privacy nightmare since they can be converted to listening devices by the various agencies around the world. While having a degoogled phone might be the best option for you in terms of privacy we also need to aknowledge that such phone might fall behind in terms of security, because google simply has a secure, although not a privacy respecting ecosystem. Hence, I would recommend you to install the /e ROM and move on. There are specific tweaks to your phone that increase the level of privacy a bit (I will make a simple video showing the tweaks and posting it somewhere). I also believe if Fairphone adopted your business model (selling degoogled phones with an option to install google services), they would go bankrupt within a couple of years. What they are doing is good enough considering the competition and circumstances.
You may be right about installing the /e/ ROM and moving on.
As I also work in free software, I’m fully aware that the existence and maintenance of software is always a question of resources - which are often not there and very often not enough.
However, as for security, one of the main threats as I see it (apart from NSA surveillance of GSM traffic) is precisely Google’s backdoors and defaults for surveillance.
I’m also not proposing that Fairphone only or even mainly sell a de-Googled phone. When I wrote this post I was admittedly not aware of the /e/ option. But here’s the rub: I bought the phone from Fairphone’s own shop. Yes, I could have done more research, but they could also have displayed the /e/ OS as an option on that page, maybe even with a warning as to some missing functionality.
Problem is, people buy smartphones for the apps, and many important apps doesn’t work on degoogled phones. That’s more or less all about it.
For this reason I think we’re fighting on the wrong field. I don’t see any reason why my banking app shall rely on Google, or my streaming service or whatever. That’s the place where people should get vocal or governments shall norm.
I may install /e/ as a form of activism but again, if I can’t use the apps I want I may rather go even more “activist” and get a good old dumbphone.
There are lots of apps you can get, e.g. via F-Droid.
Another thing is that there is a project whose name I forget to create a free version of the APIs that the Play Store app require - among other things, this allowed people to run the German Covid-19 tracing app without the Google store.
So I believe there is an actual, if smaller, market for such things. With each misstep from Google, this market is likely to increase.
