Thanks for the guide, Paul.
After 11 months of FP2 OS (without any serious problems), this thread took away my fears of switching to Open OS and I did it.
I still think it is unnecessarily complicated to switch and I do not look forward to performing an update like in this thread.
Also Iām slightly disappointed in the amount of apps not being available for F-Droid, so for me thereās no way to use my Fairphone without Play Store. Many of the equivalent apps in F-Droid do not work or are complete trash compared to a lot of apps I use from the Play Store.
So the entire OpenGAPPS thing to me seems like an unnecessary workaround and makes me feel like this is really not the way things are meant to be.
Still, Iāll keep my Open OS because I like the idea. Have not run into a case where Iād need to root though.
Youāll only need to do that if you modify your system (e.g. install opengapps or xposed) and even then itās not as complicated as that guide makes it look. Basically everything you flashed (installed via recovery) to modify your OS youāll have to flash again after the update.
About the apps: You can use the Yalp Store (from F-Droid) to download any app from the Play Store without having to install all the spying Google Services.
I personally like the apps from F-Droid a lot. They are not as fancy as Play Store Apps, they donāt have such a polished design, but they do their functions just as well and usually with much less resources needed, as they donāt constantly run shady processes in the background.
Iāve tried to follow that but I canāt find efidroid in F-Droid. Is there something I missed here? Will I have to install access to play store to go in here?
As much as I like the Open OS I think one āconā needs to be added to the list:
For people that depend on some paranoid apps like electronic banking, Blackberry Work (see this thread) or Android Pay (well, for Android Pay FP2 would need a NFC chip firstā¦), Open OS might not work
This is a hard question that probably canāt be answered, but here are my thoughts.
Open users usually tend to use less fancy apps, so (random) reboots caused by CPU straining apps are statistically probably less.
GAPPS tend to cause more issues than the lack of them, but than again I xould immagine installing them inofficially (OpenGAPPS) may make them even more error prone.
Updates that often improve the device stability come to Open OS later, so more reboots until then.
But to answer the core of your question: I donāt think Open OS is any more or less stable in general.
Thanks to the newly available TWRP with encryption support I recently took it upon myself to test the FP Open 17.02.0 release. I donāt use the Fairphone additions in FP OS and see most stuff as bloatware anyway, but I do want GAPPS included.
As stated at code.fairphone.com your /data/media will be erased. I thought this was included in the TWRP backup, but this isnāt (per design). BACKUP THEM MANUALLY or else you will lose your photoās (DCIM is located there for instance).
Going to FP Open is simple as can be:
Go into TWRP, queue the FP Open and the GAPPS package and flash! Afterward you can re-enable encryption in the OS again.
Going back is even easier:
Restore the backup created earlier. Everything will be there except the contents of your /data/media (old internal storage / sd-card).
The FP Open is now my favorite ROM because:
Itās pre-rooted (go into developer mode and enable). I had to flash a rooted boot.img on FP OS (https://fp2.retsifp.de/) after every update.
Less bloated with launchers / apps I donāt use: iFixIt, Peace of Mind and other stuff is missing. Itās pure AOSP.
I can choose the version of GAPPS. Pico has the bare framework and you can choose to install additions through the store (Calender, YouTube, Inbox for instance). The OK Google spyware isnāt included.
All the apps I use work under FP Open as well.
It feels as, or even more, stable as FP OS. But this can just be because the āfreshā install.
Nope, there is not. From what Iāve heard, there wonāt be one, because the code bases are very similar. Fairphone Open on Android 6 will come shortly after the release of Fairphone OS Marsmallow.
As far as I know, OpenOS without Google Play services (which contain the cloud messaging services that does this location tracking), is not affected. The same should hold for LineageOS.
