64 Issue 1404
Long-termfree software
userPhil Thaneonthe final
frontier,the Androidphone
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here are manyreasons why you might want to avoid Google
and all its works. High on many people’s lists would be
Google’s continuing quest to find out everything it can about
you, collate your browsing, purchasing, video-watching, emailing,
calendar details, contact lists and map searches so as to get a
better price when it sells you to an advertiser.You might object to
its tax avoidance, copyright infringements, its proclaimed desire to
digitise all the world’s information, with the unmentioned corollary
that the company will then control all the world’s information.
A lot of Google’s activity is easy to dodge. There are other
search engines such as DuckDuckGo and IX Quick. There are other
email providers – your ISP for one. There are free office suites to
rival Google Docs and plenty of online storage options instead
of Google Drive.You can even use OpenStreetMap. One Google
product that hasn’t been so easy to avoid untilrecently has been
Google’s Android OS for smartphones and tablets.
Android is based on a Linux kernel and uses various other free
software tools and libraries. At heart it is an open source, free
software project, but most of the development work is done
by Google. When Google uses and improves a free software
component, it’srequired to make the modified version available
to the open-source community, but some of the Google software
is developed purely in-house so not necessarilyreleased as free
software. AOSP (the Android Open Source Project – led by Google
- source.android.com) is where all the free software in Android is
hosted, and anyone who knows how is free to use that code as a
basis for their own version of Android.
Some of the cheapest smartphones use home-brewed Android
versions, generally on low-spec hardware that Google has not
authorised for use with its official version, but other people can
use it too. Cyanogen (www.cyanogenmod.org) began as a one-
man Android hacking project that attracted hundreds of volunteer
contributors. The groupreleases CyanogenMod, a bloatware free
operating system for a wide variety of devices using a combination
of manufacturers’ own drivers and AOSP.
Installing CyanogenMod is not for the faint-hearted. If the
phone is new it will invalidate the warranty, and if you do it wrong,
the phone may not boot at all. Despite that, many people do it,
often converting cheap phones stuffed with bloatware by a phone
company into something slicker and less annoying. Now there’s an
easier way: CyanogenOS.
CyanogenOS (cyngn.com) is a commercial spin-off from the
CyanogenMod project that develops operating systems for OEMs.
Microsoft has invested in Cyanogen, probably just to annoy
Google, and Microsoft is collaborating on new ways of allowing
apps to interact with the OS and each other, such as integrating
Skype into the phone app so that in future you’ll be able to chooseGoogle-Free
Android