[Smartphone] Put privacy in your smartphone!

Smartphones and privacy

Walid: hello and welcome to Projets Libres, LinuxFr.org’s podcast about free software, digital commons and open data. I’m Walid Nouh and today I’m delighted to have Antoine Duparay with me. to talk about smartphones and privacy. This is the revival of the series that began between June 2023 and January 2024 on smartphones: we talked about Commown in episode 4 of season 1, Fairphone in episode 1 of season 2, and /e/OS and Murena in season 2 episode 11. We will refer to it regularly, and if you want to know more, I advise you to go and listen to these different episodes.

I discovered the subject and Antoine through a conference he gave at the Capitole du Libre in 2022 called “How to protect your privacy on your smartphone?” and we had the chance to discuss together at the Rencontres Hivernales du Libre [see the episode on the RHL] last January. And so I’m delighted to have with me Antoine, aka Fla. Welcome Antoine to the Projet Libre podcast, thank you for being here.

Antoine: And thank you Walid, thank you for the invitation. And thank you to everyone for taking an interest in this very important subject.

Presentation of Antoine

Walid: And oh so topical. Before getting to the heart of the matter, can you explain to us who you are, what is your background and also how you ended up at Framasoft?

Antoine: Of course. So I’m Fla. I’ve been doing free software since basically 2012. I initially contributed to Mozilla. In fact, I was immediately quite disturbed when I discovered all the data collections that were done by the software. And then, when there was really the Prism affair in 2013, it was really something like: “well… We already knew we were right, but it was an official confirmation.” Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA is spying. So really, I started to campaign very it. And it is first of all through the respect of users and ethics that I became interested in the world of free software.

So first at Mozilla, where I directly made confs that explained the online tracking of websites. And then the Mozilla add-ons, it was called Lightbeam at the time, which allowed you to observe a little bit of all that. In fact, I have… also contributed a lot to the Diaspora project because for me the point where there was the most collected data was on social networks and yet social networks is a huge potential for contribution, working together, to bring together humans to do cool things and unfortunately today social networks are, well already at the time it was software controlled by large multinationals so Diaspora is an alternative social network project that is decentralized and which allows you to keep control of this data. I’ve been contributing to Diaspora for a really long time, 2012, and I installed diaspora-fr.org as my main Diaspora server. And then it was while talking with Pyg, from Framasoft, at the JDLL in 2014, that he explained to me that Framasoft was about to launch a campaign “Let’s unscrew the Internet” to talk about all these data collection topics and all this from the GAFAMs. and who would be interested in using Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. And so, that’s when I joined Framasoft to install Framasphere, which was Framasoft’s Diaspora server at the time. And I have kept on this side, that is to say my contributions, it is mainly popularization, giving conferences, discussing, raising awareness. As I’m already a web developer in my job, and I already spend my day writing code, for Framasoft, I’m more. I’m rather invested in the communication side and of course also everything that is management of the administration, I’m on the board of directors, etc. And so I’ve been at Framasoft since 2014 and still with this axis, how can you have your privacy respected as much as possible. As a result, smartphones, today’s subject, is one of the key subjects. So I’ve always wanted to try to use other operating systems than Android , which is not very respectful. And so, at Mozilla, I started with Firefox OS. When it stopped, I then used Ubuntu Touch. And then now I use /e/OS every time on my main phone, I hear. And then, of course, I tinkered with a lot of other operating systems that we’re going to discuss.

How a smartphone is different from a computer

Walid: Before we start on privacy issues, one of the things that comes out of what you’ve said and the discussions we’ve had or I’ve had with other people is that I think we have to start by explaining how a smartphone is different from a computer. I’m not sure that everyone has the vision of how different a smartphone is from a computer. Can you start by explaining, please, how it differs?

Antoine: Actually, smartphones are very interesting because they have evolved a lot. Originally, we really started from the phone, I want to be able to call, be in contact, etc. And then, they became more and more powerful, to the point that today, a smartphone has an amount of RAM that would make computers from just a few years ago blush. But at the same time, they also have a lot of small sensors, little things that you would never find on a computer. So we have major differences. The first is on the architecture itself. A smartphone is embedded, so it’s ARM, it’s things that are less open than X86, the traditional architectures that we’re going to find on computers. On top of that, we end up with a GPS chip, a microphone, a camera, but also the phone itself will be able to detect when it is moving too fast, where it is, what it is doing, etc. Many more sensors than on a computer, like NFC or things like that.

And then, in fact, it’s a device that we have with us all the time, which will collect, well in any case that will allow, let’s admit that it is not… Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt if he wasn’t evil. It’s still something that we use much more today. We will buy our train tickets, we will set our alarm to get up in the morning. So, if you have access to all the data on a smartphone, you really have a very precise picture of what someone’s life is like. We know where he is, we know who he is in contact with, who he is calling, who he is communicating with, his emails. We know at the time he gets up, if he is in a noisy environment or not with the microphone. You can see what he sees with the camera. We go much further than what we could collect with a computer.

Walid: no more sensors, no more stuff, no more firmware, no more code that you don’t know exactly what they’re doing all the time. It’s more complex.

Antoine: Absolutely . Indeed, at the level of the manufacturers too, there is an approach that is quite different. Today, a default computer, it will be quite easy to run Linux, things like that, on it. Whereas smartphone manufacturers are much more possessive about their intellectual property, about what can be done with their chips. And as a result, our phones are really black boxes. We have very little information, and even if we have it, legally, we are really not allowed to go and tinker with it, it’s unfortunate.

And then you have to add to that that not only is the hardware more complex and less controlled, but often a smartphone doesn’t stop at just a phone plus an operating system. It’s a whole ecosystem with applications in stores, with a cloud account that will allow us to synchronize our contacts, our calendars, etc. With Apple, we see even further integration. A whole ecosystem, the phone instantly sends files to your Mac, you have the possibility to track in real time where your phone is, if you ever lose it, well, there are a lot of things built around it and we are not just talking today about a computer chip that allows you to make calls.

Security vs. Privacy

Walid: It’s very different from what we know in the PC world, it poses a lot of problems and we’ll talk about it a little later. Can you explain that we have two different concepts here that we can sometimes tend to confuse when they are very different, which are on the one hand respect for privacy and on the other hand respect for security. What are we talking about in fact?

Antoine: These are two things that are indeed very different, even if we assimilate them. Often a solution that is secure is also a fairly good solution for privacy, but this is not necessarily systematic. Security, at least in IT, is really the fact of not being able to hijack a software, an application, etc. to make him do things that were not originally planned. So in security, we’re talking about an attacker and we’re going to say, I don’t know, you have an application that allows you to access your bank accounts. If there is a security breach, a person who is not supposed to have access to your bank accounts will be able to access them and therefore the application is not secure. So there, it’s really a threat model. He’s someone who does something he wasn’t supposed to do. That’s a security problem.

Privacy is very different. It’s a question of saying is my data only used when I agree and for things where it was needed? And so, if I go back to my example of the banking app, if my bank allows itself to read all the purchases I make with my app and rebroadcast it to advertisers, what did I buy because it might interest them, and it’s in the terms of use of the app, etc. There, we don’t have a security problem, that is to say that the application does what it is supposed to do, it was designed to broadcast my bank purchases, so there is no security problem. On the other hand, there is a huge privacy problem: probably the user is not aware that this information is being disseminated and that he would be perfectly entitled to say to the bank “No, no, just because you have access to the information of my purchases does not mean that you have the right to go and sell it to someone.”

Walid: I remember when, a long time ago, at the very beginning of Google, discussions with people, even free software professionals around me, who told me “Well, anyway, Google, it already knows my whole life, but hey, it’s not a big deal, I have nothing to hide.”

Antoine: Yes.

Walid: Over time, we realized the monstrosity of the thing, what he could do with it. And so, in the end, yes, it was a problem.

Antoine: yes, it’s still a huge problem. In fact, the phrase “I have nothing to hide”, for me, the answer is quite easy to get since people who say that, often, think “I have a banal life and then I don’t do anything illegal”. Which, in practice, is quite true. But there are two important things to note. First of all, the first is that it’s true at the moment.

So today, what you do seems banal to you and not illegal, but the data that is collected today, it will remain. 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, we will never erase data and forget it. And we can see how the world is changing. Typically, in the United States, things that could seem banal and not at all illegal when Obama was president. can now pose many more problems, now that it’s Trump and his anti-immigration police, etc. There you go, things that were banal are no longer at all, we can’t at all presuppose what the future will be. The best thing is not to allow the collection at the base, rather than saying to yourself “Oops, at the time it was quiet, but in fact today I’m being attacked for speeches I made ten years ago that are no longer accepted at all.”

Antoine Duparay (fla)

That’s a first thing. The second thing is that you have to take into account the statistics. And so a completely banal piece of information today, “I love eating reblochon”, has no value if we just say Antoine likes reblochon. At the end of the day, advertisers are interested in it and we’re going to try to sell them more cheese, but we can dare to hope to resist that. On the other hand, if we realize by the massive amount of data that is collected on billions of people at the same time that people who like Reblochon have a tendency, we don’t know why, to have more car accidents or… or not being able to repay their mortgages, or that kind of thing, we’re going to have people who will take this information into account, and who will make us pay more for our insurance, or who will perhaps refuse us our loan, on the basis that initially seems completely superfluous to us and not at all serious. So giving so much information about our lives, our way of life, to companies is not good news, even if it’s not illegal.

Walid: One of the visible causes we saw was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where in the end, we are able to aggregate a large amount of data on people and then influence votes, influence opinions.

Antoine: Absolutely . It was demonstrated today that Cambridge Analytica is a company that worked to analyze Facebook data and that allowed Brexit and Trump’s first election in 2016 by specifically targeting. people who were still undecided, and thus succeeded in influencing their vote and swaying the outcome of an election. So we’re still talking about things that may initially seem trivial and that will have absolutely enormous global consequences.

Walid: Ok, so what’s important to remember here is that we have in this part of private life, we have data that we knowingly give, which can be used sometimes by the way. Not too long ago, I wanted to go and listen to a podcast made live: on the site’s website, I had to give my information plus my date of birth [the image forum]. It makes no sense to do that. This information is personal information that I gave when in fact, I shouldn’t have given it. So there’s that, there’s what I’m going to knowingly be asked to give and then there’s what they’re going to collect without my knowledge.

Antoine: Yes, absolutely.

There are really two types of data collection. The first, as you described very well, is forms that we will fill out where we will be aware that we are giving our information. Sometimes they’ll ask for too many things. But we are still aware of it, so we can also answer false things. You can put a false date of birth, you shouldn’t hesitate to have fun with it. But there’s also something much more subtle, I’d even say rather deceitful, which is data collection without us realizing it at all and which is done by applications that will observe when our phone wakes up, when we’re going to do different things and then act. and modify things accordingly without being aware of it at all.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

Applications and data collection

Walid: A big part of the problem that I understand is a problem around applications, since it is mainly with applications that we will interact. That is to say, at the OS level, there can be data leaks. We’ve seen Google which, while the GPS is supposed to be off, still collects data by saying “Oops, sorry, we won’t do it anymore, it was a mistake”. Anyway, there may be tricks, but a good part of the data that will be collected comes from the applications. What can you say about this, around the problems of mobile applications? How are mobile applications different from what we may know, for example on a computer where you will rather use your browser?

Antoine: So, you have to take a step back to understand why we’re in such a state of so much tracking everywhere.

The thing at the heart of everything is the business model. How do you make money? So already, it’s interesting to realize that the problems we find on phones are the same as those found on the web or on software as a general rule. There are two major business models. Either we charge for access to the content, for example on the website of the newspaper Le Monde, you have to subscribe to have access to a majority of the articles, or on some of the proprietary software, you have to buy them, so we will pay for them. And then, if it’s free, it’s often the advertising model. So either display ads directly in the app, or not display them, but collect data and then sell that data to advertisers.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

So already, the first thing we observe is that Google and Apple have chosen two different business models. Apple, we talk about it less in this episode: they have an ecosystem that is completely closed. So, basically, it’s something that as a free software player, we find to be very bad, very bad, in short. But still, from Apple, they encourage their developers to make paid applications or with business models around buying things in the application.

Whereas Google, on the other hand, really has this completely open approach of saying “come all but in fact there is no guardian”. Apps can do a little bit of anything and everything on Android. They are much less controlled than on iOS. And as a result, the major business model of Android applications is advertising. So if you had to choose between two systems from a privacy point of view without changing them and without taking steps, an iPhone is still much more respectful by default than an Android. It’s far from a panacea, but it’s still the case. And so, the observation that we can make is that these applications are the opening of a new world for them, since this business of tracking and displaying advertising that comes from the web, it can now be done with much more information, much more details, much more access to contacts, microphones, position, things that were not at all possible to do from a website. And so already, the first piece of advice we can give to everyone, if you don’t yet have the energy to change the operating system on your phone, which we’ll discuss later as a solution, is to say that you don’t necessarily need to install an app. You can very well use Blablacar, Leboncoin, by going to the website, which suddenly has much less information about you. And then when the website tab is closed, it stops collecting things about what’s happening on your phone.

So the ideal little trick is even to use the Firefox web browser on your Android all or your iPhone, open an incognito window, go to Leboncoin, make your purchase and close it. And there, you will have really limited the tracking a lot compared to what the Leboncoin app would do on your phone. To give you an example of how far it goes, I’m not going to name an app because we’re not 100% sure of everything, but there are apps that go as far as monitoring your phone’s battery level. And if your battery is low, they’ll artificially increase the prices of the items you can buy in the app because they know your phone is about to turn off, so you don’t have too much time to make choices, you have to buy the thing now and so it’s going to cost more [Uber example]. This is a very good example, I think, of a small piece of data that basically has nothing to hide. I mean, no one cares about their phone’s battery level, it’s not critical personal data, it’s not your bank account number at all, but yet, it’s going to have an immediate impact. on your life by making you lose a few extra euros because you are going to buy too expensive something that was not worth that price.

Walid: There is also the possibility of using container browser features that make one tab waterproof from another as well.

Antoine: There are a number of extensions, at least in Firefox, that’s what I use, which allow you to limit data collection when you’re on the web. I think that’s really it, it’s a lot more control on the part of the user over what happens when you use websites than when you use apps. It’s a little less practical, but today with what we call PWAs, Progressive Web Apps, we still have a good compromise, I think, between websites that are still things that we control and that can still be used offline, etc., off-network if we ever need to, versus apps that have access to far too many things without us even realizing it.

Walid: I’m making a micro-aside on this because we’ll certainly talk about it in other episodes when we talk about Linux on phones, but

There is also the possibility of looking for alternatives to certain applications, which is a job that may seem a bit tedious, but which in the end sometimes allows you to come across pearls from other applications, sometimes smaller, sometimes with a different design, etc., which are perhaps more respectful. When you have a phone running Linux, you have to look for alternatives in any case. But sometimes you come across pearls.

Walid Nouh

And for me, it’s something I like. It reminds me of my beginnings with Linux where I had to look for alternatives to applications I was used to. Of course, this is not possible for everything. It also allows you to change your habits and then to discover other things.

Antoine: Indeed, you are right to remind you of this. Maybe we should have started with that. I immediately went to the websites because in fact you have to distinguish between two scenarios that are completely different.

You have to distinguish a use, for example, I need to monitor my position, so I want to access my position on a map. And so that’s something that’s very personal and the alternatives are quite possible. You’ve made some really great episodes on OpenStreetMap [see the OSM introductory episode], etc. There are many things. Free alternatives exist and can be of very good quality.

And on the other hand, you have a second scenario which is the network effect. Now, if you want to access something you buy second-hand in France, Leboncoin is a little bit unavoidable. And so, we could have an alternative client that would connect to the Boncoin APIs and that wouldn’t track us, that wouldn’t be the official application. But in any case, at some point, we will have to do our research on Leboncoin and therefore send this information to the Boncoin. Here, I’m giving the example of Boncoin because we’re on a French podcast, but in fact, the major example of the network effect is obviously social networks. So, if we need to access Facebook events or Instagram accounts or things like that, we can have alternative apps to try to access Instagram without using Instagram itself, the Instagram app itself, but at some point, we’re going to send data to Meta because it’s going to be the Instagram service.

Walid: One of the examples I like to cite, because I use, is for example for YouTube, it’s Newpipe. which is actually an Android YouTube client that allows anonymous access to videos on YouTube that aren’t tracking you.

Antoine: Absolutely, yes. NewPipe is a very good example.

Walid: That’s it, it’s always a bit of a cat and mouse. Google makes a change, it doesn’t work anymore. NewPipe needs to fix it and everything. But overall, it works pretty well. Afterwards, it raises questions about many other questions that we are not going to talk about the effect on creators, etc. But overall, there are possibilities.

OK, so on applications, there is a real challenge because of the business model. Personally, what I do is that all the applications that I don’t use every day, I go through the website. Typically, Leboncoin, I don’t go there all the time and when I do, I go in my Firefox browser. It is also an opportunity, for example, for a route planner. There are some very well-known ones and all that, but in fact, in the end, if you look for them, there are others. I came across one called Bimba. It’s not very nice yet and all that, but overall, it can do the job. And so, there you have it. But on the other hand, it requires the past, time, research and everything. And people, they don’t necessarily want to spend time and search.

But hey, anyway, there’s a little bit of everything. And then, there is also, I think, on our part, to make known alternatives, nice alternative applications.

What Android is made of

Walid: You, you had noted in the plot we had made that we should avoid using the basic Android.

Antoine: Yes, that’s right. In fact, today, in Android, we may not have defined what Android is very well. Maybe we could just say a word about that.

Android is therefore the operating system created by Google and which is now used by a large majority of mobile terminals and smartphones. And Android is split in two, actually. There is a project called AOSP, Android Open Source Project, which is, as the name suggests, open source, the sources are available. I don’t consider it a free project, which means that the license means that you can access the source code, modify it, redistribute it, etc. However, for me, a project that is free is a project that has a minimum of ethics, that will accept contributions. But this is not the case at all. Google is locking everything that we integrate into Android, which will have open governance. It’s the same, it’s not the case at all. Google decides on its own the direction of the project, etc. So there you go, but it’s still a database that’s open, unlike iOS where there, we don’t have any access to anything at all from Apple.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

And on top of this open base, Google adds a whole ecosystem of applications. So first and foremost, the Google Play Store, which is used to download other applications, but also the Gmail application, the Google Maps application, etc., which are based on APIs. So here, we get into something a little bit technical, but it’s called Play Services. So here, what you have to understand is that there is a basic system that is free, but which is very simplistic, which does not allow much. And on top of that, there’s a completely proprietary layer of Google that makes both the added value of Android and, at the same time, really catastrophic from a privacy point of view.

The ultimate solution, but we won’t talk about it too much today, we’ll do other episodes on it, is to say outright that we don’t want Android because, precisely, Google controls it way too much. We are dependent on the direction that will give to the OS and so we rebuild another phone system typically based on Linux. So there, we have PostMarketOS, Ubuntu Touch. There are plenty of projects around this that we can talk about later.

But another solution is to say we start from this AOSP layer and we develop alternatives to the proprietary layer, the Google Play layer, to have a complete and functional ecosystem on our phone again. but where there is no longer a proprietary code.

Walid: If you have a bit of technical skills, I strongly invite you to go and listen to the episode with Agnès Crépet on Fairphone, where we go into detail about these subjects and talk about how to maintain a phone over time, over years. And precisely, where Agnès explains all these different types of layers, Google’s responsibility, Google’s control over the releases of Android phones, compliance tests, etc. We go into quite detail about this.

Software building blocks to recreate a free Android ecosystem

Walid: If you have technical skills, it’s a good complement to go a little further on what Antoine has just said. That just leads us to the next part that I wanted to address which is, all right, I want to make an alternative. I want to make the alternative to a version of Android that is provided by a phone provider. What are the basic building blocks we need to be able to make a credible alternative? That is to say, as we said, a smartphone is not just hardware and OS, but it is an ecosystem. What are the basic building blocks we need?

Antoine: There are many things, but the very first thing is the blind. Today, this is how users install software on a smartphone. Here again, there are two approaches. There’s an approach that’s more like saying, I don’t want to use traditional apps that are proprietary, that are full of trackers, etc.

And so, there’s a great job being done. by the people behind the F-Droid project, which is to say, we’re really going to list the applications that are obviously open source, but they go much further. They analyze the code, they even rebuild it in some cases, maybe in all cases, I don’t know. But anyway, in any case, an application that is available on F-Droid, it will arrive with a fine analysis of what it will actually do, the permissions it will have, etc. And all of this is listed in the store. And so, it’s really an ideal approach if you want to be sure that your smartphone doesn’t mess around. But which obviously comes with its limits, which is that an application like Too Good To Go, for example, obviously that it is proprietary and will not be available on F-Droid. And unfortunately, they don’t make a web version of Too Good To Go. So, there is no other solution if you want to be able to access, once again, the network effect of the store that offers this. Well, you’re going to have to install this app.

And so, if you don’t want the Google Play Store, which also requires a Google account to download apps, you can use another project called Aurora Store. So there, there are others, stores like that, but this is perhaps the most well-known which is in fact the equivalent of a proxy. We must understand an intermediary between our phone and then Google’s application store and which allows us to download applications without having given information to Google and without having installed Google Play on our phone. So I maintain the warning, be careful, typically, Too Good To Go is an application that has a lot of trackers. So just because you installed it through the Aurora Store doesn’t mean the app is clean. It’s just the way we got it that avoids having given information to Google.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

But once the app is there, it has all the same permissions. It’s really the same build, so it’s the same compiled version, the same APK for Android apps. than the one on the Google Play Store. So any trackers that the makers of Too Good To Go may have put in the app will be installed on the phone.

Walid: What is also needed, one of the strengths of Android, is all the Google collaboration applications. I’m thinking of Google Drive, Google Photos, etc. And there, in free, we also have alternatives if we want to make our own alternative suite.

Antoine: What’s interesting today is that since the base of Android is open source, a lot of people have asked themselves about the question. There have been people working on these issues for a very long time, so we have alternatives for just about everything. So there, typically, you just talked about synchronizations, contacts, etc. It’s been a very long time that a project like OwnCloud, which has become Nextcloud today, has existed and allows you to have your own personal cloud on a server and therefore that you can use to synchronize your calendar, your contacts, automatically upload all your photos to have a backup, that kind of thing.

And then the advantage is that there are plenty of people who offer this today. For example, Zaclys, we with Framasoft, we list the CHATONS, the collectives of hosting providers that will offer alternatives to the web giants. So finding someone who does Nextcloud and installs it for you is easy. You don’t need to have to install your own server. And you can totally sync your phone that would be freed from its Google account, and sync that phone with a NextCloud.

In the same way, all the really internal APIs of Google and Play Services, there is the microG project that exists and which is a free reimplementation and which allows a much finer control of the data. So that’s something a bit complicated because a lot of applications use that.

The way it works, I’m taking a little bit of height, we have the AOSP project which is free and the Google overlay. The basis of this overlay is what we call Play Services. These are really tools for applications that give a lot of ease. Typically, one of the most well-known uses is notifications.

Notifications, to avoid an app constantly asking, I’ll take the example of Signal: “have I received a new message?”. Instead of doing what we call pulling, we’re going to have push. So, Google, which will be able to say through its service: “you have received a new notification” which will remotely wake up the phone instead of the phone constantly checking for new messages, which in terms of battery management poses a big problem. And obviously, that’s it, it’s what we call an SDK, a software developer kit , so all Google application developers are still Android, are always very encouraged to use Google’s SDK, to use all these APIs and as we said, and well, Google by the way, doesn’t hesitate to collect all the data. So every time the apps talk with the phone, they observe all this. And so microG is a reimplementation of the SDK, but in free software, and it will therefore allow you to say “Ok, I agree that you use push notifications, but I don’t agree that you use fine geolocation, for example, or that kind of thing. We’re not going to go into details because there will be too many things there. But it’s a bit of a countermeasure to always control the source code of what is being executed on your phone.

Walid: To learn more about microG, we talk about it in the episode with Gaël Duval on /e/OS and Murena about what microG is, the person who does it, how it’s financed, etc. So similarly, if you want to know more, you can refer to this episode. Sorry, I cut you off.

Antoine: No, no, that’s exactly it. I just wanted to finish by saying that obviously, the goal is still to communicate with Google’s APIs. So, even if you no longer have proprietary code running on your phone, all the data you send to Google, that you continue to send it, it still has its limits. On the question of push, there is Unified Push and then there are other technologies that are being implemented, but we are not going to go into details.

Walid: On microG, for example, to give you an idea, until quite recently, it’s been a few months now, there was a feature, for example, that we didn’t have, that we have a Google account and we want to connect. Google may send a notification on your phone that says you want to sign in on another device, it’s me or it’s not me. Before, it wasn’t supported by microG. We couldn’t use this authentication method. Whereas now, for example, it works. That is to say, you can use this feature and sometimes, it’s still very practical. I know that on my work account, on my phone on /e/OS, having this feature is still convenient to connect to my Google work account, for example.

Antoine:

someone who would be completely saying “I want to do without Google’s APIs 100%” would not install microG, they would not need it. But without this layer, there are a lot of applications that don’t work. A banking application, for example, will almost systematically check that what they call security standards, so these integrity checks, etc., are correctly available on the phone to verify that the phone is, according to them, secure, and therefore has not been hacked. In reality, it’s a little bit the opposite, if I may say so, but anyway… So, if there is nothing installed on the phone, the application will simply refuse to run.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

While microG is going to be a solution that can make the application believe that yes, yes, Google APIs are available and yes, yes, this phone is secure. Even though there is no Google code that is executed on the phone. So depending on what you’re looking to do with your phone, it’s almost essential to have a microG installed to have a functional Android.

Walid: I think we’ll talk about it in the next episodes of banking apps because it’s a bit like the list of all the apps. The banking application has a good place. And so, the fact that we go through an alternative version of Android in terms of security means that we can add additional tools. In addition to what we said about microG and everything, we can add additional tools. Do you want to say a few words about these tools that allow us to improve the privacy part?

Antoine: Yes, there are many things that exist. I think we maybe… Not going into a lot of details today, but in particular, you talked about Shelter just before, which is an application that bypasses the Android profile system a little bit to run applications in profiles that are blank. So this, for example, very interesting, you can’t do without the Instagram application for the moment which asks to have access to your contacts and that kind of thing. Well, if you run it in a work profile, which is suddenly empty, you will still have the app installed, you will give it access to contacts, but in fact, the contacts it will look at, it will be an empty contact list, and so you have not given access to your real contacts from your phone.

There is also the Exodus Privacy application which tries to give ratings, to monitor each other application a little bit. In fact, it is an analysis of the applications that exist in the phone or in the stores. by saying here are the trackers that we were able to detect in it, etc. There is also Privacy Badger. There are really a lot of things that can exist on the Android ecosystem in general. There are plenty of people who have asked themselves the question. I think we will have the opportunity to discuss it again. There are things to do on how to set up your phone.

Alternative versions of Android

Walid: Now, what I would like is for us to talk a little about the alternatives that exist. Basic Android or Android carriers, phone manufacturers. There, there are several systems that stand out a little from the crowd. I think that the first one we can talk about is a system that is rather based on the idea of having security. That’s GrapheneOS. Do you want to say a few words about Graphene?

Antoine: So, what you need to know is that basically, we start from AOSP every time, the basic Android. The most well-known project at the time, maybe 15 years ago, was a project called CyanogenMod, which is a recovery of Android AOSP by trying to install it on other phones, where Google didn’t necessarily provide support, etc. A project that has evolved, which is now called LineageOS, and which is basically the basis of all the alternative Android systems that we observe. So that’s kind of the primary block of the thing.

And then, there are approaches and philosophies that are very different depending on the project. So GrapheneOS is a project that is led by security experts. It’s a project that remains very close to Google’s Android, but with a whole multitude of additional patches to really try to secure as much as possible the different uses that we can have, especially as soon as there are Android security patches that come out, they are immediately reapplied. It’s a project that allows you to relock the bootloader, so this is something a bit technical. It is important to know that on phones supported by Graphene, we have a level of security on this that is important. And then, it’s a sandbox approach in fact for applications that are what we call a sandbox in French, which are run in an environment that is controlled. Applications are not supposed to get out of it. So, there are many, many things that are being done on security. It is a very good operating system. However, there is not a lot that is being done about privacy.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

Remember the distinction. If an app has access to your contacts or things like that that include trackers, GrapheneOS isn’t going to try to prevent that, it’s going to let the app run normally. [Correction by Walid and Antoine: The original version of the text used the wrong example of contacts. GrapheneOS actually has a mechanism for isolating contacts between applications, called “Contacts scopes”. Thanks to the GrapheneOS project for pointing this out to us. To learn more about the privacy features in GrapheneOS, visit this page: https://grapheneos.org//faq#security-and-privacy ]

Typically, the approach to Play Services that we were talking about before is to use Google’s because they are the most recent, because they are the ones that make the latest updates, and therefore they are the ones in which there is the slightest risk of having security breaches. But as a result, traditional data collection can take place.

GrapheneOS is really the security approach. You’re a journalist, you’re an activist, you want to make sure that your phone isn’t attacked by someone, a government or something like that. I’m not saying it’s impossible to break Graphene OS, but it’s the most secure solution on the market. On the other hand, if we compare it to other OSes that are more privacy-oriented, you mentioned /e/OS, there is Iodé too, there is CalyxOS, there are several alternatives that exist. Here, we are on something quite different. The goal is rather to use microG, to remove as many proprietary applications as possible to control data collection as much as possible, and especially those that are insidious, those that we are not necessarily aware of.

So typically, if we dig a little bit into /e/OS, even if you’ve already talked a lot with Gaël, we’re not going to go into details, but the approach is rather to block trackers with a blacklist based on domain names. So that’s a module called Advanced Privacy. They have their own store called the App Lounge, which is kind of the same as Aurora Store. So, it’s to allow you to install apps without having Google. And then, they made a great effort to go and remove, for example, the time synchronization, I think, which was still done by Google servers, even on

Walid: AOSP. They remove all calls to Google.

Antoine: yes, they really tried to do a global audit of AOSP and say everything that speaks to Google, we remove it, and to allow microG to be configured precisely to let through only what we want, etc. They go even further. We were talking about saying that a smartphone today is an ecosystem. It’s the idea of grouping together in a single Android system a whole number of alternatives that think relevant and making them coherent and having a coherent ecosystem. We were talking about Exodus Privacy to get the analysis of apps. That’s integrated into AppLounge. In its store, you can see the ratings that Exodus Privacy gives to applications. And then, they also provide a cloud to synchronize precisely these contacts, etc. So there, they have a really global approach, in mode we want something turnkey, that works for everyone.

The CalyxOS project is a little different from that point of view. For example, they choose to start with something more minimalist. And then, on the other hand, when the phone is first launched, they’re going to tell you, hey, in messaging, what do you want to install? Do you want Signal? Do you want anything else? Instead, they will suggest alternative applications. This allows, when you really want to control what is installed on your phone, to have something a little more customizable. There are several different approaches, but basically, it’s the three we mentioned, /e/OS, Iodé and CalyxOS, which are more privacy-oriented while Graphene OS is more security-oriented.

Walid: These OSes still have to run on it. You can have Lineage OS running on it, but not necessarily one of the other OS. I’m not sure that /e/OS, for example, supports all phones that are supported by LineageOS.

Antoine: In theory, since /e/OS is based on Lineage, there is nothing to prevent you from installing i on a phone on which Lineage would work. However, you have to compile it for that. And so, Murena, the company behind iOS, doesn’t offer support on every Android phone that someone has had fun running Lineage on.

So, there is already a distinction between phones officially supported by Murena, so those where we really have a build of iOS available. Phones that are supported by the community. So here, it’s people who said to themselves: “I have such and such a phone, I compiled /e/OS for it, it works. I’m making this build available to other people and so you can install it.” When we add these two categories, we already have more than 200 devices available. And then there’s a whole list of devices that are supported by LineageOS and where no one has yet taken the time to compile /e/OS for. But then, technically, there shouldn’t be any limitation to doing that.

And then, the fourth category is phones that are not even supported by LineageOS and are often very locked by the manufacturer. And then, obviously, there would be a lot of reverse engineering work, that is, trying to understand how the phone works so that you can install something on it by hand. These are very technical issues, they are not within everyone’s reach.

Linux on mobile <:></:>

Walid: So on these operating system stories, we’re going to talk quite briefly, even if we’ll go into a lot more detail in later episodes of the series, there’s an approach which is not to try to start from AOSP, but to try to start from Linux. I’m not going to lie to you, I find this approach super exciting, especially since I myself put a phone under postMarket OS, so one of the OSs we’re going to talk about. And it’s quite exciting, it raises a lot of other issues. Can you introduce the subject of Linux on smartphones?

Antoine: Absolutely, especially since that’s really what interested me in the first place. I had a phone, a smartphone for the first time in 2010, Android 2.2 on it. It was an HTC, and after not even six months, a year I had not had a single Android update and I had switched to 2.2.2. I very quickly understood that there would be no support from the equipment, from the manufacturer, well that they didn’t give a damn at all.

That’s when I discovered CyanogenMod at the time, which allowed me to run Android 4 on my phone, I was already super happy.

Because we didn’t mention it, but one of the major advantages of using these alternative operating systems is that as long as there are people motivated to make them work, well, they work! Unlike a manufacturer that no longer has any financial interest in making long-term updates to phones, my main phone today is a Pixel 3a. We’re at the Pixel 9 or 10 now I think at Google, so I’m 7 generations behind, but I have the latest version of Android running on it with Lineage and so /e/OS today, because there are people who continue to port the latest versions of Android.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

So that’s already something very interesting. But an even more different approach is to switch to Linux. The first time I did that was with Firefox OS, which is still a rather peculiar Linux, which was mainly a web OS by Mozilla, which was abandoned by Mozilla, but which continues in Asia under the name KaiOS, if I followed correctly.

But then, when Mozilla ditched Firefox OS, I switched to Ubuntu Touch. And there, indeed, we discover a completely different world. For me, the major disadvantage of all this is the compatibility with Android applications. Even if there is a project called Waydroid that allows you to run an Android emulator on Linux and therefore run APKs on phones, it works pretty well. But there are still problems around it. It’s not made for the first place. Linux is Linux and it’s not Android.

Android is based on a Linux kernel, but you get what I mean, it’s not the Android ecosystem. So personally, I used Ubuntu Touch from 2017-18 to 2020 as my primary phone. And it works very well, everything that is SMS, call, GPS, camera, well everything you might want to do with a phone, it works. But we don’t have access to apps, and we don’t have access to the manufacturers’ binary blobs either. So typically, when I tell you that the camera works, we know that today there is a lot of post-processing that is done in the chips of the cameras to make super pretty photos. Well, we won’t have that on Linux but it still works very well.

I think that what is very important in this approach is that, as we said before, Android is not a free project: its governance is not shared at all. Google is really in full control and we’ve had a lot of signs lately that Google is getting ready to shut down more and more Android. And so, having a real alternative in case Google kills an OSP, that would be really essential to be able to keep control of our phones.

Walid: So, you have Ubuntu Touch, which is basically Ubuntu, it was carried by the company Canonical, which publishes Ubuntu distributions. They stopped, it was taken over by a community, but I think we’ll try to talk about it in more detail in another episode of the series. There are other alternatives. The ones I chose to put on my phone to test, I’m going to test them as I go along, it’s postmarketOS, which still has a potentially a slightly different philosophy because they don’t want to be based on Android at all. They want to make sure that all the drivers and any changes they make to the hardware drivers, etc., are fed directly into the Linux kernel [upstream]. The goal is to run a Linux version as up-to-date as possible with a kernel that is as up-to-date as possible on the phone.

Antoine: Yes, you’re right to say that. There are two important things while we’re talking a little bit about Linux on mobile, although you’ll detail it in other episodes. There are two important points. The first is that in fact, we find the same diversity on our phones as we find on computers. That is to say, there are different layers, different bricks.

You are free to arrange them as you wish. So, it’s quite possible to use a Plasma Mobile environment which is made by KDE, there’s Phosh, Gnome Mobile, there’s Ubuntu Touch, their graphical environment is called Lomiri.

There is really the possible diversity of projects and then what you choose to install on your phone is equivalent to what you can find, it’s still a bit in its infancy. You can have a Debian base, a Gentoo base, an Alpine base for the case of postmarketOS and then install the Shell, the graphical interface you want. So the possibilities are endless, there are really lots of different things to do.

So that’s one thing. And then the other important thing is indeed the compatibility of the hardware. There are two approaches here. The first is the most beautiful, philosophically, to support the hardware directly in the Linux kernel. So that’s a project that is quite complex, since, as we said, manufacturers don’t necessarily play the game. And then, we are forced to reverse engineer to understand how it works. But there are some phones that are quite well supported. The people at Fairphone, for example, as you mentioned before, do a very good job of trying to submit patches and there’s even one of the developers of postMarketOS who is an employee of Fairphone [Luca Weiss]. So there you have it, there are contributions between the projects.

Another approach, therefore, is to use a project called Halium, which is to say that we keep the Linux kernel of Android. We flash the phone with a version of Android. Typically, we’re going to install Android on the phone, we’re going to keep that layer and then we’re going to install the Linux ecosystem on top of the Android drivers. And so, by doing that, you have access to all the equipment, and in particular the GSM chips, the camera, etc. These are things that are not necessarily supported in Linux Vanilla. But some projects favour one approach over another. Again, these are bricks and then these are user choices. For example, on Ubuntu Touch, if you do it on a Pixel like I’m doing, I encourage you to use Halium instead if you want to have good support for your phone. There are a whole bunch of pixel components that are supported directly in the Linux Vanilla kernel and so you will also have the possibility to install Ubuntu Touch without Halium on a pixel. There are a lot of things that won’t work as well, but for example if you install Ubuntu Touch on a PinePhone, then you’re 100% on a normal Linux kernel, not Android’s. So everything is possible, you can choose whether or not to use Halium, you can choose your kernel, you can choose to use one distribution or another depending on what you prefer, and then you can choose your GUI within the distribution. There are really a lot of things that are possible with Linux.

Walid: We’ll really talk about it in other episodes, because there’s also Sailfish OS, Mobian, there are a lot of projects that are more or less advanced, that have a more or less different philosophy, that are more or less open source. It reminds me a lot of Linux on the desktop 20 years ago. So personally, I find it super exciting. I’m really excited to do that. But here’s the thing, my OnePlus 6T phone on Post Market OS, it’s not yet ready to be put in everyone’s hands. If only because you can’t make a phone call. It’s sometimes a bit complicated.

Where do I start to install an alternative version to stock Android?

Walid: If people are convinced or interested in installing an alternative version of Android on their phone, my first question is where to start? What advice can we give to people? knowing that either they already have a phone, or they will have to change their phone, in which case of course it’s not the same. What advice would you give?

Antoine: There are several questions to ask yourself. The first is: “Do I want to spend some time there? Do I want to understand how it works? Am I curious? Or do I just want it to work and I don’t want to worry about it?”

If it’s the second case, there aren’t 50 different solutions. If you don’t want to do the installation yourself, you either have to find people around you who will do it. There are quite a few, in the same way that there are people who help you install Linux on your computers, there are people who help you do it on your phones.

And the second solution is obviously to buy a phone that is already installed. So typically, Murena with /e/OS has a partnership with Fairphone. This is also the case for Ubuntu Touch, which has partnerships with Fairphone and Volla. Murena too, by the way Volla which is a German manufacturer that makes phones that are also easily tinkered with.

So obviously, don’t buy a phone just for that, no ecological waste please, but here you will be able to say to yourself “the next phone I buy I’ll go to the Murena or Fairphone website or Volla or whatever, and then I’ll buy a phone with a linux or with a liberated android, pre-installed so that solves the problem”.

Otherwise if you still want to say to yourself is it really that complicated or not, you should know in fact the complexity of installing an alternative OS depends a lot on your phone model. There are phones that are open. I was talking about Google’s pixels, which are relatively easy to manipulate. So, it’s going to take a little bit of time because since you’re going to erase your phone, you first have to make a backup of your contacts, etc. to be able to put things over it. So, obviously, don’t sync with a Google account because if it’s to put the Google account back and resynchronize everything behind, it wasn’t much use to put a degoogled Android. So, once you have made your backups by hand, exporting contacts, downloading your photos, etc., you will be able to use both Murena software like Ubuntu Touch and then there are others that provide small apps called the Easy Installer in the case of Murena. You plug in the phone, you follow the steps on your computer screen, you click next, next, next, next and then the phone is installed. So that’s for models where it’s easy to do like the Pixels.

There are other models on which it’s much more difficult because the manufacturer won’t want us to unlock the bootloader which is really the initial part of the phone. which allows you to choose which operating system you will switch to. So there you go, depending on the phone you have, it can be very fast, much slower, or even completely impossible. So for that, there is each project that lists the phones that are supported or not. So you have to go to devices.e.foundation and you will have the list of all the phones supported by /e/OS. Now, we have more than 200, so you still have a small chance of having yours in the lot. If that’s not the case, there’s not much else to do but wait and buy the next phone.

Walid: The third option is to rent your phone. Here, I refer you to the episode we did with the people at Commown [note: the author of the podcast is a company at Commown] too, who rent phone equipment, but also other equipment without a purchase option, and who are therefore able to make phones last as long as possible over time. There is also this approach to renting the phone.

Antoine: Absolutely.

Walid: with the service that goes with it to always have a functional phone. Ok, so the LUGs, the Linux user groups, indeed, there are quite a few install-parties. There are quite a few people who can help you install an alternative OS on your phone if your phone is supported by one of these alternative OS. This is where you have to turn if you don’t want to try to do it yourself. Personally, I inquired which phone was supported.

And I ended up with, because I had broken my phone, I had to take another one, by taking a refurbished phone. on which I was sure it was running well. If you want to add something on that.

Conclusion

Antoine: If I had to summarize and then conclude what we’re saying here. Obviously, the thing to remember is that the phone is a device that tracks much more than a computer and therefore you should not stay on the basic operating system of your phone. Unfortunately, he cannot be trusted.

But the thing that I find really nice is that as you just said, in fact, it can be a very exciting adventure. to rediscover your phone, to take back control of it, to say to yourself “yes, but actually, I can do a lot of things that I didn’t necessarily think possible with my phone before because it was a little locked, controlled, etc.”

Antoine Duparay (fla)

For the geekiest among us, it’s even going to be like “yes, but actually, I’m connecting to SSH on my phone, now I’m making backups with Borg and everything.” Anyway, we can do a lot of different things that can be very funny. It’s an adventure that can be very exciting, having fun changing interfaces, discovering new apps, doing lots of things. It’s also an adventure that can obviously be a little scary, because your phone, as we said, is your device that you use the most. That’s why, I don’t know, we’re going to say, right now, I’m on the train, I have to show my tickets that I just bought. And if my phone is crashing for x or y reason, it’s going to upset me. The phone has to work. That’s pretty cool to realize that the people behind these projects are well aware of it. They really try to make projects that are of quality and that are not going to let us down.

Typically, on the Linux or Ubuntu Touch side, they decided to have a phone whose main partition is read-only and where they strongly advise against doing apt-get installs even if it’s technically possible because they say, if you put your phone in a weird state by installing any package, it’s going to be complicated. We assume that this is not what you want to do. So, these are still serious projects. It’s not just tinkering. The thing to keep in mind is that if you’re already using a lot of Google services, software, things from Google, you have to learn how to do without that first before you move on to these alternative OS.

I think I’ve installed /e/OS for at least thirty people around me, including my parents, little sisters, grandmothers, well really, everyone is doing very well. And the only people I had problems with and who told me “no but actually, I want more, get me back to basic Android”, were on the contrary work colleagues, very technical people with whom I told myself that there is no problem. And in fact, no, they hadn’t anticipated their dependence on Google at all. They hadn’t realized how much they were serving as Google all the time. They used Google Pay with their bank card inside their phone. They would come home, they would use their phones with Chromecast on the TV, that kind of thing. Obviously, when you remove Google from the phone, and that’s the goal, it’s not going to work anymore. There you go, if there is no longer Google in the phone, you can no longer store your bank card with Google.

So finally, the question to ask yourself before telling you whether I take the plunge or not, is not am I good enough technically, because it is not at all necessary to be technically good to use these solutions today, they are mature. It’s more about how dependent I am on Google and am I willing to do without it. If your answer is actually, I don’t use much of Google and I think that’s okay. so go ahead, there’s no problem with taking the plunge into an alternative system from which Google is removed.

Antoine Duparay (fla)

Walid: I’m not going to add anything more. The sequel to the next issue, as you have understood, is going to be a series. There will be other episodes that will happen throughout the year on this. That’s good because we did a little survey to find out what topics interested you, the listener of the podcast Projets Libres: the majority of people answered that they were interested in everything that revolved around the smartphone and the de-googled smartphone. So, you’ve come to the right place! We will continue to talk about it.

Before we leave as well, I invite you, if you want to know more about how Google services were going, to listen to the many episodes we did with other people from Framasoft on this. You have material.

There you go. See you soon for future episodes. Thank you very much for coming to talk to us, Antoine, for the listeners, as usual. Talk about it around you. look at alternatives to Google and others and then we’ll talk again soon. Thank you!

Antoine: thank you Walid, thank you!

Contact Antoine

• Mastodon: fla@mastodon.social
• Diaspora: fla@diaspora-fr.org
• Email: fla@framasoft.org

Episode production

• Remote check-in on March 23, 2026
• Plot: Walid Nouh and Antoine Duparay
• Editing: Walid Nouh
• Transcript: Walid Nouh

This interview has been automatically translated from the original language into English.

License

This podcast is released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license or later