Episode: 3246
Title: HPR3246: LXCast: freeing the Fairphone 3 (and many other phones) 
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3246/hpr3246.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:37:50

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3246 for Monday 11th on January 2021.
Today's show is entitled, LXCast, Freeing the Fairphone Free, and Many Other Fones,
not, and is part of the series podcast recommendations. It is posted by 2B Frank,
and is about 29 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, we look at how to get a free smartphone operating system on the Fairphone Free,
and many other phones.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Thanks for watching!
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon,
and you're listening to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
Today, a podcast recommendation for you.
LXCast from our good friend, 2B Frank, new podcast in English,
open source, freedom, tech. What's not to love?
Welcome to LXCast number 3. My name is 2B Frank, and in this episode,
we will be talking about freeing the Fairphone Free and Many Other Fones,
introducing a great free operating system called E for the FP3, and many others that you can install,
or that you can purchase already pre-installed phones with, which is a very good option.
So let's get right into it to learn more.
Okay, so last time I talked about the Fairphone when it had just come out, that's about a bit more
than a year ago. I think the Fairphone 3 is sustainable, easily repairable, and long-lasting,
fair trade phone. If you want to learn more about that, have a look at LXCast number 2 here on the
page in the show notes, or at lxcast.net. The Fairphone came out in 2019, I think, in October,
I think, your shift, and it had only stock Android number 9 back then with the full Google apps
installs that you can't really uninstall, which means Google is regularly looking over your shoulder
when you use the phone, and that is really not great for privacy-aware users.
If you want to install an alternative operating system on your phone,
back then there wasn't really an option that was stable, really usable.
In the meantime, at least two solutions have emerged. One is Lineage OS, the free Android,
with the G apps removed. I should put the link in the show notes, but that is not the one I'm going
to talk about mainly today. Today we're talking about the E-Project. It's a D-Google operating system
also based on Android, and it is actually a fork of Lineage OS, and you can find more about it
under the email address, hdgps, double.double-slash, e.foundation. Yeah, naming a problem just with a letter
e and slash before it, and slash afterwards actually poses one or two problems when you look for it
online, but if you look at e.foundation, then you will find the actual website. It will be in the
show notes anyway.
So why would you want to install a different operating system on your phone? Well, on the e-page,
they say smartphones quietly transformed into surveillance devices, sharing our personal data
with the highest bidder or with government agencies to predict and influence our actions.
On their website, they actually quote study from a professor Douglas C. Schmidt, professor of
computer science at Vanderbilt University, and it's a very in-depth study, basically saying that
how much Google is using the Android phone and actually the Chrome browser that is pre-installed
on the Android phone to collect a large amount of data on every user. Just the quick quote from
that study, Android sends periodic updates to Google service, including device type, cell
service carrier name, crash reports, and information about apps installed on the phone. It also
notifies Google whenever any app is accessed on the phone. So it collects a whole of a lot of
data and will share a lot of unique identifiers of your phone with Google servers. And the
study in a graphic on their site, they say that based on that study, when active phone with
G apps, contacts, Google servers about 90 times an hour, and when inactive about 40 times an hour,
as compared to an iPhone, which still does that, but a lot less actually, well, when active an
iPhone contacts 55 times an hour Apple servers. So that's a good reason to actually get rid of
most of the Google apps on your phone and be a bit more serene, I would say. I put this article
in another article in the show notes because definitely worth the read. It might be even worth
being a separate episode because it is so fundamental and many users, I've often compared
this to a total, so many users just buy the phone as is and use it as is and then don't change anything
and don't really want to think about how much of their privacy is going out of the internet
without the knowing or without and wanting to know without Google telling them. So what does the
e-project offer to get rid of this? They have announced a partnership with their phone
for the Fairphone 3. That is great. That means you can buy Fairphones now from the eFoundation pre-installed
with the D Google system, which has a replacement of many apps and just a little more about the EOS.
It's open source, it's pro privacy and fully D Google or Google services have been removed
and replaced with micro-g services. Basically micro-g is an open source implementation
of Google apps without the spying parts that report to Google. Micro-g replaces Google's
libraries with purely open source implementations without hooks to Google services, they say.
They promise no data scanning or location tracking 24-7 until you install apps that are less privacy
aware, I would say. But more on that later, you can check built-in track as in apps before installing,
store or backup your data in your private space instead of Google Drive for cloud storage,
you get E's own cloud, which is based on the open source next cloud. So who's behind it?
The man behind the e-project is Gael Duval, who is a big name, I think, in the open source community.
Back in the day, in the 90s, I think, in late 90s, early 2000s, he started Mandrake Linux,
which was one of the first really user-friendly, easily installable Linux operating system versions
that made it popular. He then was the head of an online cloud service, I think, called Ulteo.
I'm not sure if it exists anymore. I'm adding an article here in the show notes from Gael Duval
himself, who basically outlines the basics of what, when he started the project in 2017,
back then it was a crowdfunding campaign by a Kickstarter and another platform, I think,
and what his vision is, his article is called EOS redefines the mobile operating system paradigm
for a more sustainable world. It's definitely worth a read, and it's a very interesting personality,
no doubt. Now, you can buy a Fairphone 3 because we're focusing on the Fairphone 3 here,
and the Fairphone 3 Plus with E pre-installed at their shop at the website. The Fairphone 3 Plus
is a little more sophisticated version with a better camera module, I think, but otherwise it's
identical to the original Fairphone from a year or a half ago, and every time it's about like
30, 30 euros more than the stock Fairphone when you buy the version that has E pre-installed,
but that's definitely worth the price, plus you get regular updates. Just another word,
you have some more offers on the website, you can buy, for example, a slightly older Galaxy S8
or S9 which are refurbished and pre-installed with the E system, but I've recently seen a review
in a Joan magazine that there are a few quirks and it doesn't work quite as well, whereas I have to
say on the Fairphone 3, it works just like pretty much flawless. I haven't had any trouble with
whatsoever, I can definitely absolutely recommend it, and there's another phone to come that's a
Gigasets GS290 that I don't know much about, I think it's Gigasets Siemens, German brand which
doesn't mean that much anymore since all our phones are built and made in China these days.
Now, there's also the option to install the EOS on your phone, be it if you already have a
Fairphone, this works for the Fairphone 3 and the Fairphone 2 as well, I think. You can also
install EOS on an existing phone and there are over 110 devices supported at the time of writing of
this, from Aces to Google to OnePlus, I actually tried this with an older OnePlus X phone I had in
my drawer and it worked just fine and it works really well and it's a great way to mostly
for these phones that are three, four years old, the manufacturers don't update them anymore
and you have an obsolete version of Android which is actually a security risk if you're permanently
online. So installing EOS on that is a definite option. There's a list on the website with a
device that's supported, each time you get the instructions of how to do it, security precautions,
you should always make a backup of the data you have on that phone, on the SD card or somewhere else
to be sure if anything goes wrong. So have a look at that, I'll include the list of the devices they
support for now in the show notes. Now back to the Fairphone 3 as I said I had the stock version
of the Fairphone 3 and actually spent about almost a year giving away like my address book and stuff
to Google without actually, without actually wanting to do that but there's so many automatic backup
and sync options in Android that are more and more difficult to turn off, the vocal assistants and all
that. I was going to say crap which can be helpful but they're permanently listening and I don't
trust them and I am ready to not have that speech to text version of a program
not having that option of dictating text for text messages and everything in order to be a little
more secure and not have someone listening to me permanently. For me it involved on the standard
replacing the standard Android was backing up my data, I used ADB for that which is the Android
debug bridge which is so you hook your up your telephone to a computer with Linux or Windows or I
think you can even do it on Mac and then you access your phone from there and you can actually
flash some new system on it, you can do complete backup and you have various other options.
I shall do a different episode or a blog post on ADB later on because it's a bit more
stuff to say about that that can fit in this episode. The EOS also has its own app store with ratings
which sometimes it looks like no one has rated the apps yet but what you can definitely look at
is the privacy evaluations by an entity called Exodus Privacy and you should try it for WhatsApp
or Zoom for their apps, I don't recommend installing them on your phone and if you look into the
app into the Exodus Privacy site or in the app store of the EOS you see why because they pretty much
have a demand every permission there is almost to have access to your phone, to your contact list,
to your camera, to your microphone. Now for some applications like Zoom or WhatsApp that is definitely
at sometimes useful and sometimes necessary to access your microphone in a camera but once they
have it what else do they do with it even when you're not using the app you don't know. Anyway back
to the app store so this is the EOS app store they've written their own app store, it's a replacement
for the Google Play store and it focuses mainly on open source apps that are privacy-friendly
and definitely more the way to go than installing if you look for some texture speech or OCR which
optically character recognition which has searched recently you find everything in the Google Play store
and you have no clear idea whether these apps are sending you ads or reading all your address
books and your phone status and all that or not. In the app store from EOS you can have a look at
what permissions they actually ask for and how privacy secure they are. Now I also installed
another app store called FDroid which is another excellent open source app store that focuses
on open source software and which I've used for years which I'm a bit surprised by the way that
they haven't used as a standard app store in EOS because it's right down there early and I did
that because I use a use a FDroid in parallel because some apps you don't find in the EOS
app store. In our days for work or for whatever reason or to stay in touch with your friends if
you need an app then you can find on neither the app store or the the FDroid app store there's
an app called Aurora store which allows you to install Google Apps without having a Google account
that is an option. What other features are there a typical for the EOS there's the E launcher
which reminds me a lot of the Samsung launcher and I didn't find it great but then in Android and
with these app stores it's not difficult to replace it. I would recommend the simple launcher
or one or two others which I will put in the show notes. What else is great about the EOS
and I don't think lineage OS does that is you get regular over the air updates for the systems
as you do with a normal Android at some point system modifies you there's a new version available
and you can reinstall update the system. Now sometimes you should wait a couple of days
or a week when you see a new update before actually fleshing it because a friend of mine told me
he had some people have had problems because there were one or two bugs in in the new system update
I have never experienced anything like that for me the system updates just worked fine and there's
a reasonable selection of apps in in the EOS for example magic earth program called magic earth
replaces google maps because google maps the downside is it is a very good app I have to say
but the downside is google knows all the time where you are where you're going and how you're going
and that is a bit worrying too so magic earth doesn't track you as far as we know
and you got offline maps you don't have to have internet coverage to to be using the map you
download them when you're in a Wi-Fi or when you're in a spot where you have a decent internet
connection and then you use them there's a standard email client the excellent open camera app
as the photo app there's a gallery there's contacts pretty much what we know from standard Android
there's the liberal office viewer to view Microsoft office docs and stuff like that you can only
view them you can edit them unfortunately in liberal office viewer but at least it's a fully
open sourcing app there are SMS apps and a few more I recommend adding if you want to go
open source applications and replace most of your commercial applications adding antenna pod
for podcasts as an antenna and pod fair email which for me is the best email client on Android
it has a lot of settings that might put off some uses if you were worried by too many options
and you could use another client that's called simple email phenic which is the Firefox version
open source Firefox version on the app store the app store signal messenger if you want a secure
messenger certainly makes sense and there's a few others like simple calendar from the same guys who
who do simple email which does just what it says and it's open source and it doesn't necessarily
think your calendar with Google servers if you don't want that which I definitely don't and then
there's an app called new pipe that I would recommend for watching YouTube without being tracked
so are there any downsides to installing EOS or buying a phone with EOS well I can only
talk about the install version of EOS on the fair phone but I think it's identical to what you're
going to purchase I can't see any for me as I said everything worked just fine out of the box
except for maybe a banking app I had to use which sometimes I have to restart to to get the
confirmation if I'm doing online banking I'm usually doing this on my computer and this is an
additional security step which you have to validate on your phone as I said sometimes it doesn't come
up immediately then you have to to to end the app and restart it and then it always works
that's not such a big trouble really to go through a few caveats recently the backup via ADB the
Android debug bridge on the fair phone seems to be broken you can't do that way anymore but that
is not the fault of the EOS that is something that has happened occurred in Android and between Android
and ADB I'm not quite sure why one of the downsides is the recovery there's a recovery partition
on every Android phone and back in the days there used to be the possibility to flash a new
recovery that means rewrite that standard recovery partition and from there you have a program
that's called for example TWRP that allows you to flash the main image of the main system or
make backups of your data partitions and play them back but you can do it with a different
method basically you start a program called TWRC on your computer via ADB and then it should be
able to make a backup so that's basically concludes our tour of the EOS on the Fairphone 3
in conclusion what would I say I think it's a brilliant project it's the most comprehensive yet
for a real free Android alternative and I think it's perfect if you want to buy an already
free Fairphone 3 pre-installed no hassle not having to worry about rewriting your phone or anything
and it's also a way to combine a fair repairable sustainable phone with an operating system that is
free where you're not being tracked the perfect match as far as I know one more mention
the project is an open source project and it calls for donations it offers membership models
where you can actually donate a certain sum per month or per year and you get several benefits
from that um that's pretty much it
okay that's all for this time on elixcast keep it open source and don't give them your data
and these times of pandemic and Brexit don't pay the ferryman until it gets you to the other side
take care bye
you
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