GNU Android

The dream of free software remains illusive for many people and many computers, especially in the smartphone industry. Competition is tough, which explains why it is not just the chipset producers who try to outdo each other and block each other with software patents, but also the vendors who integrate even the tiniest features as proprietary solutions.

Android is Linux, and Linux is open source, so is Android open? It turns out that a mobile phone is much more than just a kernel. Many of the surrounding components – including the firmware and drivers, as well as the fleet of onboard applications, are proprietary. The non-free nature of these Android components is a problem for many Free Software advocates. Also, privacy advocates object to the constant monitoring and data collection that has become commonplace in the mobile phone industry. As you might expect, much of this monitoring occurs through closed-source applications, and it is impossible to see what these components are really doing because you can't see the source code.

The Replicant project [1] began as an attempt to create a free Android distribution that "puts the emphasis on privacy and security." Replicant is one of several non-Google Android alternatives. (See my article on CyanogenMod in the July, 2015 issue of this magazine.) Of all these Android alternatives, Replicant is perhaps the most similar to the Free Software community in its outlook, but does it work? Can you build a smartphone experience from Free tools and come up with something equivalent to what you get from conventional Android? I decided to find out.

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