Free Your Android: Let's test Free Software android distributions
Free Software on phones has been of major importance over the past
decades. Android is a big cornerstone in that area, but which
distribution suits your use case? Which one respects your freedom and
supports your daily life? In this series, we will try to answer those questions.
As part of an update to our Free Your Android campaign,
the FSFE took a
closer look at several of them, installing and using each one to see how
well it respects your freedom and how it works in practice. Starting
today, we will publish our findings one distribution at a time.
You should be in charge of your phone just like with any other
computer
Smartphones are the computers we carry with us everywhere. They have
information on us such as our location, who we talk to, and what we
read. Yet most of the phones you can buy run software that their users
can use, but not study, share, or improve. They also usually come with
deep ties to a single company's services. With our Free Your Android
campaign, we have long encouraged users to regain control over their
mobile devices.
Since the beginning of this campaign, the ecosystem around Android has
changed considerably. Questions about privacy, device support, and ease
of installation are what users need to know ahead of time to make
informed decisions about what to run.
Developers of Free Software Android distributions do important and
increasingly difficult work for software freedom on phones. And users
have a real choice between different distributions thanks to those
extensive efforts. For this update, we examined several of those
distributions in detail. We looked at usability, privacy aspects, and
of course, software freedom. We will release the results one
distribution at a time as part of a larger update to Free Your Android.
This way, each distribution gets the attention it deserves and you can
follow along, perhaps try things out, and share your experience with us
and the Fediverse.
Today, we release our report about LineageOS;
further articles will follow. Keep an eye on our Free Your Android page and
our Mastodon
account.
"Smartphones are the most personal computers ever built; they typically
know more about you than your closest friends do. Who should decide
what happens with that information? Free Software operating systems on
phones give users that choice. We looked into the differences and
figured out what works and what doesn't so you are empowered to make a
decision about what your phone does." - Florian Snow, Technical Advisor
Free your device today
Have you already liberated your own phone? Did you run into problems or
did everything go smoothly? Then please help the developers of those
distributions by sharing this information in a structured manner, by
expanding their community wikis or by filing a well-written bug report.
Do you have experience with a distribution we should cover? Then let us
know!
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