Ask HN: Any respectul alternatives to Android?
It is more a mean for a company to get more data than ever possible.
The problem is that you can’t use an Android without connecting to your GMail account. Without identifying yourself.
This means Google know your contact list, your phone calls, SMSes (and their content), GPS coordinates (past and current), etc
It even gets worse! If you unlock your phone via face recognition or fingerprint, they have that too.
The last straw is that they don’t even let you choose what apps you want. You can’t remove the Play* suit, and not event Chrome.
Yes! Chrome! Microsoft was in the same boat a few years ago on Windows because they had IE installed by default, and they were forced to let other browsers be installed. Why Google can get away with that??!?
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So I started searching for an alternative. The best promising ones, currently, are Firefox OS and Ubuntu OS... but wait! They all dropped their ambitions and both Mozilla [2] and Canonical [3] decided it was not worse it to pursue these paths.
Firefox OS was a great great idea in my opinion. Coming from Mozilla, you could expect to be respected as a person and feel that your data won’t be used against you. I’m starting to believe that their ambition came at the same time too late (Google’s and Apple’s domination) but also too soon (Number of privacy concerned people growing, myself included).
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This is a cry for help. I’m starting to feel desperate that the only solutions are to accept our faith, giving every part of ourselves to Google or Apple, and hoping for the best.
So in a last grain of hope, I’m asking:
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"Is there any viable alternative to Android or iOS that doesn’t require you to be www-authenticated to make a fucking phone call?"
[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-chrome/
[2] https://www.cnet.com/news/why-the-death-of-the-firefox-phone-matters/
[3] https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/06/the-ubuntu-mobile-dream-is-over/