Comment by gcblkjaidfj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcblkjaidfj | Hacker News Reader

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Lately i've been de-googling my android phones.

It's a shame that we are now back to the times when microsoft made IE4 (or 6?) part of the OS and completely impossible to remove it.

On windows98 and later I would install windows, open IE, disable every single setting to make it completely broken (no JS, no activeX, require latest SSL or bust, etc... pretty much made it impossible to use or be exploited in the background) ... win10 still insists on opening Edge when I click a link from the settings application despite firefox being my main browser.

Now I try (and fail) to do the same with google on android: Reset my phone, disable a bunch of System apps that completely break everything (i have to press OK twice on a "google service stoped working" every time i enable wifi) And I still cannot prevent any app that want to access the web directly or via chrome "web view" and load anything they want and keep cookies no matter my say on the issue. ...not to mention that it makes it a pain to get updates to the bloatware apps I still have to run to make the phone minimaly functional as the app store insists on me having those Advertisement services running to get updates to the bloatware i already bought with the phone.

So, yeah, you can install APK without Google blessing and their captive store, but that is an option for less than 0.1% of users that will want to put up with that.

To get a good experience degoogling your Android phone, you have to go farther and install an aftermarket OS, like Lineage OS.

or whole hog and get a Pine phone?

Just get a Huawei phone. That's Android without Google.

Soon it will be even more Google-free, with Huawei's own Hongmeng/HarmonyOS. They just released a beta of version 2.0: https://www.huaweiupdate.com/harmonyos-2-0-to-support-androi...

you say potato I sat potahto.

Same thing, different company.

Also different government listening in.

I'd love to, but mobile phones are bad-compromise-all-the-way.

I can't live without a proper SSH client, and that requires a proper keyboard where you can actually do key combinations.

Any phone with a keyboard (and not ancient) can't receive an unofficial OS. e.g. blackberry Key2

Either because they do not have unlocked/vulnerable bootloaders, or because you must have the closed source driver running to be usable. Android is not opensource and even lineage OS still requires TONS of closed source binary blobs to even boot. There is zero open source android alternatives.

> I can't live without a proper SSH client, and that requires a proper keyboard where you can actually do key combinations.

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.pocketworkstation.pckeyboar... Not quite the same as a hardware keyboard, but does support key combinations with modifier keys.

Well, Termux [1] as a ssh client works well enough for the basics when I am too lazy to shift my 'okole to the office.

[1]https://github.com/termux/

The F(x)tec PRO¹ might be of interest to you. Comes with a full keyboard and LineageOS support.

Planet Cosmo Communicator and Planet Astro Slide have a physical keyboard and support custom OSes.

> .. install an aftermarket OS, like Lineage OS

LineageOS for microG fork, lineage.microg.org. Lineage refused to include it for some reason.

It needs patches that allow faking the app signature. They consider this bad practice/a security risk and they are kinda right. I patch my lineageos to support signature spoofing though and use micro g.

> open IE, disable every single setting to make it completely broken (no JS, no activeX, require latest SSL or bust, etc...

Personally, I usually just delete the .exe (and .dll, etc) files. The most secure code of all, that never has bugs and can't be exploited, is code that doesn't exist.

That wasn't possible in Windows 98; IE4 provided explorer.exe, iirc..

It worked on XP IIRC. I don't remember 98 that well, so I'm less sure about that.

XP didn't integrate Active Desktop as tightly, so I can imagine that.

Installing APK outside of Google Play and breaking system libraries on your phone is different things. First is easy and plenty of people do it. Certainly more than 0.1%. Second might not be easy and I don't know why even 0.1% would want to do that.

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