“We use our smartphones to keep our secrets, do our banking, interact with our governments, share our deepest thoughts with our friends and family, and a whole lot more. Having this invaluable tool the vast majority of us depend on tied entirely to Google and Apple is not just bad for the market, it’s also a downright threat to the national security of anyone not living in the US.”
I know I may have an unpopular opinion, and as I don’t read OSNews for reasons, I partially agree with them on this statement.
I believe it is also a threat to those who are primarily in the US as well, specifically you HAVE to use either-or when it comes to a cheap smartphone. Apple is a HUGE walled garden fruit tree orchard in an inescapable fortress, so much so that they make it extremely impossible to run another OS on your phone/tablet, and possibly in the future, your desktops and laptops.
Furthermore, Poople is trying their darndest to make Android increasingly more proprietary, making it impossible to develop banking apps that use their own methods of Tap to Pay outside of Poople Pay. Without root and even with a locked bootloader, custom ROMs cannot process Tap to Pay payments for this very reason.
If possible, I will pre-order a Clicks Communicator and put your guys’s iodéOS on it. The ad-blocking is amazing on my Pixel 4 and I can’t wait to see when (or even if) you guys can successfully port it to the Communicatior with a locked bootloader.
Also I hope iodé will NOT implement OS govt age verification…
I had to laugh as apple are running ads here in the UK touting safari as THE privacy browser.
Serious though, I need a smart phone less and less these days, being retired, I will get a dumb phone if things get that bad and open my Linux laptop once a day to catch up with emails etc.
I just tap a credit card not my phone, no inconvenience there and Google don’t know where I’m shopping, or pay cash for small items.
It’s not just google though, today I can’t track an inbound delivery using our national postal service without accepting their ads and trackers. If delivery fails and they waste their time, I’ll collect it.
Don’t play their game if you can avoid it.
Beside the EU Office alternative coming up those days , the Commission would be better backing initiatives like iode (FR based) to help rising a EU Android alternative.
How many EU MEPs are being spied upon by Israel/USA ? rhetoric question.
China has solved the “national security issue” with Huawei’s HarmonyOS
iode should seek support from the French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI) to be pushed in the French gov. related telecom world, as a start. @anton, any contact over there? 
NB I am not a French citizen
Somebody had a rant over this on the XDA forums yesterday:
Some possibly relevant numbers popped up in a radio interview yesterday too (BBC, usually reliable):
75% of world compute is resident in USA; 15% in China; 5% in EU; then the rest of us …
Wow! So much inaccuracy, exaggeration and bitterness in that post and the first few replies. The poster really needs to move on and get a better sense of perspective.
Yes the custom ROM scene faces many challenges, but it self-evidently is not dead 
What specifically was inaccurate, exaggerated and bitter please?
I did describe it as a rant, and the thread was closed for the manner of its presentation, not the content.
Yesterday I looked again at some recent stuff from YT on privacy, spyware, &c. It occurred to me that there is a problem: if we manage to develop and maintain a free/libre/open system, where does the hardware come from? Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo, can afford to order custom chips (or make their own) to lock in their own systems, and cause problems loading alternate ROMs. How long will the Pixel remain clean? Can Fairphone, Above Brax et al supply the whole European market? The rest of the world?
The whole article IMHO. Clickbait and manufactured outrage. The time I spent reading it was time wasted, and I won’t waste more time ‘discussing’ it or pretending that it contains anything worthy of discussion. You are of course free to disagree with that assessment and to spend your time however you like. But I have muted this thread and won’t participate further. Goodbye, and have fun 
This was a very good review, I like their deeper dive into the banking app and messaging discussions. “Don’t be afraid of microG” is a tagline maybe microG themselves should pick up
people voluntarily give all their data to zuck et al anyways,
And often, yours and mine as well.
Exactly, there’s a reason why there are so many “useful” fields in google contacts etc, then people share contacts with meta, X etc, it annoys me cos I don’t have a google account or use the socials.
Back in the day when I was degoogling my life style I set up a wot sap account in the name of ‘Robin Yerbandwidth’ with an email address in the same name. Since than I have closed the wotsap account but left the email address open for those that didn’t follow me over to Telegram or Signal. Don’t use for it for anything else now that way it’s dead data for meta or screwgle. If I get a notification from it, it’s on the spoofing phone which I have no use for these days apart from staying in touch with the big tech’ faithful.
There’s only so much we can do and it feels like just slowing the inevitable.
Meta Rayban glasses etc, if they gain in popularity like smart watches, coupled with advances in facial and body recognition will be a huge threat to our privacy. Potentially worn by anyone, comparing faces seen to known images on FB and IG, even if you don’t have a social media presence, you can be in the background of all the people I see video calling and live streaming and walking down the street where I live.
Anyone using apple or google pay could be linked to a transaction witnessed by someone wearing these glasses.
The social media companies and big tech will track us in unregulated ways, our phones are something we have control over, but not something someone else wears that just harvests information.
Good review, but whith such an in-depth analysis you would expect he would’ve understood the sentence: “Hidden, data deleted, uninstalled on next reboot”.
Claiming that the preinstalled apps are only hidden instead of removed is a factual mistake.
One of the very essential advantage of IodéOS over /e/OS is the freedom of completely removing the preinstalled apps.
Yes, logged in or not. Looks like the Overlords decided they didn’t wan’t to keep exposing that sort of dissent 
Whilst custom ROM users still have access to google apps there is no urgency for the community to put the effort into alternative ways to circumvent big tech’s strangle hold. If google were to pull the plug on CR users in the short term, webapps would be the only viable go to solution.
I’m already a big fan of webapp’s especially PWA’s, they give me everything I need instantly without having to go to any repository and the extra bonus is that once you close the tab there’s no risk of background activity. Right now I’m experimenting with Pockr, an app that allows you to load up a minimalist Alpine Linux desktop distro along with docker containers on a non rooted Android platform. Anyone familiar with Alpine linux is aware that a) it’s super fast (ARMv8), b) also does not require kernel mod’s unlike UT, Droidian etc and c) adds an extra level of security to your device for everything you run on it.
So I’m using iode as the android provider which is great for taking care of the network capabilities and the device’s peripherals without all the complexities and bugs you get with droidian. Everything just works! I have also installed all my dedicated FOSS app’s on to the android platform too. On the Alpine sub-platform I’m testing different browsers and web app’ managers in order to optimise functionality as best I can. One benefit of this setup is that you are free to use hacking tools that just aren’t available to android users and without worrying that by using them you could create conflicts that cause connectivity or compatibility problems for the android platform. All the sites you install as webapps are not even aware that you are accessing their server on a phone, so it’s PC functionality along with PC rules for webapp’s, circumventing all that crazy android sh1t.
I’d like to see iode taking a different route to Graphene when it comes to future proofing our devices. The Graphene route is way too dependent upon google for my liking and the recent move to Motorola in order to provide dedicated hardware doesn’t change a thing.