I'd suggest to anyone worried about Google tracking to use Privacy Guard built into LineageOS, which aims to make each and every request for sensitive permissions explicit.
A big benefit of free software is that we can also use useful proprietary apps without giving up control of our hardware.
At the moment, I recommend the previous version of MicroG (0.2.6.13280) since the latest version (0.2.7.17455) may have compatibility issues. If you're using LineageOS for MicroG, builds on or before June 2 use the previous version.
NewPipe is like YouTube, but also with a background music player, a video/audio downloader, and no ads. It also supports SoundCloud.
You can use NewPipe regardless of whether you are using LineageOS or MicroG. It's not available in the Google Play Store (or the iOS App Store) for obvious reasons, but you can download it for any Android device from F-Droid.
The possibility to just download and listen offline and also to create playlists without an account are awesome.
Same goes with NewPipe - you're using YouTube without actually paying for bandwidth, storage costs or the video author.
So you're not actually getting yourself rid of Google or tracking, you're just using their resources without paying the asking price.
Use other alternatives instead.
Google Maps can get its location from MicroG but in my experience it isn't even close to fully functional. Basic things like searching for a location or asking for directions just result in endless spinning.
You mean it is still fully compatible with MicroG. Guess what will happen when the OS becomes popular.
Just for clarification, I don't have Facebook installed in my phone, neither have a Facebook account.
Did you give a recent try to Apple Maps? Just finishing a few months road trip across the US and to my surprise I vastly prefer Apple Maps for the navigation and I now default to it. While in France I can't live without Waze/Google Maps because it's so efficient to workaround congestions in real time, I found it no better than Apple Maps in the US.
Otherwise I agree there is no alternative for Youtube. The move from Gmail was the easiest, and Search to DDG not really hard (with the !g keyword still handy for tech or complexes searches).
It doesn't really fit the tone of the article.
Driving/walking directions? Reliability? Traffic? Street View?
I imagine it’s a combination but curious in general what would a competitor need to master to change the conversation, if OSM isn’t there yet.
OSM has a ton of features, but the most useful ones to people who use Google Maps just aren't dead simple to use. Maybe they should make a directions-specific app. I'm not sure how good the directions are since I've only managed to use it a couple times before getting frustrated and switching back to Google Maps.
I'd love to see a competitor who could make that experience a little smoother. Navigating in streetview is more like a slide show than a drive.
Regarding YouTube, try using only their video widget, and not their recommendation engine.
Check this sandbox app out, does it work?: https://island.oasisfeng.com/
OSMAnd gets lots of attention though.
Users are free to host their signal servers if they choose. The usage of their network is their prerogative. It's not a federated protocol and they never promised or set out to support arbitrary clients on their network. At the moment, the world is really better served by signal than most other messaging solutions.
Matrix/Riot is superior in about every way to Signal, and they welcome third party clients without any restriction.
> What sort of weird FOSS zealotry is this where you want to use someone else's network resources without their consent
Well, are they in the business of building something open, or building yet another walled garden? Because this is precisely what they seem to be doing by creating such restrictions.
I tried Jami when it was called Ring and I couldn't figure it out after some fumbling with the app and skimming of the website. If I can't figure it out how can I expect nontechnical people to? That was one of the reasons why I ended up adopting Riot/Matrix back then and have been pushing it since, but I'm still interested in alternative communication systems if they can bring any benefits to the table. Does Jami bring any?
I'm not an Android developer, but could it be that applications are just expecting that API? It would make sense for Google to want to route location requests through what's usually their service...
And then there's a more powerful version provided by Google Services, which automatically fuses all providers and talks to Google servers. Most apps these days opt for the Fused provider, since it's easier to use and automatically handles getting a reliable location in pretty much any environment. It's not available on "Google-free" phones though, since it depends on Google's infrastructure.
GPS is a standalone system but it doesn't have a lot of spare bandwidth for the metadata so the alamanac you need frequently updated to use it takes quite a long time to receive over GPS itself whereas you can download it very fast over even a mediocre GSM signal.
Taking a few minutes, especially the first time you use it in a day for example, sounds like the time needed to receive the almanac. But I could be wrong.
It does, but you'll have very poor reception unless you have a nice line of sight to the sky - large cities and forests are typically the most problematic.
Will fix as soon as possible!
Edit: It should be somewhat better now, with relative font size values. Still not ideal, I gotta refresh my CSS skills and work more on the stylesheet sometime soon.
Thanks again for letting me know.
w3m (via Termux) and unv.is both win:
https://unv.is/hexaquo.at/posts/2019/06/29/Freeing+my+phone+...
https://itsfoss.com/open-source-alternatives-android/
By the way PureOS seems a good shot.
I just can't understand people claming to run free of Google and stay on Android !!! ;) ;) ;) ;)
Good luck with your fight againsn't the Google devil. Me ? I am staying on Apple devil device, but I just take responsibility for that choice.
Because it's open source, Google can't put their objectionable code directly into Android - that's what their proprietary apps and services are for, and those are where you begin to lose your freedom and control.
Also, building independent operating systems that reach as many devices as android or android based distros like LineageOS do is next to impossible because of driver issues. In fact, it's only thanks to standardization pushes by Microsoft that you can build a single ISO and run it on different IBM PC's. There is no such standardization push by Google. They are okay with each vendor forking stuff, changing source code, and then providing their own version of Android instead of requiring one google-built binary for all devices. This has detrimental effects on anyone wanting to build an alternative to android because they need to maintain a large number of kernels sometimes with millions of lines of diff to torvalds mainline. There are some meek pushes by Google and other parties to mainline more stuff to Linux and implement ARM GPU drivers in Mesa, but I doubt that we'll get a situation that's equally nice to the IBM PC situation any time soon.
PureOS is not yet ready for prime time, but it will be very interesting to see how it performs compared to AOSP when it's released. And pmOS will most likely manage to support many PureOS components on existing hardware, although obviously at some cost in reliability and privacy compared to running PureOS on Librem's supported platform.
https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/carnet
https://github.com/PhieF/CarnetDocumentation
I've been on the lookout for such an app as well, and after trying a lot of different ones, this is my favorite so far.
You're right though, it's surprising how hard it is to find a note taking app that's just simple and intuitive.
If you want to be completely private, you'll probably have to use TOR together with those alternative clients.
Overall though, Linus' law ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow") is a huge factor when it comes to privacy and security in my opinion. If an open source app is bad in one of those aspects, it will be noticed and fixed (or forked). Additionally, community driven projects like OSM simply don't have any reason or motivation to spy. They're a collaborative effort owned and developed by their users, not a company driven by capital and short-term profit.
Ditch evil doers, be in positive side to support companies that actually have people's privacy in they priority.
