I recently learned something new about those tweety birds we hear in the tall trees all along our school run, cycling or walking past the golf course. Near the school end, lots of coal tits, a name with which I was barely familiar. Near our end, lots of wrens. I had an idea that wrens were rare and secretive and tiny, so it had not occurred to me they were responsible for that noisy cheerful chatter. Perhaps it's hard to spot one but they're loudly singing.
These I learnt last week helped by an app named “whoBIRD” which, as you may guess, listens for bird calls and displays the most likely matches. It's delightful to identify real birds, and surprisingly successful if they're not too far away.
This article is about one particular step of the procedure for “flashing” a new android-compatible operating system onto a Samsung device to create a Freedom-Respecting Smart Phone or Tablet.
This is about buying a Samsung Android tablet and replacing the privacy-invading proprietary Google and Samsung software with privacy-respecting Freedom Software: “degoogling” for short.
Why? In “The Problem” section below, we take a look back at how much we're giving up when we accept Google's and Samsung's terms.
I would like ordinary people, with a little technical skill, to be able to do this. The process unfortunately is currently far too difficult, especially so on Samsung devices.
My goals:
Install a privacy-preserving freedom-software operating system on my tablet
Let's make this fun — for children in particular — and show how we can bend the device to our will because FOSS means it's truly ours, fully under our control.
Android or iPhone — either Google or Apple delivers our messages — surely? You don't accept that?
Time I Learned: there are freedom-respecting phones.
People who do not want to depend on Google or have them control our devices are using android-compatible but not google-controlled phones, a.k.a. “degoogled phones”. We have been asking (ourselves) for several years if we can have google-free push notifications. Thanks to the developers of the UnifiedPush standard, the answer is now, “yes!”
UnifiedPush open-standard push messaging complements degoogled android-compatible phone OS's such as LineageOS.
People who do not want to depend on Google or have them control our devices are using android-compatible but not google-controlled phones, a.k.a. “degoogled phones”. We have been asking (ourselves) for several years if we can have google-free push notifications. Thanks to the developers of the UnifiedPush standard, the answer is now, “yes!”
The open standard UnifiedPush.org has now been created. While not a large number yet, a useful handful of apps already support UnifiedPush, including several matrix and fediverse apps. For its servers and the associated client-side “distributor” component, there are multiple successful implementations deployed.