Cat and Mouse

Recently, My wife had her phone broken, so it was a necessity to buy her a new phone, this time I decided to get her one which I can play with to make it a more privacy-oriented, and at the same time keep all the apps that she often uses (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Snapshat...etc) in order not to disturb her daily use.

When I first got the phone with its original official Stock Android, I was really disturbed, The phone was filled with bloatware, and every official app from OPPO that you find pre-installed will not function unless you agree on their "Privacy Policy" and their "Terms of Use", I mean every app in the system, Camera, Notes...etc. Furthermore, they will always try to force you to register in their cloud service and link your phone with it, that means that the whole phone will be always synced there. That enforced my determination to wipe it out and install a new, Free, Open-Source privacy-respecting Custom Android Open Source Project (AOSP) ROM. (Android and AOSP are two different things, although they are both developed by Google, the first one, Android, is a trademark of Google, and it is only used by Phone OEMs after they sign a predatory contract with Google, while the second one, AOSP, is open-source and anyone can modify it, which where all the Custom Community ROMs came from.)

I only tried lineageOS before (which is what my phone is), that was my plan at the beginning, to just flash LineageOS to her phone, since it was the most famous one, and the one that I have some experience with. long story short, I ran into some problems when I tried to flash MicroG in LineageOS (MicroG is an Open-Source implementation of Google Play Services, which most of the famous apps depend on to function), So I went to some developers forum and started asking questions, and the tremendous amount of help I got was amazing. Through their help and advice I installed crDroid instead of LineageOS which is, in my opinion, far better (we'll leave the details of that for another post). I broke the phone once, and they were able to know what did I do wrong and fix it.

Through the many posts and help guides already posted in these forums, I was able to bypass many of the technical obstacles that Google had put to make sure you only depend on them (Like SafetyNet), I was also able to hide my root access (because many apps, like bank apps, will refuse to function if your phone is rooted). I came across many awesome open-source tools and hacks that people developed and the brilliant ideas behind it to overcome Big-Tech hindrances, I unlocked the many customized and latest features of AOSP. I discovered The ability to actually isolate predatory apps in a dedicated space that is completely different and isolated environment from the main one, as if in another phone, where apps there have no access to your phone, and you only tunnel to them what you actually want them to have access to. Unlike the previous experience that I had in my phone, were some bank apps did not work, and location was not that precise...etc, with my wife's phone, everything works just fine, and no app have more access than it actually necessarily needs when it is called.

Although it was a bit of hard journey filled with bugs, tricky problems, frustration, and sometimes a broken phone, it was totally worth it, not just because of the privacy, the total control of your phone, and the longer life of the battery, but above all the experience itself, the dopamine shots I get whenever I fix a problem, make something work, or understand a new idea. Aside from technical things, I was introduced to a "cat and mouse" war between big-tech and community developers, where the first wants to dominate the internet and take full control of our digital life and make it only accessible through their walled-gardens, what they call an "ecosystem", and make it so hard and inconvenient to do stuff out of their ecosystems, while the latter trying to prevent that and offer alternatives and raise people's awareness of how important it is to live a free digital life.