http://pad.constantvzw.org/phone notes made by Wendy & Gijs during the workshop

Notes of Free Your Phone by Gijs de Heij & Wendy van Wynsberghe

Gijs de Heij is a designer/programmer interested in the influence of ... tbc :)

Disclaimer: this is not a class, this workshop is about discovering together.

Step 1: BACK UP!!! Superbackup is an app you can use for this.
Step 2 : install ADB (Android Debug Bridge)
Step 3: charge your phone
Step 4: root your phone....

Wendy: Android comes free of charge, is Ad supported, Cloud based, and highly customizable. Google says it logs your "phone number, calling0party number, forwarding numbers, time and date of calls, duration of calls, SMS routing information and types of calls" in their privacy plicy. It aslo logs your IP Address...

Installing software on your android phone is per default done via Google Play store, linked to your Google account. There is an alternative with FOSS Apps for Android: F-Droid. Free Software Foundation Europe recommends its use as it is a very nice showcase of all FOSS projects for Android out there.

The Guardian projectis a collection of apps that help encrypt and obscure, to protect from intrusion and monitoring, like for instance Orbot: Anonymous Web Browsing With Tor On Android.

In Linux systems there is always a root user, but in Android root access is not a default. You have to do some work to get it. Why root? You can't modify much except the wallpaper, for instance a simple thing like removing apps that are installed by default is not possible unless you have root.

There are many mods available. Mods are forks of the Android OS that have been modified. Examples of mods are Replicant and CyanogenMod. They are usually proprietary because they contain proprietary drivers. It is very unclear how 'free' these mods are. Replicant gives clear information on what they stripped and what they included but is only available for very few phones.

Other OS's include a.o. Firefox OS (originally boot 2 gecko), a Linux based open source operating system developed by Mozilla,  Ubuntu, and Sailfish is a part open source project stemming from Nokia's 
Fairphone pushes manufacturers to publish drivers under free licenses. It also tries to create fairness in the hardware production cycle. 

Everyone is asked to make an "ID card" for their phone, with the brand, model and Android version