
Smartphone startups take on Google, Apple and put privacy first - indidea
https://www.dw.com/en/smartphone-startups-take-on-google-apple-and-put-privacy-first/a-52369255
======
dangus
I wish the article was a little more technically competent. It leaves out a
lot of other important projects in this space like PinePhone, LineageOS, and
even the proprietary alternative of Sailfish.

I also take issue with a lot of articles talking about data collection as the
boogeyman without actually explaining how data collection happens and how to
minimize it.

You don’t have to actually get rid of Apple or Google, which can massively
handicap the usability of your device, to gain some semblance of privacy.
There are a lot of simple changes to be made:

\- Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps

\- Auditing Google/Apple/social media account privacy settings

\- Make sure you’re on a recent/the latest Android version

\- Audit and minimize app permissions

\- Uninstall apps that you don’t need or have web alternatives

\- Installing content blockers on web browsers

\- Set up a PiHole

\- On Android, you could switch to an alternative App Store like F-Droid

I suggest these sorts of thing only because these projects, while very
admirable, are years away from being viable alternatives. Most smartphone
users outside the technically inclined would absolutely not make the trade-
offs required to live with something like a Librem or even giving up Google
Play on LineageOS.

The other issue I take with articles like this is that they fail to understand
the value that data collection _can_ provide to consumers as well. A lot of
useful features actually depend on using your data. The assumption that the
consumer is unhappy about this trade-off is not necessarily correct.

A great example of that concept is how Google and Apple use aggregated
location information to determine traffic conditions. This is a highly useful
feature to most smartphone owners. It would be impossible to implement without
collecting location data.

That’s just one example of many. In many ways the utility of the smartphone
outshines the personal computer precisely _because_ it can gather more data
from more sensors to be put to use.

Fighting Apple and Google with alternatives is a losing battle if you ask me -
privacy will never be protected until strong regulations with real teeth
become universal.

In reality, there will never be more than two smartphone operating systems
that any significant number of the public use. If you don’t believe me just
look to the personal computer world - in 30 years has any operating system
gained any more traction than Windows or macOS? Sure, Desktop Linux is more
usable and popular than ever, but the fact remains that 95%+ of the general
population still doesn’t use it. While me and my technically inclined friends
can finally use Linux as a daily driver and even play AAA commercial video
games on it, something of a pipe dream 10 years ago, that doesn’t help the 90%
of people that are still on Windows. That desktop computing situation is a lot
like the future of smartphones - Apple and Google aren’t going anywhere.
That’s why I say that regulations and laws are going to be the only way to
reign in mass data collection, because getting people to switch to
alternatives will never be more than 5% effective.

~~~
MisterTea
> Turning off location history in Google and Apple Maps

Google dark patterns make this a no-go. I have multiple locations stored on my
Google maps. With location history turned off I was fine until a few months
ago when maps told me in order to access that data I need to turn location
history back on. So google cripples their software unless you turn on
tracking.

~~~
chewz
Use alternative maps -

[https://en.mapy.cz/](https://en.mapy.cz/),
[https://maps.me/](https://maps.me/) \- Google Maps is useless anyway.

~~~
FalconSensei
> Google Maps is useless anyway

Care to elaborate on that? It seems very useful, considering the amount of
people that use it on a daily basis

------
ThePhysicist
Ars Technica recently tested the current version of the Purism Libre:
[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-
hands...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/librem-5-phone-hands-on-a-
proof-of-concept-for-the-open-source-smartphone/)

It seems that it's still more a prototype than a functioning phone, where even
basic functionality like replying to a SMS is not implemented yet. That's not
really surprising or discouraging though, it's simply a lot of software that
you have to reimplement, so even attaining feature parity with current phones
seems quite difficult with this approach.

I think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem,
fighting back with technology will not work.

Taking aside the usability issues I think these initiatives are fantastic
though and while I don't think they will replace current smartphones they
might find unexpected markets that can benefit from the open approach. For
example, I think an affordable, fully open mobile computing device could
become as successful as the Raspberry Pi and provide a great platform for many
innovative, data-driven mobile applications.

~~~
dmos62
> think we need a political/organizational solution to the privacy problem

I agree, and I'd add that that's because there isn't much money in privacy at
the moment, and there's a lot of money in violating privacy. And, that's
probably because there's too many people who don't understand privacy in
technology, or don't consider it a priority. I think that regulation can't
come soon enough. Anyone who helps privacy and tech politics move faster is a
hero.

~~~
ThePhysicist
Yes, I think there's a trend (maybe fake, I hope real) that people become more
savvy in respect to privacy. As the article says, 70 % of people say they
learned more about privacy last year. We can already see the first large
corporations that use this for their marketing (though with mixed real
committments I'd say), and I think more will follow. Also, there are so many
privacy legislations now and more are coming, not only in the EU but also in
other parts of the world.

It's a real problem and it will get more prevalent the more data we collect. I
think we're only at the beginning of the data-driven economy and there's still
so much potential for harnessing data to improve things, but we have to ensure
the security of the data and the privacy of the persons that it belongs to.

------
me551ah
It is really hard to beat apple and Google due to their app stores. Windows
phone wasn't bad but it lost the market badly because of lack of apps. Any new
phone OS is going to lack the apps which people are used to and won't sell.
Devs won't make apps for a platform until it has users. It's a classic chicken
and egg problem which is very hard to solve.

~~~
deltron3030
It's dumb to target the same market, everybody. This ship has sailed. It
doesn't mean that there isn't subset of a market for privacy/security
enthusiasts (purism), or for productivity people and digital minimalists who
could do with one app like Notion and maybe email.

~~~
three_seagrass
Even those niche markets are still too small to hit the economies of scale
necessary for per unit costs to be remotely affordable. These variable costs
are magnitudes higher than just launching some privacy-first service like
protonmail.

------
teekert
They could have mentioned
[https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/](https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/)

------
josefresco
Link to the Librem 5 product page:
[https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/](https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/)

~~~
Siecje
Can the Librem 5 phone make calls yet?

~~~
blendergeek
Yes. It has been able to for quite some time.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/121251196907...](https://mobile.twitter.com/thelinuxgamer/status/1212511969070239744)

------
supernova87a
It's hard to imagine that even a smartphone platform dedicated to privacy will
be able to out perform the resources of Google, Apple who have entire groups
working on solely that problem.

Unless the point is to lock down the phone so strictly that no info can leak
or be taken off the phone. That's simple. But that would make a phone that's
practically useless for everyday personal use except if you're a paranoid spy.

I guess the need to have privacy and security while offering users some level
of reasonable usability through 3rd party apps is why Google and Apple are
succeeding in the face of such privacy focused startups.

~~~
pjc50
Google will at best deliver you privacy against everyone but Google.

~~~
rorykoehler
Which is not at all considering their business model is to prostitute your
data to the highest bidder.

------
WhyNotHugo
Honestly, the killers are Google Photos and Google Maps.

Google Photos lets me back up photos from my phone AND copy them to my PC. I
haven't found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop
(unless you use macOS). Since they already handle my photos, I might as well
use it for backups.

And Google Maps is pretty uncontested when it comes to moving around. Apple
Maps doesn't even have a "biking" option (in a country where > 90% of the
population bike everywhere, that's a killer).

~~~
mceachen
> I haven't found any other way to copy photos from an iPhone into a laptop

Both SyncThing and Resilio Sync work well for this, but require your
"server"/laptop to be on in order to sync.

You can also just plug in the device, and it should mount as USB storage on
both Windows and Linux.

(I have no financial interest in either pieces of software, other than
regularly needing to recommend them to my PhotoStructure users).

~~~
FalconSensei
So, you have to keep a computer on to sync files. And then, what about
automatically tagging people, suggesting fixes (rotation, lights), searching
by location name, sharing albums, etc?

~~~
mceachen
That's what I want PhotoStructure to do.

It already has best-of-class deduping, "variant" clustering support, and
metadata inference, as well as a UI that makes browsing very large libraries
feel serendipitous. I release roughly every month, and it's free (in exchange
for feedback) during the closed beta. Here's what's coming soon:
[https://photostructure.com/about/release-
notes/](https://photostructure.com/about/release-notes/)

------
JohnFen
> Rankin warned that tech giants were now "redefining the word "privacy" in
> their own marketing." While they may claim to protect it, what they really
> want is to protect privacy from their competitors, he added. "They add
> security measures to their software and services so only they can capture,
> view and sell all of your data and others can't."

I've been making this case for over a year now, and I'm very pleased to see
someone else making it too. It's an incredibly important point that not enough
people are bringing up.

~~~
open-source-ux
The tech giants redefined the word "privacy" years ago. How did they get away
with it? Quite simply because the tech community let them get away with it.

When it comes to privacy, the tech community is full of contradictions and
double-standards. Too many people in the field view privacy solely through the
lens of security i.e. if your data is securely held and never leaked that is
good enough - no matter how much data is captured. This suits the tech giants
very well. In fact, it appears to be how many of these tech giants view
privacy themselves.

Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by
itself does not equal privacy. Questions about how much data is held about
users, or how relentless is the level of tracking are rarely raised. (Until
some of that user data gets leaked and we get a glimpse of the sheer volume of
data held.)

Another example: the language around tracking users. It's purposefully worded
to sound benign or neutral: telemetry, analytics, web beacons, logging. We
don't challenge the use of this language - we gladly use it ourselves.

~~~
JohnFen
I agree (obviously, I suppose).

> Of course, you can't have privacy without security. But security simply by
> itself does not equal privacy.

Privacy is not the same as security, and I agree that you can't have privacy
without security. I also think that you can't have security without privacy.

This is part of why the argument that some companies make about how securely
they're holding our data is a nonstarter for me. That form of security only
comes into play after the first form of security: preventing the unauthorized
data collection. If the companies don't have my data, then their security
practices around how they protect my data don't matter.

------
megaraid999
I like a lot the LibreM but I don't consider it a viable option for a use in
the real world. On the other hand, the /e/ smartphone is doing a great world
to keep me out of the Google ecosystem, and I'm very impressed how far they go
on this aspect, even removing call to Google server during connectivity
checks, replacing Google NTP servers by NTP pool servers. I don't know any
other Android custom ROM doing this.

~~~
Iolaum
Maybe because the actual privacy benefit for this change is negligible? (Or so
I 've been told).

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
If they can come up with a "Play Store" that developers can drop in ungoogled
versions of their official apps, that would be killer.

~~~
uncletammy
I think you're looking for this: [https://f-droid.org/](https://f-droid.org/)

~~~
ropiwqefjnpoa
The store I'm suggesting would contain commercial, non FOSS apps as well.
There are some apps I use that will probably never be open source and there's
no website version either.

For wider adoption, I think this would be necessary. Otherwise these phones
will always remain a niche product.

~~~
zozbot234
FlatHub has commercial, proprietary apps in Flatpak sandbox format. It's
generally targeted at "desktop" users, but the Flatpak sandbox ought to work
just as easily on mobile devices based on mainline Linux, including the Purism
phone.

------
xfitm3
As someone who spent some time in the mobile industry the telecom operators
are the greatest barrier to overcome in these situations. They're quite
inflexible.

When I was involved in a phone project we were provided a firmware blob for
the baseband and it had DMA to the main processor. We did quite a bit of RF
fuzzing and well, the results are what you would expect.

~~~
Infernal
What I would expect is some snooping by the baseband - I’m curious, could you
expand further on your techniques or findings?

------
xthreen
These boutique type phones are cute, but they really only serve as a bell-
weather on how much consumers are interested in privacy-enabled or unGoogled
mobile devices. Between either having to wait 6 months, or pay $2k USD you're
I find it unlikely that Librem/Purism will make turn the consumer market
toward privacy/security.

~~~
rorykoehler
Is choose the privacy/security focused phone if they were as good as a mid
range android. They're not even close to that but hopefully they'll catch up
soon. Can't see Librem or Purism being the ones to do it though tbh

------
Aaronstotle
I think if someone could find a way to make an iOS compatible operating system
(e.g. Current iOS applications could be built & run on the system with little
modification), then it would be a huge hit. Not sure of the legal
implications, for de facto reverse engineering, but it would at least put out
another option.

~~~
oscargrouch
I dont think this is a good idea, because it would need a lot of cash and man-
hours to burn just to have a mediocre finished mockup at the end.

Microsoft had a better approach once, still expensive/buggy, but at least more
doable, which was adapting the various iOS kits and calling back window
primitives in the backend.

And yet, they abandoned because its also a bad move in the sense that nobody
will care about your platform if they just need to target iOS.

You will be doomed and have to chase and implement everything they do in iOS,
even if it doesnt make sense, and nobody will care about your platform.

You will also end with more bugs and application crashes, so your platform
will be seing as something inferior to Apple (emphasizing the "nobody cares
about you" effect)

By the way, Blackberry took that route by implementing Android and we can see
how nobody cares about Blackberry as an app platform, because in the end you
know they will have to follow Android.

For me the only way to get out of this trap, is to have a distinct platform,
that for some reason, people want to develop for it.

I mean, the web did this trick once, Linux is also doing this. Its doable, but
its a lot of hard work and community effort based a lot in other goals other
than cash.

Another way to do this trick, is to create a consortium, and to create some
base API, inspired by iOS, Android and the Web, and to have a lot of industry
leaders onboard.

They would need to finance the prototype or the reference implementation on
top of something like Linux.

It was tried with Tizen, but given it was more of a Samsumg project without
community to drive it forward it failed. Also, i dont think it can compete
with Android and iOS in platform quality.. so this probably was also one of
the reasons they have failed.

------
gentleman11
Exciting times to live in with multiple privacy focused smartphones in
development: we have /e/, purisms librem, and The pinephone. If just one of
them succeeds enough to get to gen 3 or 4, the whole industry will be
dramatically better

