Tuesday, 4 December 2018

Ubuntu Touch may step in where Firefox OS finished....maybe?

We certainly have a strong case for an alternative to Android because we should get a choice to be free of Google's massive data collection infrastructure that is tracking everything we do and everywhere we go with our phones. Revelations for example that Android 8 screen scrapes every app in the system are mind boggling. I have by choice switched my PCs to Firefox Aurora as the main browser and regular Firefox as a secondary, dropping Chrome for nearly everything, but I still use a lot of Google accounts on my computers. On the Android platform the scope is there for a much more universal collection of data by Google even as the European Union looks at more stringent penalties and regulations to force Google to cut back the scope of its data mining.

Ubuntu Touch is these days more of a community effort compared to when it was officially funded by Canonical. Firefox OS looked good for a while and it's a shame it was dropped. UT does look like it is gaining ground but of course is limited by the degree to which it can be adapted to a very large number of different hardware specifications. So far not many pieces of hardware are supported.

Or of course one can go back to the "dumb" or feature phone I guess....