Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [3]: Using Lineage OS - 1

So last time I wrote about the installation experience for Lineage, now it is time to have a look at early impressions of using it. Along the way I discovered some stuff about the Nexus 5X. It turns out that it was first shipped with Android and the final official release of Android for it was 8.1. Also that the last time Google sent a security update package for it was last December. So as far as Google is concerned they no longer feel a need to continue updating Android on this phone.

On the other hand the version of Lineage I was able to flash to it is 15.1 corresponding to Android 8.1 and they are currently working on a release called 16.0 which will be Android 9 so it is possible I could get a later version of Android for this phone that what Google is prepared to support, provided the developers are able to produce an Android 9 release for the "bullhead".

Although I am not using it as a full replacement for the Nexus running Google Android just yet, as I haven't yet switched back to using it as my day to day phone, initial impressions of Lineage are pretty good. It doesn't come with many apps of its own, but one can choose to install one's own from various sources. Of course you have to be sure the sources are reputable and are not going to contain spyware or malware or whatever. I was able to access a site called apkmirror to get first of all the Youversion Bible app and install that. I then didn't install any more apps for a while.

I am currently planning to install the F-Droid app to be able to access their app store (and possibly the Amazon app store as well, although I will be carefully considering that option since I want to steer clear of apps from big multinationals that could do unwanted things on the phone). For further security certain things that are built into Lineage will be activated and the app store apps will be disabled when they are not actually being used. In addition the phone will not be rooted as this is not really necessary as I only plan to use regular apps on it, not ones that need root permissions. All of these measures mean hopefully no security issues with apps from outside the Play Store. However there are many apps that use Google Play Services, and those simply will not run on Lineage.

At the same time I deliberately chose not to have social media apps on my phone and only one email account that is being checked regularly because I simply decided I don't need to have access to social media when away from home. This means apart from the phone and text messaging, the main thing the phone would be used for when not actually at home is reading my Bible or possibly listening to music (it depends on how well the battery lasts). Any time I was away from home for any period of time I can take my tablet with me and use all these apps on it but for regular day to day stuff I won't need any social media apps on my phone. Also I intend to use an Open Street Maps app instead of Google Maps.

So yes it is possible if one is willing to make a few sacrifices about what apps are really essential, to escape the "rat race" of having your phone taken over by gigantic multi national corporations to make enormous profits and just get back to the basics of the convenience of having a phone you can carry with you and which can perform a small number of additional functions.

One of the bonuses so far which is partly because Lineage gives control of the ability to run an app in the background is very much increased battery life. Although I haven't used my phone much in the last couple of days, it is currently 37 hours since the last charge and the battery capacity is 73% which is absolutely unheard of for this phone. If I used it I could expect it to go down a bit faster, but I am still going to get heaps more use out of the battery than I have before. So this phone will probably last a lot longer. Then I suppose I will have to work out what I can replace it with.

I am also planning to install the Android Studio app developer software and maybe some other F/OSS app developers to see what I can do with them, and whether I can develop an app to replace the Auto DND app that I use. But ultimately the replacement for a lot of apps is to use a web browser instead.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [2]: Installing Lineage OS

So after further investigation I decided Lineage OS would be the most straightforward means of getting my Nexus 5X off Google. This is quite a lengthy process that involves replacing the installed Google bloatware on the phone with the LineageOS installation images.

LineageOS provides guides, which are pretty good except that like me, you can get some steps wrong the first time. And of course the instructions differ depending on your version of Android.

The most important points found are as follows:

• When you install adb you will need to install the udev rules on Debian. Using the instructions for Ubuntu are what worked for me. But of course because Buster won't let us run all the commands in a bash shell, as usual we have to go out to a full screen terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1) to do some of it, and then come back into KDE (Ctrl-Alt-F7) to finish things off.
• When you go into recovery mode, the Lineage instructions have missed out a step or two. The steps you need to follow to boot into recovery mode are
• Power off the Nexus
• Hold down Volume Down and Power to boot into recovery mode
• According to Lineage the next screen gives you "Recovery mode". This is not so. You actually have to press Volume Down button to get to Recovery Mode. By default it just comes up with "Start".
• Then you see a Android icon tipped on its side with a exclamation point hovering over it. 
• At that point you have to hold Power and then press and release Volume Up to get into recovery mode.
• The recovery environment install is tricky because if you don't reboot properly, it seems that Google will conveniently replace the TWRP recovery environment with its own (Android Recovery). How you know this has happened is if recovery comes up to TWRP it is a graphical touchscreen environment. But Android Recovery is all text based and using the volume up/down keys to select options and the listed options do not match the ones for TWRP at all.
• So you have to make sure you reboot properly to use TWRP to run the commands you need because Android Recovery will not let you flash anything into the system. So you can't use it to install.
• So after you have flashed TWRP into the system then reboot properly.
• On the recovery options DON'T CHOOSE REBOOT. Choose POWER OFF
• Once the Nexus is off then turn it on by pressing Volume Down and Power together.
• This will get you into TWRP with its graphical touchscreen and then you can get on with flashing Lineage and any other packages onto the phone.

I have chosen to flash only Lineage and the rooting package. I am no way absolutely never verboten from my cold dead hands etc NOT INSTALLING THE GOOGLE APPS PACKAGE. This means unfortunately not being able to use any app from the Play Store and anything that will rely on Google Play Services if from another source. However that is why I have other devices running regular Android but these devices are not a phone or do not have a cellular services SIM card installed or can be turned off when I am not using them thus preserving my privacy. 

After I had done the flashing I told TWRP to reboot the system. The most annoying thing at that stage was TWRP telling me that I had no OS installed and was I sure I wanted to reboot.  After rebooting you are going to see "Google" and then instead of the animated boot icon for regular Android you will see the Lineage one instead. Then there is a slightly scary moment when the whole screen is black and the system doesn't respond to pressing any buttons. Fortunately after a few more seconds your computer will pop up and tell you it recognises the Nexus (assuming the USB cable is still plugged in) and at that point checking the Nexus shows us that LineageOS boot screen has come up.

The setup steps are practically the same as for regular Android except you don't get asked to do any of the Google apps stuff but I was quite pleased to see it work with the fingerprint reader and allow me to enrol fingerprints just the same as before. After this it went into the home screen of Lineage and at that point was ready to go. I'll leave it there for this post and I am not going to do any more stuff on it right now, that will be covered in my next post after I have had plenty of time to play with Lineage and see what I can do with it. I will be using it initially with my tablet share SIM, which can make phone calls and send and receive texts but can't receive phone calls, until such a time as I might be ready to switch over to it becoming my regular phone again.

Escaping Google's walled garden on handhelds [1]: Intro

I've owned smartphones since 2012 when I was given one as part of a new employment role. It (HTC) was running Windows Phone 7. It was followed by a couple of Nokias running Windows Phone 8 (the later one since updated to 10) and then a low-end Motorola Moto E running Android 4. The next thing was a Samsung Galaxy J2 running Android 5 and a Galaxy Tab A 8" tablet also running 'Droid. My latest phone is a Nexus 5X which is currently on Android 8.

What has become particularly noticeable in handheld operating systems apart from Apple's (in a class of its own) in recent years is the extent to which vendors have sought to take ownership of the user's device and data. MS first did this with Windows 10 and went to extraordinary and obnoxious efforts to push users of older versions into upgrading to 10. 

Google has been sneaking upgrades into Android over the past few years, particularly in the "Google" app which in Android 5.1 has gone from 13 MB to 209 MB in size without any explanation or choice on the user's part as to the justification for installing this massive bloatware. But what we do know about Google's recent efforts is that voice recognition and the obnoxious Google assistant are now enabled by default with every new Android phone or upgrade and are very hard to disable. The assistant in particular is listening to everything that the microphone can pick up and transmitting it back to Google. In addition, it is becoming known that in Android 8, Google screen scrapes data from every app installed in the system, and that it tracks every location that the device travels to.

So we have entered an era where more than ever, operating system vendors are forcing updates onto systems to increase their ability to grab every possible piece of information they can collect on the device owners and transmit it back to the mothership so that it can be used to make increasingly bigger profits. And we are supposed to trust these gigantic multinational corporations that they have a benign intent and really are going to use our data to give us better products and services? LOL! 

So in much the same way as I have been through a journey of giving Windows the boot and installing open source software on my PCs, I am going to be doing the same sort of process with my handhelds. First of all, I will be switching my phone back to the Galaxy J2 with only a limited set of apps, and then the Nexus will be reinstalled with something else. At the moment, Lineage looks good, but I need to delve deeper into its architecture before making a final decision. The Galaxy Tab A will be left as is. If Lineage is what I want then it should be capable of becoming my day to day thing on the Nexus. Of course, it won't be running any of the Google apps or the Google Play Services. 

More to come...

Why I hate the Google Nexus 5X

Well when I got this thing I thought it was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, a Google Nexus phone, with stock standard Android, a lot of available updates from Google, great spec and performance etc. Great hardware, well made quality product. Such a shame about the software though.

Unfortunately over time I have grown to hate the Nexus 5X because of some glaring design bugs in the version of Android shipped with it that Google have failed to remedy. In a respect that is what you get dealing with the likes of Google, Apple. Microsoft and the other majors like Facebook these days. These companies are so big and powerful they can just trample all over their customers by ignoring complaints and failing to fix issues. Because of the experience I will never pay more than $400 for a phone ever again. As it happens this one was just over $400 but Google is screwing their customers big time by charging Iphone-like prices for it's replacement the Pixel. Well I could choose from the Nokia or Moto models this time, probably go for Moto because our family debacle over the reissued 3310 has convinced me Nokia is not much or any better than some of these other outfits. 

So here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X and why (apart from the huge price) I do not believe anyone should buy a Pixel as I doubt Android will be any better on it, it's not going to be a different interface than on the Nexus. About the only good thing about the Nexus is getting the regular Android updates. But one day Google will stop sending them, or else the battery will go down, and then it's time to throw the thing away and buy a new one. And my guess is that will happen by the end of this year.

Here are my pet hates about the Nexus 5X:

1. The Do Not Disturb feature is extremely poorly designed as you have to click a Done button to save changes to the settings. If you forget to do this then the default is the timer doesn't click in to turn the phone back on after a certain time. So, because of a poorly designed user interface that is different from every other part of the phone (and from other Google products like Chrome) I have on many occasions accidentally left the phone on silent for days at a time without realising it.
2. there is no way (unlike my old Nokia dumbphones) that you can put in a catch all timer to turn off DND after a certain time frame, just in case you forget. I have a timer that puts on DND automatically at night so that only phone calls and alarms work. But if DND is already one, this doesn't turn it off at the end of the timer period, even though it would normally if the DND function was previously off.
3. On one occasion when the phone was set to total silence, an alarm went off on the clock and the phone sounded the alarm even though it was set to total silence.
4. Sometimes even when you use the fingerprint sensor the phone makes you put the pin number in.
5. If you restart the phone, when it comes back up, it will not start Android until you enter the Pin number. This is totally unlike every other phone I have ever had, where the phone comes back up to the lock screen. Again I have been caught out many times by this, not realising that Android had not started and therefore no calls or messages could be received.
6. There is no SD card slot, so you are stuck with the 32 GB of internal memory. I would rather use that for apps and have an SD card for music and pictures so I don't have to worry about using all the internal memory.
7. Even with the sophistication of Android there can be some app that for some reason is hogging all the CPU usage to 100% even when the thing is allegedly on standby in your pocket, and with it sucking your battery dry in a matter of hours, this has caused the phone to go dead without warning on occasions.
8. It uses a USB-C cable which means I had to buy extra cables and can't rely on being able to connect a regular charger or computer cable to it.
9. The battery drains very quickly if you are taking a lot of photos for example, there have been times I was using the camera to take photos of a whole lot of different things and the battery ran down really quickly so I had to switch to a separate camera.
10. There are next to no accessories available for it. Although admittedly that is true of nearly any phone that isn't an Iphone or a Galaxy S, and buying it from someone other than Vodafone doesn't help.
11. Contacts is a disaster, it keeps losing contacts especially new ones. I now expect to be doing a lot of contact editing in Gmail as I have many duplicates and old contacts as well as attempting to fix up this contact loss issue. It may be the contact sync on Thunderbird is causing some issues but it never created any problems before.

I have to admit that with the above and various glaring standout problems in that list that have made the phone unavailable for days at a time that I haven't noticed, because at home I can use PCs to do most of the stuff I would use the phone for apart from calls or texts, it has been a less than happy experience with this phone and I would think twice about buying another one again for sure.

UPDATE: Issues 1 and 2 were overcome by installing an app (Auto Do Not Disturb) which makes the whole experience much smoother and easier.  The contacts issue has not been completely resolved but I did discover that there was an all contacts view which makes the whole experience easier, although there doesn't seem to be any way to make it the default. But at the moment I am coping with using the phone every day as I expect it to have some more years of life left in it yet.

Android updates not as good as Windows Phone

If you buy an Android phone, the key issue is getting software updates from the manufacturer. With Windows in particular, which is the nearest equivalent (one OS on many different hardware devices), MS has a very good system that provides updates to their core operating system for many years after it is first released. This is possible because MS has fairly tight control over the Windows OS, and because the nature of the OS makes it easy to customise for different hardware.

Android is a very different beast, and that creates problems for end users. Typically the stock Android is customised by a hardware manufacturer for their product, and then further customised by the carrier who sells it to the customer. There is a big shoving match as to which of the three is responsible for updates to the software. But the vast bulk of Android devices out there are not able to receive updates for security issues (and Android has had its fair share of exploits). This is because Google can't make an update for the customised Android that the manufacturer has produced for their platform and that in part is due to the nature of Android (and Linux) in respect of the adaption to different hardware platforms. By and large, manufacturers are passing the buck on supporting non-current models of their phones and it is rare to see a version upgrade (compared to the Apple scenario where new iOS versions come out regularly) let alone a guarantee of security fixes for any period of time.

It is for this reason (and a few others) that I have reluctantly concluded that to be sure of getting a phone that will receive a good level of support from the manufacturer for security and version updates, that I will have to spend a little more and buy a Google Nexus. Google makes these phones (and the newer Pixel series) to compete head on with Apple. But the lower end models are still affordable compared with the iPhone (I have many friends who have iPhones and I can't quite bring myself to ask them how they were able to justify the huge expense, since at the time of writing the cheapest new model is $749) - Noel Leeming has an unlocked Nexus 5X for $399. This is really as high as I could justify for a phone, and a long way up from the $149 you could pay for a locked Samsung Galaxy J2 at current pricing (I paid more than that for mine) - $149 is also what I paid for my Lumia 635 and its predecessor. 

The Nexus has 32 GB of onboard memory, but there is no microSD card slot, and it also has a USB-C socket, which means different charge cables. There is also a fingerprint sensor for the unlock, and you get a stock Android version in it, so you aren't missing out on features the OEM has chosen not to implement (as I found with Samsung's implementation of Do Not Disturb on my Galaxy). It comes with Android 6 but Google has guaranteed availability of Android 7. So we shall see.