free software<\/a>. One of the many upsides of this is that the applications therein tend to work well, do the job they’re designed for with minimal fuss, and generally not get in the way. This is because doing anything else would be considered a bug, and with free software anyone can fix the bugs.<\/p>\nAndroid is very much like Windows – in order to accomplish a task, I have to select between several applications of unknown provenance, which are generally written with the intention of profiting the author rather than helping the user. Even if they’re zero-cost, they may be full of adverts, or they may want far more access to my phone’s systems than is required for the job they purportedly do. This makes installing Android apps inherently risky for my privacy, quite apart from the overarching panopticon of the Google Account tracking my every install in the first place!<\/p>\n
On the other hand, the Android platform is considerably more open than say Apple or Windows phones. So it occurs to me that there may be an alternative source of apps which are free software, or in some other way more trustworthy than those currently available. Does anybody know of such a thing? Preferably one that isn’t tied to a Google Account while I’m at it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t like Android. It’s too much like Windows.The operating system I’m most used to, Debian GNU\/Linux, is a collection of almost-exclusively free software. One of the many upsides of this is that the applications therein tend to work well, do the jo…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-free-software","category-geek","category-phone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}