TECH

Privacy Focused Android Rom Without Google Functionality Based On LineageOS Enters Beta

A few years back there were a lot mobile OS systems, we had Symbian, Blackberry OS and IOS among many others. Google entered the market with Android, although it wasn’t an instant hit, they gained huge momentum overtime.
Part of Android’s success was definitely due to its open source nature and the massive customisation it offered. Android somewhat bridged the gap between budget and premium smartphones at that time, because it enabled so many functions on budget devices, it was truly something back then.
With time Android became a behemoth in mobile OS, but along with that Google was also benefitted. The OS used Google Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Google Play, YouTube and a lot of other customary Google software. This meant huge AD revenues but also privacy concerns as it’s well known that Google can pull out a lot of usage data from Android devices.
That is why a developer named Gaël Duval started a project called “Google Free“, which is now in Beta. So “Google Free” is basically a custom Rom based on the Lineage OS without any of Google’s software. The Rom now supports the following phones –

Essential Phone

Essential Phone – “mata”
Fairphone
FP2 – “FP2”
Google
Nexus 4 – “mako”
Nexus 5 – “hammerhead”
HTC
One (M8) – “m8”
Huawei
Honor 5X – “kiwi”
LeEco
Le 2 – “s2”
LG
G5 (International) – “h850”
Motorola
Moto E – “condor”
Moto G – “falcon”
Moto G 2014 – “titan”
Moto G 2015 – “osprey”
OnePlus
OnePlus 2 – “oneplus2”
OnePlus 3/3T – “oneplus3”
OnePlus One – “bacon”
OnePlus X – “onyx”
Samsung
Galaxy A5 (2017) – “a5y17lte”
Galaxy s6 – “zerofltexx”
Galaxy s7 – “herolte”
Galaxy S III (International) – “i9300”
Xiaomi
Mi 5s – “capricorn”
Mi 5s Plus – “natrium”
Redmi 3S/3X – “land”

Redmi Note 4 – “mido”

You can also do the same thing by flashing a Custom Rom and not flash GApps, but this Rom will set you up with alternatives right out of the box. It uses the BlissLauncher for the theme.
For email, you will have a version of the K9 mail with OAuth support, for SMS you will have the Signal app and for chat there’s Telegram.


 Indranil Chowdhury