➡ AOSP phones offer more privacy than regular phones as they don’t come with Google Play Store or Google Services, which track user activity. Instead, they use alternative app stores like Aurora Store and Eftroid, which offer apps without spyware. However, some apps may not work without Google services, so AOSP phones use a spoofer app called MicroG to mimic these services without compromising privacy. While most apps work on AOSP phones, users should be cautious as some can still leak data or invade privacy.

Many of you have seen my viral video on the dangers of the iPhone 16 or you may have watched my older videos criticizing Google Android phones and all the surveillance built into it and you may have felt discomfort with my revelations and are curious about what the alternatives are. I didn’t openly state what phone you should use instead in those popular videos but they were discussed in separate older videos. Those alternatives described in older videos haven’t changed. For example one of those videos was about the Google phones which was from five years ago.

But those options have grown up as some things have changed. In this video I’ll talk about alternative phone options which I will just generally call open source phones. I’m sure the average person is wondering what the user interface is like on these phones or what apps work and don’t work or if there are significant usability differences that would prevent either grandma or your teen from using them. Surprisingly today there isn’t much of a sacrifice to convert to a safer phone from your spying iPhone or Samsung or Google Android Pixel. Basically the sacrifice for privacy is pretty small now.

You don’t have to be a caveman. The differences today are less than you might think. For example many Google apps will actually work. But what you will feel when you transition to an open source phone is a sense of relief. Like this big heavy burden on your chest will disappear because you will no longer feel that someone is watching you. Frankly it is a feeling of freedom that I relish. It is great to have my privacy back again. If you want to learn to see if this can fit you stay right there. You can watch my video on the iPhone 16 and there are several videos that show that these apply to Google Android phones as well.

These new production phones are full on spy phones and no these are not conspiracy theories but are factual information on what phones do. iPhones and Google androids the production phones which basically make up 99% of the smartphone market are extreme surveillance devices. As I’m making this video the anti-ice riots are happening in Los Angeles and though some people think they’re smart by covering their faces with mass they’re not smart enough to understand that their phones have precise locations. Looters even stupidly stole phones from the Apple store further confirming their location. These are recorded and can be retrieved through geofencing.

So you should not be surprised that law enforcement can find anyone they want when the political will is there. By the way location tracking cannot be turned off and just to remind you all that this same technology was used to arrest the January 6 writers as well. These are known facts already in front of your face but most of you will ignore it. While this data to find criminals is certainly acceptable to most of us the fact is that the data collected is from all phone users. So if your thoughts deviate from the government and power you should worry.

Production phones also have a fixed and unique hardware identity and this is matched to your Apple ID or your Google ID. So the identity of each individual user is easily determined. Even more distressing is the fact that everything you do on your phone is recorded and tracked. Every access on the internet every app used and all this is tied to the Google ID. This same device is used to identify you even when you do something outside of your phone like using a computer. The device becomes a cross device tracker. When you use Siri and search on it all that is recorded and attached to your online identity.

This is the big picture I want you to understand. This is why you have to dump these if you want big brother to stop watching you. If you’re not committing a crime why shouldn’t you be left alone? Open source phones. The good news is that there are alternatives and the safe alternatives are to use phones running open source operating systems. There are two major options here. Phones using Android open source project AOSP and phones using Linux. As of today the only viable option for new phones is really to use Android open source project AOSP based phones.

But very soon I will make an announcement and videos announcing our own involvement in making native Linux run on a modern phone. So this is coming up soon hopefully in a month or two. So Linux options will be ready soon. Android open source project is of course just standard Android. It is the precursor to the final Android version on production phones. And just to keep it short from here on I will call these types of phones AOSP based phones. So whatever you’re expecting as behavior on an Android phone is mostly what you will see on an AOSP based phone.

It is actually the same user interface. Let me just demonstrate that on a running EODay OS. You have the same gestures buttons and behaviors already familiar to most people. Over the years the community has given this type of phone a name. We have called these the Google phones. The reason these are called the Google phones is because by design none of the spyware modules from Google are embedded in them. I discuss this in other videos but you cannot take a production Samsung for example and remove Google or even Samsung apps. It’s impossible.

Just like you can’t take an iPhone and remove Apple. Don’t even think of deleting Google apps on your Samsung for example and expect it to stop location tracking. Those spyware behaviors are built into system apps that are hidden from you. The only option technically is to install a completely new operating system that never had Google modules in there to begin with. I’m not going to explain this in detail as that is not the purpose of this video but watch my many videos on the Google phones to understand this. Don’t be afraid of the new terms I use here.

There are several AOSP based operating systems or the googled phones. AOSP as I said is open source so there is no magic involved in determining if there’s spyware since programmers can check the code on source.android.com. I’m not expecting you to be a programmer to have to check that out but I’m saying that programmers like myself can see if someone is lying about what a phone can do. This is the main advantage of open source. No lying, no secrets. It is all exposed thus spyware cannot be hidden. From the original AOSP open source several communities have built customized projects called forks and over the years some have disappeared and some remain well used.

Currently the well-known open source options available to you are LineageOS, EODAOS, CalixOS, GrapheneOS, LunarOS and EOS. Of all of these the most popular is likely LineageOS and this is because it supports the most devices. EODAOS is actually for from LineageOS so it means it supports many devices as well. CalixOS and GrapheneOS are primarily focused on Google Pixel phones and are very popular in that category. LunarOS is limited to Brax phones currently. EOS is limited to certain models mostly special phones you get from marina and they mostly have a European presence. Just some details you will need to understand.

Notice that there are no options for most Samsung phones and definitely there is no alternative for iPhones or iPads so not all phone models can be converted. There are some other phone models being sold today that I didn’t mention that are also based on AOSP but the fact that they are not open source means that they do not fit in this discussion. While they may not have Google tracking we cannot be certain if some other substitute tracking has been inserted since it cannot be verified without being open source. All the ones I mentioned here publish their source code publicly so we can check.

You can choose any of the options I’ve stated here and they will all do the job for privacy so that’s your choice. Today I will actually talk about a real phone and one of the open source OSs I mentioned. For this demonstration I will use EODAOS which is one of the companies participating in the community project called the Brax 3 phone which full disclosure is one of our projects and if you choose to use another OS the behavior will be similar so use what you are happy with and the demonstration should be the same results for all of them since they’re all based on AOSP.

The invisible phone. One of the first things you will notice with an AOSP based phone is that since the phone is not connected to Google there’s actually never a login on the phone to a third party. This is very different from a regular phone or android and this is the first indication of privacy and really invisibility and without that login a big chunk of the identifier that is used to track you disappears. So when using your phone for the first time the only thing you really have to do is put in your password pin fingerprint or pattern and you are never actually required to put your name on the phone.

This is the first guarantee of phone invisibility to big tech. This is also the clue that your internet and app actions are not directly tied to your identity. App stores. The basic difference between a normal production phone and an AOSP based phone is that there is no Google Play Store. In fact by default there will be nothing installed from Google. This is important to understand. Google Play and Google Services make up the surveillance modules that include app telemetry, location tracking and identity tracking. These modules are loaded as system apps so they are installed by contract by the main makers of production phones like Samsung and of course Google pixels.

On an AOSP phone the OS maker will package a safer alternative store for you to use since Google Play will not work. Here on my EOD OS the options offered are Aurora Store and Eftroid. It is already set up for you so there is nothing more you need to do. Aurora Store is what I call a Google Play Store proxy. It is made to access the Google Play Store with an anonymous identity. This means that all apps found on Google Play will be found on Aurora Store since it comes from the same exact source.

The problem is that since Aurora Store creates a fake identity to access the apps from Google it is frequently blocked by Google so sometimes the Aurora Store stops working. The alternative when this happens is to go to the website apkpure.com. This website can also be run as an app so that’s more convenient. It’s a good backup whenever Aurora Store has issues. The only problem with apkpure.com is that it is very spammy so it will trick you to install some other app they promote. However, apkpure.com is sanctioned by Google so it is always accessible.

In this demo I have installed apkpure.com manually so I have it in reserve. It is not automatically installed. There is another type of app store that is typically installed on AOSP phones and you can install it yourself if it is not there and that is Eftroid. The source of the app is eftroid.org. The Aurora Store itself comes from the Eftroid Store. Some of the apps that come standard on EOD OS like Messages, SMS app, the Alternative Contacts app, or the Magic Earth alternative to Google Maps come from the Eftroid Store. Eftroid Store is a source of open source apps.

There are very specific rules to being listed in the Eftroid Store so you can have a guarantee that such apps will not have any spyware. This source is not tied to Google in any way and the responsibility for screening apps is solely in the hands of the Eftroid maintainers. You will not find the same versions of apps from Eftroid on the Google Play Store so it adds a unique set of apps and guaranteed to be privacy safe. Google services spoofer MicroG. If you’re trying to run popular apps you find on the Aurora Store which takes from Google Play, the only way most apps will work is if they think they’re running under a production Google Android.

This requirement is actually built into the developer tools provided to those building Android apps by Google but on an AOSP phone the specific Google module called Google services is not installed so many apps will fail. Google services for example provides a very common system feature called notifications. If this capability is not detected the app will fail. Another example of a Google service is location. This by the way is responsible for the 24-7 location tracking. The way AOSP OS makers overcome this is by installing a Google service spoofer app and most use the app called MicroG which is downloadable on MicroG.org and this is standard on EOD OS.

Again this is pre-installed on most OSes so you don’t have to worry about this. What this MicroG does if you look at the source code is provide the availability of system calls to Google functions but MicroG becomes the substitute system app for Google services. MicroG is able to offer alternatives to two of the needed Google services and that is location tracking and notification. However the location service offered through MicroG does not forward your location to Google and uses a safer location provider and the notification identity is incognito. Because MicroG has no access to the original Google code other services that actually need Google are given a spoofed response.

This is what I call a stub code because the Google call actually does nothing but popular apps do not know it did nothing so they go about their merry way in most cases. Because of MicroG you will find that the vast majority of apps will actually work normally unless there are specific Google API calls that are not supported by MicroG. Examples of app calls that cannot be supported are any functions that connect to Google Pay or has any payment connection to Google Play like app purchases or in-app purchases. What apps work and what won’t? In general you will find that likely 95% of apps will work and this means that most popular apps that you are used to using on iPhones, Samsungs and Pixels will work just as well.

However just because it works does not mean you should install it and I will discuss that next. What I want you to understand is though there is not a restriction for running many apps that some apps will contribute to a loss of privacy. It is not as bad as using an iPhone and production Google Android but some of these apps will leak data like your locations and sell it to third parties. Some are privacy invasive by nature and merely joining these platforms already create a danger and you can limit the danger of apps by restricting their permissions.

As I explained most apps require services from Google itself and since we don’t really have an app from Google embedded on the phone then communications with Google are terminated. The apps that need a direct Google connection are paid apps or apps that do payments or in-app purchases since there is no connection possible to the national side of Google then these apps will not run. Next another Google specific feature is called Google Safety Net. Typically financial institutions make use of this to ensure that apps are not spoofed. However I found that most banks no longer rely on extreme features of Google Safety Net so this is less of an issue.

Some basic safety net features are supported by MicroG. So these two categories of features are not completely spoofed. The more eager an app is to do extreme surveillance the more likely they need actual Google services and that will not work. This is also a clue about their danger. Another category of apps that didn’t work before are apps from Google itself. In the past this was an all or nothing deal. If Google services are not found the Google apps stop working. It appears that Google eased some of these requirements so you’d actually be surprised to find that many Google-owned apps work on Android 15.

Safe apps to install. As a general rule all apps from fDroid are safe to install so if that is the source then you are fine. Examples of apps in this category are magic earth aurora store, falsify contacts, falsify messages, and thunderbird. These are already typically pre-installed on EOD OS so you don’t have to worry about them. Surprisingly a large number of apps from the aurora store are safe to install. I will just show you what’s on this phone. Here I have Sypnetic, Signal, Braxme, Tesla, Starlink, Amazon Store, Kindle, Brave, DuckDuckGo. For media entertainment I have Netflix, Prime Video, Spotify.

For financial apps I’ve installed Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi, American Express, and Zelle. As you can see most work. Apps that add risk. Just to prove how flexible an AOSP phone is I have Teams, Zoom, X, Outlook, Telegram. For social media I have TikTok and Snapchat. And in the high-risk category there are the meta platforms WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. I do not recommend ever loading these apps into a phone that’s meant to be private, but the risk is within the meta platform only. But if the choice is to install these apps versus using an iPhone, then some privacy is better than zero.

However I will emphasize to my active followers that just because you can install them
[tr:trw].

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.