Replicant - a fully free Android distribution

I guess the majority of the Steemit community already knows that the term "smartphone" is actually just an euphemism for "spying device" - at least when it comes to the default settings provided by those devices. If there is any doubt about this statement please just let me know and I'll write another post about the spying problem of ordinary smartphones.

Today, however, I would like to introduce you to a remedy for the default spying of modern day smartphones. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Replicant! The name stems from fictional bioengineered or biorobotic androids in the 1982 film Blade Runner. The Replicant project aims at providing a completely free (as in freedom) operating system for smartphones which is based on Anroid and endorsed by the Free Software Foundation.

Before going into details about the benefits of this project, let me briefly introduce some of its limitations first in order to make sure that beginners are not too disappointed if they decide to try it out.

Replicant's limitations
Due to the fact that there are not many completely free replacements for a lot of drivers, there are several things the ordinary user will probably miss if he or she decides to give Replicant a try. The dire driver situation leads to the following missing functionalities:

• Replicant does not provide Bluetooth support
• Replicant does not provide GPS support (except for one device called GTA04 )
• Replicant does not provide hardware media encoding/decoding
• Replicant does not provide 3D graphics
• Replicant does only provide wifi support under certain circumstances for certain devices if an external USB receiver is used

Replicant's benefits
I'm glad you are still reading these lines even after learning about Replicant's limitations. You might be asking yourself now Why on earth should I be using such a system with which only basic things such as phoning, texting, mobile data, the camera, audio and 2D graphics (mostly) work? Well, let me give you a short list and tell you about more about why I think using Replicant is important:

• Replicant's uncompromising approach guarantees that there are no (known) back-doors in the software they ship
• The Replicant developers actually found and fixed a back-door being present in "in most proprietary Android systems running on the affected Samsung Galaxy devices, including the ones that are shipped with the devices". The developers state "However, when Replicant is installed on the device, this back-door is not effective: Replicant does not cooperate with back-doors."
• Replicant's puristic approach actually could serve as a catalyst to spur development of completely free drivers for the (currently) unfunctional parts listed above.

Installing Replicant
I would not recommend installing Replicant on any device if you consider yourself to be a completely novice user. However, for even slightly advanced users it should not pose a very huge challenge to install Replicant on your device. Please note that Replicant is, however, only available on a handful of devices (exactly 12 to be precise). Replicant's development is actively continuing and it's highly likely that more and more devices will be added in the future. The projects provides several recommendations for supported devices and also links to tutorials describing the installation process for each of the named devices.

Is Replicant ready for daily usage?
Well, yes! I use it on my smartphone (Samsung Galaxy S3) on a daily basis and even though I sometimes do get some strange looks for not being able (and not wanting) to "WhatsApp" or connect to the local wifi network, the operating system definitely can be considered stable. I'm very excited about this project as a whole and if you are too, please let me know or directly head over to http://www.replicant.us/ to learn more.