Now I know I’ve done the-right-thing supporting Librem5.

I knew that almost all phones comes with a proprietary OS, either the prison-ware iOS or proprietary derivative of Android. Yet I wasn’t aware that the situation is SO bad. Read this.

Android is not open source – The Quantified VC – Medium

Now there are some real issues these days:

1. there are so many applications available “for Android” that non-tech people will want on their hardware,
2. most of them are sadly proprietary,
3. almost all proprietary are available only on Google Play store
4. some of those proprietary, available only throught proprietary store is almost mandatory to access some facilities such as most European home-banking

Now free-as-in-freedom Android application can be found on the net or conviently on F-Droid while access to “apps” (how I dislike this abbreviation!) can be “extracted” using Aurora Store. Sadly:

Using Aurora Store with your own Google account may cause your account to be blacklisted, use at your own risk.

So this is not a long-term solution. A more long-term way to handle this issue is microg.org “A free-as-in-freedom re-implementation of Google’s proprietary Android user space apps and libraries.”

But this is not a solution. It is a work-around. A solution would to have free-as-in-freedom software. I fear that their inofficial Google PlayStore Client, Phonesky will be blacklistable as Aurora.