I’m getting very weary of Apple’s endless issues syncing with WebDav which is required for Fruux or NextCloud. Apple just doesn’t seem to be able to collaborate politely with FOSS and is deliberately sabotaging their users. Hence time to start another investigation of Android/iOS alternatives. Unfortunately the only viable mobile OS outside of iOS is de-Google Android. It comes in two main forms – LineageOS and OmniRom (found OmniRom on the Wikipedia Linux family tree SVG, which is worth a detour all on its own).
Not too many phones supported but some of those supported have good cameras like the Redmi Note 10 and the Google Pixel 6 Pro. Just check out the ReadMe though from the Google Pixel 6 Pro. It’s probably the most user-hostile readme I’ve ever read.
First time install:
Bear with me that I simply dont care about Windooze users here just google for any specific instructions there.
Also I will skip anything regarding bootloader unlock here and assume you did this before….
Use payload dumper to extract boot.img and vendor_boot.img from that payload.bin file
There are different impls of payload dumper eg https://pypi.org/project/payload-dumper/ https://github.com/ssut/payload-dumper-go
Make sure you use the latest version of Android SDK platform tools https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools
Make sure you are familiar with basic usage of fastboot and adb commands
If you care about anything on the device – NOW its the time to create a backup somewhere save
What’s the marketing angle here for FOSS?
Apple politely screws their users, we might be rude and unhelpful but we won’t sell your data.
Hopefully someone at OmniRom will rewrite that ReadMe for a popular device to be more useful to new users. And perhaps proof-read for grammar.
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
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