For well over a year now, I've been using custom Android ROMs on my phone, stretching all the way from the rock-solid LineageOS to CalyxOS to the horrible-to-pronounce Google-free /e/OS, and while they've all had their merits I've now decided to roll back my Fairphone to stock.

First of all, I want to talk about my stance on degoogling and the current state of the Android ecosystem. Please note that I am not a developer and do not understand how everything works under the hood. These are my subjective observations as an end user.

The state of Android and the AOSP

Android is, and probably always has been, my favorite mobile operative system. Android has always been feature-packed, customizeable, and extensible while still being user friendly. Features that iOS only got a few years ago (like widgets and custom icons) or still don't have (custom launchers) are all things I've been enjoying since I got my HTC One back in 2013.

Not only that, but Android at it's core is, and has always been, free software, something I believe the mobile ecosystem has benefitted greatly from. The AOSP has been used in phones, games consoles, and even digital cameras, and has made the development of tools like Waydroid a lot easier than an equivalent "Way-iOS".

However, the AOSP feels like it's dying, and with it the idea of a free Android system. With more and more essential apps for a functioning operative system being killed off and replaced with Google-apps, and with most apps now being dependant on Google Play Services, it's hard to see the spirit of the AOSP - instead, what we're seeing is Google essentially pulling an EEE (eli5) on not just AOSP, but the entire Android ecosystem.

Luckily, there are developers trying to combat this. We currently have a thriving ecosystem of custom Android versions (or ROMs) that ship with microG instead of Google Play Services such as /e/OS, or GrapheneOS that allows you to sandbox Google Play Services so that it won't be a privacy nightmare. These "workarounds" allow you to have the same functionality as someone running the stock Android their phone ships with, and in most cases this works pretty good with only minor inconveniences and bugs - and youknow, having to use another ecosystem which will often be different apps you find and sort of glue together for a cohesive experience.

However, these developers are fighting an uphill battle, having to play catch-up with whatever Google publishes and decides to remove. MicroG will always be one feature behind Play Services when it updates, and will therefore inevitably break sometimes, and with Google slowly but surely just killing off more and more system apps (messages, dialer, and gallery to name a few) the app ecosystem just gets more and more fragmented - though if you care about free software, you might want to swap over to Fossify anyways.

It's kind of sad to see the AOSP as this, as it hardly feels like an "Open Source Project" anymore except for the core-core Android and the custom ROMs. Which is why it's with a bittersweet feeling that I've now gone back to my stock ROM.

Why I reinstalled FairphoneOS

Before I installed FairphoneOS, I was running LineageOS. Before Lineage, /e/OS. Inbetween those two I flashed Calyx for a brief moment, but didn't really like it.

On /e/OS my main issues were with their blissLauncher, their App Lounge, and with microG being buggy at times. Certain apps that relied of different security features wouldn't work, and I was also unable to install and use apps that I had previously paid for in the Play Store which kinda sucked. I swapped out App Lounge with Aurora Store and blissLauncher with oLauncher Clutter Free, two great pieces of software. However, that still didn't fix the issues I had with security features and apps that I had previously purchased.

My solution to this was moving over to LineageOS with the Gapps-addon. This fixed more of my problems, but still left me with a minor pain point which over time turned into a major one - a lot of my apps wouldn't record sound and video at the same time.

The best example of this is in Snapchat. I could record a video snap and see that Snapchat was using both my camera and my mic, but the final video would be without sound. After that, I could add my voice onto the video with their overdub-feature which works, but really isn't a good workaround. This also applied for any other app that used my camera which wasn't a camera app.

This sucked really hard for me as a musician. I often use Snapchat to send different ideas I have spur of the moment to bandmates, and I really enjoy explaining things or ranting to my friends in a video instead of writing a wall of text in a snap. I could record a video and send it in a chat (preferably on another platform because fuck snap), but that isn't as seamless. The interaction is different somehow, and it really doesn't work on snapchat stories.

Side note: ever noticed how corporatized our langauge has become? We don't send photos, we send snaps. We don't watch short videos, we watch tiktoks, reels or YouTube-videos. The most common one is probably that we don't look stuff up, we "google" it. I really dislike this trend - probably gonna write another blog post about this some other time.

Another issue I had which I thought was due to me using a custom ROM was, again, those damn security features. Faster BankID and paying for my groceries using my phone (I don't really wanna do the latter, but the first one is pretty neat) are just two things that I've found not to work on my phone. A part of me wonders if it might have something to do with my unlocked bootloader, but tbh I can't be assed to check right now. These both persisted into my FairphoneOS install.

It is a pain in the ass, especially with the privacy compromise that comes with Google, but I have slowly realized that my level of privacy using Lineage with Gapps and using FairphoneOS and removing some system level Google-stuff (ie. uninstallable apps) through adb is really close. There's the philosophical downside of now running a proprietary system, but for now I'm gonna remain pragmatic.

I do however doubt that this will be the end of my custom ROM journey. Projects like Graphene, /e/OS, and especially postmarketOS fascinate me, and I hope to be able to extend my phones life when it inevitabely looses software support. After all, I'm using a Fairphone which is hypermodular and repairable - I want to use it for as long as physically possible before getting myself a new one.

I'm also still a strong believer in a fully free ecosystem some time in the future. To a certain degree, it has already been made possible on Linux - though somewhat impractical if you decide to go all in and use the linux-libre kernel. I do really hope that it will also be that way on the phone some time in the future.

And who knows, maybe I'll consider going full pmOS and just finally getting rid of social media and all of that crap on my phone all together in the future.

I sincerely hope so.