Google and Samsung-free

After a couple of hours of spinning my wheels going nowhere this morning, my Samsung A5 2017 android phone is now free of all Google and Samsung apps.

After some consideration of both privacy concerns particularly relating to google described here and more general security concerns described here I looked into replacing the Google-provided operating system on my Samsung phone. One of the side benefits is to rid myself of all of the annoying and bloated Samsung apps that can’t be deleted by an everyday user.

I researched the few options available for my phone and landed on LineageOS. Another option I liked the look of was from the /e/ foundation and I might try it out one day.

The process to swap the operating system on my phone wasn’t difficult, but it did require a number of steps to be followed and took close to a day when all was said and done.

These basic steps are to:

• Backup all of the required data on your phone. For me this included contacts, call logs, SMS and MMS messages (apparently easier said than done), photos, apps (not really needed unless there are some apps you use that are no longer available), any documents and downloads that I wanted to keep, and audio recordings as well as music files/folders. A variety of means are necessary to save these files - from the SMS Backup and Restore app (which makes a backup of SMS, MMS and call logs) to App Backup and Restore (funnily enough, for apps). Contacts can be exported to a vcf file and downloaded. Files such as documents, photos, downloads, music files and video recordings can be downloaded through any file manager type app. These steps aren’t tricky, but you do need to be thorough and organised otherwise things can disappear into the ether.
• Download onto a computer software that can load files onto a mobile device. I opted for Odin on my Windows machine, and Heimdall and adb on my Linux machine.
• I also needed to download and install a Samsung USB driver on my Windows machine.
• Download onto the same computer some recovery software such as TWRP or Lineage. These are image files (.img) that can be run on reboot and allows the user to install and run an alternative operating system.
• Download onto the same computer a copy of the new operating system.
• Load the recovery image onto the phone using whatever method is chosen. When the phone is rebooted it should¹ access the recovery image and allow you to sideload the new operating system from the same computer.
• Boot into the recovery image, sideload the new operating system, reboot and voilà!

In my case I tried to install both the TWRP and Lineage images onto my phone using the Heimdall utility on a Linux machine. This may or may not have been successful because I wasn’t able to reboot my phone using this new recovery image because my phone would reinstall the standard (Samsung) recovery tool. After around 6 or 7 attempts I finally ditched this approach and headed for my Win 10 machine and installed the recovery image through Odin. The difference between Odin and Heimdall seems to be that Odin forces a reboot of the phone meaning it boots into the recovery (TWRP) system rather than the default (Samsung) image.

Once TWRP was successfully running on the phone, I switched back to my Linux machine and installed the LineageOS through the adb utility. This could have been achieved from my Win 10 machine but I’d already set up adb on the Linux machine.

For posterity the two main web page references I used were the first 10 steps from this site where I replaced step 11 with the TWRP image, and then LineageOS Wiki

The final steps will be to install some apps (through F-Droid because the Play Store app is no longer on my phone), upload my contacts and sort out the layout I want. Interestingly, F-Droid has an app called Aurora Store which, when installed, allows the user to download and install apps from the Google Play Store without needing to register an account with Google.

There is more to say on sourcing apps - where they can be found, how they can be installed, etc, but that can wait for another day.

My new setup is by no means perfect. The stock camera app had a bug where the image seen on the phone wasn’t exactly the same as the images captured (around 10% of the left hand side of the image was not captured in the photo). I have since installed a new camera app called Open Camera. I can’t see a way of sharing web pages or photos by email, but apart from that the phone makes and receives calls and texts and is now free of all Google tracking and Samsung bloat.