Before I tell you my thoughts on this phone, I want to say really briefly that the art of figuring out what phone to buy may be easier than you think but it takes some logical simplification in order to break down the decision process.
You can summarize a phone into 2 major parts, hardware and software. So, hardware means all the computer parts in the phone and it includes the phone itself. To be clear, a phone is a pocket computer or tablet or device. Hardware can have spy chips on them. They can have problems depending on who made them. The different parts in a phone may come from different companies. I would focus on the motherboard of the phone because that would be the main brain or central hub of the hardware of the phone.
Your phone may be only as good as the sum of the parts, that is the hardware. Plus, it depends on the CPU, the GPU, the RAM (memory), and the hard drive or storage devices which are plugged into the motherboard which is the green circuit board which all the other hardware pieces plugs into. Oh, if the motherboard is not green, just ask her and she will say, "But I identify as green."
So, determining the quality of a phone rests mostly on the quality of the hardware and I cannot say which hardware parts may have backdoors with remote control access which may have the ability to hack into a phone in order to control it. I can say hypothetically that the best thing you can start off with is a phone with hardware that does not have remote access which big tech, governments, and others may be able to get a hold of. But I'm not going to bore you any longer with hardware talk. Let's move on to software.
A phone consists of hardware but also software. There may be some read-only memory (ROM) programs inside phones and that may include a Basic Input Output System (BIOS) firmware or a bootloader which may assist in the Power-On Self-Test (POST). I do not know if BIOS can be remote accessed via backdoors or not.
Generally speaking, the BIOS will boot-up or load or open an operating system (OS) on your phone or computer. I would stay away from Windows, Apple, and Android related operating systems for a variety of reasons. All your software, the programs or applications (apps), rest on the OS which means your app can only be as good as your OS allows it to be. But your OS can only be as good as the hardware of the phone allows it to be. I'm just trying to summarize and simplify a wide variety of things which brings me up to the topic of this post.
Erik Finman's The Freedom Phone
I was watching Infowars shows today. After watching Alex Jones, I was watching Owen Shroyer's War Room where he interviewed Erik Finman who was promoting his Freedom Phone which runs what is called the FreedomOS. More on that OS later but I have to say freedom is good. Erik said some nice things about freedom but the phone is $500 which might be ok for some people.
The actual hardware of this phone according to some people might be a modified version of Umidigi A9 Pro.
The Umidigi A9 Pro includes a 48MP Sony AI matrix quad camera. I say that to say a Sony item is on that phone. I can't say if Sony is working for big tech or what. I've never heard anything bad about Sony trying to censor free speech or anything. It runs Android 10 for the OS. You can buy it on Amazon for $179.99. The Freedom Phone may be a repackaged version of this phone which they turn around to sell for $500. Now, that may not necessarily be a bad thing in and of itself. Might be overpriced but so are the iPhones which people still buy each time for over $1K every few years. So, I'm not going to get too much into the hardware specifications (specs) partly because Erik's website does not seem to say who made his phone. Like, phones do not grow on trees. People on Twitter said these phones were modified Umidigi A9 Pro phones and I say that is probably true. But I don't have the evidence to prove that. I can say they look oddly similar. But at the same time, many things can be very similar and yet not the same.
This Freedom Phone, according to their website, uses what they call the Freedom OS. So, being the curious Oatmeal Joey Guy that I am, I decided to go look that up and I think I ran into a few different OSes with that same name and I cannot say which one might be in the Freedom Phone mostly because Erik has not told us I guess or if he has then please let me know.
This one OS is called FreedomOS. I saw that on Git Hub. But that is probably something unrelated to this phone.
Freedom OS might be a modified Oxygen OS.
I cannot confirm if this is the case or not. I thought I saw somebody on the Internet say this. Oxygen OS is an Android based OS developed by Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus going back at least to 2016 which means at that time it was Android version 5.0.1 (Lollipop) that it was originally based on. Oxygen has privacy concerns which you can also read about. I'm going to get into that.
Swipe ELITE comes with its own ‘Freedom OS’, priced at Rs 5999.
That Indian Express article was updated on August 13, 2015. In the article it reads, " It will run Swipe’s own customised OS called Freedom OS based on Android Lollipop 5.0." So, they use what they call the Freedom OS. Now, I cannot say if this same exact OS is in Erik's phone or not but I do know this Swipe OS and the Oxygen OS are both based on Lollipop. So, either way you cut it, it is possible Erik's FreedomOS is a Lollipop of some sort which I'm not going to say is bad but I will say it might be bad. But it depends on a wide variety of things which we would have to break down and digest and ponder and study and everything.
I've read that Android is an open-source OS that is based on Unix. I have no idea if that is true. Perhaps, earlier versions of Android had more freedom welded into it so to speak. Perhaps Android went a different direction after version 5, after the Lollipop version. I would not bet the house on that but I could see how that might be possible.
Erik's Freedom Phone appears to be a modified Android device that does not have GAPs (Google Apps) which would likely be the thing that tracks users. Well, I would not rule out that Androids doesn't have dirty tricks up its sleeves but a major problem may be certain programs which are installed onto Android. Erik's phone appears to have an app store that is not the Apple iPhone App Store or the Google Play. So, it comes down to whether or not people trust Erik's store and I have no idea who made that store. Also, it uses Trust (a privacy guard thing) which I guess is supposed to keep the phone safe.
People are running around talking about this phone on Twitter. It is kind of crazy as some people are happy about it. Some are skeptical. And some are calling it a crazy stupid phone for all the insane Jan6 Parler Insurrectionists can go so the FBI can keep an eye on them similar to what might have happened on TOR.
By the way, Jan6 was a trap by the bad guys which includes bad FBI agents. It was an inside job. Videos can prove this. They put around 500 innocent people in prison and pretended as if they were bad but they didn't storm the Capitol. A few people did sort of did something but those people were not Trump supporters.
For those who may not know, long story short, TOR is a web browser which works like a VPN or proxy and so it can help people remain anonymous to hide their Internet traffic and activity from internet service providers (ISP) and others. I may be off with the details but legend has it that TOR had problems or that the FBI or other governmental agencies were able to track down TOR users and go after them because TOR allegedly used unique protocols or whatever which then might stand out on Internet highways. I am not saying they went after all TOR users but maybe some.
I am not saying that is what happened absolutely but that is bits and pieces of what I've heard over the years and the theory is that you will NOT be able to blend in if you are sending oddly coded messages or protocols through the Internet which stands out in a crowd. It is like raising a flag. it's like shouting at people, "Look at me." But I don't know because I know Proton Mail and other websites can use encryption to help protect data from being intercepted and spied on. I don't know how to compare TOR with encryption or even with HTTPS or IPFS or FTP or a number of things.
But my point was TOR might have been a trap and the Freedom Phone might be a trap too. I want to hear your thoughts on it and I may try to do more research on this later on. This is just a quick summary update on this basic topic and I wanted to open this article up with a simple overview to help people make choices regarding what kind of phone to buy or make.
And like I said, Freedom Phone might be basing their OS on Lollipop and Oxygen was also based on Lollipop and Oxygen was caught spying on their users in 2017. So, I wonder if Lollipop was ever caught spying on their users. And if FreedomOS is based on Lollipop, and if Lollipop does have that problem, then is Freedom OS really a for-freedom OS? Erik should come out and say who made his phone and what the OS is based on. If the OS is based on Lollipop, Erik should say, if he still wants people to continue to buy his phone, "We modified Lollipop to make sure it doesn't spy or whatever and then we stuck inside it that Trust thing and did the Hokey Pokey and turn ourselves around, that's what it's all about."
My recommendation is to focus on the hardware first when buying a phone, try to get the best hardware you can and then root the phone meaning remove the operating system (OS) off your phone and then put a better operating system on it, maybe an OS that is based on Unix, Linux, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, etc, something that is open-source, etc, etc. For example, one person wrote, "Just get a Pixel and run Graphene OS."
I've not tried the Graphene OS yet but I say what the Hell, why not give it a try as anything would be better than Apple or Google.