Replicant was started as a pragmatic way to achieve software freedom on mobile devices, as a fully free version of Android. Over the years, support was added for a dozen of different mainstream devices. However, most of these are severely flawed when it comes to software freedom and privacy/security. Thus, it was decided to focus the development effort on a few specific devices that perform better than others from those perspectives, instead of trying to catch up with the latest mainstream devices.
This talk will first cover what was accomplished by the Replicant project over the last few years and what milestones have been reached. This includes an overview of the work that was completed to support various devices, especially when it comes to writing free software replacements for proprietary components. Some of the most challenging examples will be highlighted and put in perspective as milestones for the project. In addition, some of the work on making the system better regarding privacy and security will be mentioned. Once the improvement of the situation is acknowledged, this talk will show how most of these devices are still fundamentally flawed, hence opening up two possible ways for the future of the project: adding support for more and more new devices and recent Android versions or focusing on a handful of devices that show real potential for being liberated. Hence, the second part of this presentation will introduce the recent efforts that were started to support devices that can take freedom to the next step. Some of these exciting devices will be presented in details, with a description of the journey to freeing them from the ground up!
Speakers: Paul Kocialkowski