For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an Apple Fanboi. Well, no, not that long, but ever since I started working at Ibuildings in the 00’s and getting my first Mac, I was sold. Unfortunately at some point for a power user like me the laptops started becoming less interesting (and also way too expensive), but for my phone I stuck with Apple because iOS was far superior to Android in terms of UX and consistency.
In recent times, however, I’ve been becoming more privacy aware. Aside from that, with the current geopolitical situation and the “mightiest country in the world” being led by an unstable and unpredictable leader, I want to prevent my dependency (US-based) big tech.
Some months ago I got introduced to the de-Googled GrapheneOS and e/OS. I got to try out e/OS on a secondary phone for a while and had to admit: Android has improved a lot since the last time I played with it. It compares quite well with iOS these days in terms of usability. So that’s when I started considering the move.
It’s not an easy move though. Migrating from one platform to the other requires some planning and serious thought. When you’ve invested so many years into a platform, switching to another platform means figuring out how to replace certain platform-specific features. To my surprise, however, this turned out to not be that hard. Over the time I’ve switched mostly to apps that support both iOS and Android, and files I’ve been storing in for instance Proton Drive, not iCloud, so… hey, switching might not be as hard as I thought.
Fairphone
The first thing then is to think of which hardware to get. I was using an iPhone 12 mini, which is a very small phone, and quite quickly I came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be that easy to get a similar device. Especially since I needed to keep in mind the device had to be compatible with e/OS. I preferred a phone that would also have official support instead of community support so that I could use the official installer. A sustainable and European company would also be nice. I’d heard a lot of good things about Fairphone and given their focus is on sustainability and right to repair, and they’re Amsterdam-based… that seemed like a fine choice.
Installing e/OS
My previous experience with installing e/OS on an old Samsung device was horrible. Hence my mention of wanting to use an officially supported device. The Fairphone I ordered came with a standard Android instead of e/OS, but hey, I’ve gone through the ordeal of installing it on that Samsung device, I can do this.
So, connect Phone to laptop, go through setup steps so that I can start using the official installer, go through the first couple of steps… so far so good. One step was confusing: the e/OS documentation mentions having to unlock the bootloader, but as I did that it asked for a code, which the documentation did not mention anywhere. Turns out this is a Fairphone-specific thing. Fairphone offers a tool to calculate that code based on your IMEI and serial number.
The phone is recognized and I can connect to it. But at the second point where I need to connect with the laptop… nope. It didn’t connect. Searching around a bit, this turned out to be related to the phone being locked. I found this blogpost and by just going through the first couple of steps (up to and including the fastboot flashing unlock_critical
step), I got it to work. Now the second connect step of the installer did work.
One thing to note in the official installer: Your progress is usually at the bottom of the screen, but any errors are shown in tiny letters at the top of the screen. So while you might be waiting for things to finish, there might already be errors. Keep your eyes on the top of the screen as well!
After this, the installer was able to finish all the way to the end, and I had a Fairphone with e/OS. Yay!
Another thing I noticed, however, is that I do not find anything in the documentation about, after finalizing the install, putting to lock back on using the fastboot flashing lock_critical
and fastboot flashing lock
commands. I did that regardless.
App lounge
After booting into e/OS I had another issue. The App lounge, the app with which you install other apps, would not load in anonymous mode. It would just keep on loading without being able to do anything. Unfortunately clearing the cache and storage, as recommended by the official documentation, did not solve it either. The official documentation suggested that if it couldn’t be solved, to still use a Google account. Which kind of defeats the purpose of using a de-Googled Android, imho. On the Internet I found some people who suggested just to wait a bit, however, and a friend made the same recommendation. So I wanted and lo and behold: It started working. I’m still not sure why it didn’t work before, but who am I to complain.
Migrating
Next step: migration. I had to install a whole bunch of apps of course. The first one was my password manager, because after installing all those apps, I would have to log in to most of them. This was a boring but very straightforward task. A big shout-out to Pocket Casts that after I logged in even remembered exactly where I was in the podcast I was listening to. Talk about a seamless migration experience!
Contacts
One thing I was quite scared of was how to ensure my contacts were migrated. Turns out that fear was based on nothing. The e/OS documentation offers a very simple tutorial: Download a vcf-file from iCloud, transfer that to the new phone, then import that file into your Contacts app. Everything was transferred!
The watch
My trusty iPhone had a trust companion: The Apple Watch. In my evaluation of my Apple usage, I’d come to the conclusion that while the Apple Watch can do a whole lot of things, all I really used it for on a daily basis was keeping track of my exercise and getting notifications of important things happening on my phone. I don’t really need such a complex watch for that. After looking around I found the PineTime watch: I very simple “sort of smart” watch. After posting on Mastodon about this I got a response from someone one village away who had one lying around that I could test-drive. I’ve been wearing it for three days now and I haven’t even had to charge it yet! And yes, this is not as fancy as an Apple Watch, but it tracks my steps (not all my exercise, sure, but my steps) and after setting up the Gadgetbridge app on my Fairphone I do get notifications. So hey, this works just fine!
Airpods
The only thing now that I still have from the Apple ecosystem is a set of airpods. I hardly use those, though, since I also own a pair of Bose QC-35 headphones. And the airpods connect just fine with the Fairphone, so I have no real need to replace those. And even if I wanted to replace them, Fairphone has a solution for that as well.
Concluding
I had expected that escaping the Apple ecosystem would be hard. But, some minor setbacks aside, it was pretty much smooth sailing. Whether I will bump into other things, only time will tell of course, but so far my experience with the Fairphone, with e/OS and with the Pine Time has been great!