So I got Fairphone 4, with /e/ os, a couple of days ago. When I connected it to my NextDNS I saw that it was trying to connect to some weird addresses, like every 5-10 minutes. I searched Internet a bit and found out that it was something with snapdragon cpu and location services. I travel a lot and use Organic Maps for navigation, so location was enabled almost all day on the phone. I turned off location services and connections stopped, and everything was fine for a couple of days.
Today I came home, checked logs in NextDNS and saw that phone started doing the same connections almost constantly even with location turned off.
Can I do something about this, other than allowing these connections? These connections are probably so numerous because they are getting blocked. If I allowed them, phone would maybe call home once in a couple of hours. I would rather not allow them, but I don't want 20% of battery to be eaten by this.
I don't really blame fairphone for this. They would probably have to make their own chips, if they wanted control over that. Almost nobody has money for that.
Naa that's not something with "snapdragon cpu and location services" it's something with snapdragon + the OS allowing it and most likely profiting from it. Fairphone guys have been petitioned multiples times to open their platform and/or collaborate with projects such as GrapheneOS and CalyxOS so user can have private and secure phones but they don't care.
CalyxOS does support the Fairphone 4 however that's only due to the persistence and reverse engineering efforts of the CalyxOS project / community. If you decide to use it you won't have a secure bootloader anymore due to a bug in Fairphone's firmware that they choose not to fix. That's how "fair" the "Fairphone" really is.
Here is more relevant information for you from here:
Before you say this is the CPU's fault, it isn't, at least on its own. GrapheneOS also deals with this kind of stuff and has patches and options so you can block it.
After looking into it more, I don't think I would use Graphene OS even if it was supported on FP4, main dev seems like a lying man baby.
On the other hand, I didn't know Calyx OS has support for FP4, I might try it out.
I don't really remember strcat "lying", yet there are some evidence of him being... Let's say unstable. GrapheneOS, tho, is another story as it's trying to improve the android's privacy/security model instead of simply not making things worse. For example, they are behind hardened malloc - for security, and have storage & contact scopes (i.e. letting the user choose which files/directories exactly an app can access) - for privacy. While the former feature has been adopted by a few other roms and even desktop Linux distributions, the latter I've seen only on graphene so far, which is quite a shame. Same goes for sandboxing play services
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Thanks, that was interesting and eye opening read. Do you know if he is still working on graphene os or is he out? Because some users mentioned that he left.
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