My Android and pure AOSP

As I talked about in my post "what is android without google", it is possible to get a pretty functional phone with only OSS apps.

This was only in theory and I wanted to try it with my own phone. I already ran CyanogenMod 7 on my phone. This is quite free from proprietary vendors (you don't get the proprietary sense framework for example). But still, the google marked was shipped with it and some other proprietary apps.

So I switched to the pure AOSP compiled by Fydor.cn on XDA. The only proprietary things left are some drivers. But I don't think this will bother anyone.

So I putted the pure AOSP on it and installed the FDroid apk. I decided to only work with apps that are in the FDroid repository. This is even more limited than saying "only OSS". The phone and messaging app are part of the AOSP, so I didn't have to look for that.

First of all, I wanted to get my mail to work. I saw that there was a mail app, but as far as I see, it only works with exchange, not with pop or imap. So I took the K-9 Mail app from FDroid, gave it my gmail address and password and it connected without a problem.

Secondly, I also wanted to be able to chat via a jabber account. So I installed beem. There I got a bit of a problem, for now, it seems that it's only one-way communication. Maybe that's because I'm also tethering with my phone, but I don't seem to be able to send from my computer to my phone. I'll try it again when I have decent internet.

A calendar app was also no problem. with aCal, I could connect to my google calendar (although I had to check the wiki to see how to do it). There is a calendar app in the AOSP project, but it seems only able to connect to exchange calendars.

As you can expect, there is no immediate way to sync contacts (although exchange syncing is supported again), but I could import a vCard in the contacts app.

For the rest, I installed a pretty good pdf reader, a text editor and an RSS reader. With that rss reader, I was able to read google news (the news and weather app seems not available too).

I don't think you need anything more, I have camera working, FM radio, a music player, a file manager, a browser and navigation software. There are also some games available in the FDroid repo (like tetris or sudoku), but you don't really need them.

Maybe there is one thing missing: a screen calibration app. It is difficult to use my keyboard because the keys at the border of the screen don't work very good. There are some calibration apps available, but it's difficult to see if they are open source or not. I think I could configure it manually (since I have root access) but I don't really want to get into that.

So to answer my question from the previous time, pure open source Android without Google is a bit more difficult to set up (you need to set up each app separatly) but once configured, it is just as functional like a normal Android phone. Cyanogen does do a good job to give you as much open source as possible without giving up the easy configuration.