Your open-source custom ROM has a dirty secret, and Librephone wants to fix it

Privacy is a big concern for a lot of smartphone users, and while platforms like Android offer oodles of different settings for managing your data and who gets access to it, at the end of the day you’re still placing your trust in Google. You’ve got other options, though, with projects like GrapheneOS offering alternative firmware that doubles down on privacy while further minimizing your data’s exposure. And now we’re learning about a new effort that looks to address one of the biggest issues with open software projects like that.

Systems like LineageOS attempt to offer fully open-source alternatives to the software that might ship with your phone, but that goal is often hampered by their reliance on proprietary blobs — basically, pre-compiled code provided by a hardware vendor that’s necessary to interface with that silicon. That could be something like a graphics driver — this is the same sort of situation Linux enthusiasts have been dealing with on PCs for decades.

Even if you strip all the Google apps out of your Android release, and use nice, clean, open-source code wherever possible, having to distribute your software with one of these binary blobs means that you can’t truly offer your users full code transparency — you’ve just got to take the OEM’s word that the blob is doing what it’s supposed to.

That’s not great, and now a new effort from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is trying to do something about it. The goal of its Librephone project is straightforward, if far from simple: reverse engineer those blobs and turn then into open-source code.

Step one is going to be identifying the most practical phone to attempt to free in this manner. That means cataloging all the different blobs that popular handsets rely on, and trying to find hardware that maybe doesn’t lean on quite as many as some others. Librephone is looking “to find a phone with the fewest, most fixable freedom problems” to start.

Then after that begins the grueling work of reverse engineering, trying to describe the behavior of those opaque binary blobs in a way that lets them be recreated in a functionally identical way — though now with the benefit of offering clear, readable source code, as well.

At a time when Google’s tightening its control over Android, more users than ever are probably thinking about privacy-first alternatives, so a project like Librephone could be just what the doctor ordered. We’ll be very curious to see what the initial phone the FSF attempts to free ends up being — stay tuned for updates there.