Calculate Phone

Updated 14 September 2019

About

Calculate Phone is a project dedicated to integration of a mobile device with Calculate Linux. Integration is achieved via [Nextcloud] (nextcloud), with access to telephony, mail and instant messaging services.

When you buy a phone, you get a ready-for-use device out of the box. You can integrate it with Google/Apple cloud services by logging into your Google Account or Apple ID. All your contacts, calendar events, notes are immediately restored. This solution is undoubtedly convenient, but it also has a number of disadvantages:

• If your account is hacked, they will know everything about you, including where you moved for the past few years.
• Obviously, in some cases you would have to pay if you wish to store your photos on the cloud in acceptable quality, then pay for listening to music, for watching movies, etc., thus progressively spending more and more.
• There is no guarantee that your data will not be used by third parties for advertising and other purposes.
• If, at some point, you want to change your service provider, you may have difficulty downloading your photos, for example.
• Remember that no security is guaranteed when hosting free data.

Calculate Phone has none of these, because it allows you to host your data yourself. You can create and run your own cloud on any computer of your choice that has Internet access. For even more security, you can forbid direct online access to your cloud services.

The project has three main development lines:

1. Gathering information about Android-based phones that can be accessed as root and, if possible, support firmware customization;
2. Optimal selection of open source software;
3. Phone setup with CU templates.

Supported devices

Calculate Phone can be used on any Android mobile device. In future, we also plan on releasing a Calculate Utilities version with automatic phone setup. You will need full root access for the tools to be operational. This is unfortunately impossible on some devices. Phones that support custom firmware will be described on a dedicated wiki page. Feel free to share information about your device in this Mastodon group: @phone@calculate.social.

Software

The main requirements for software to be used in Calculate Phone is that it must be open source and offer possibility to integrate with [Nextcloud] (nextcloud), as well as with other free cloud services. For instance, music lovers could be interested by the conjunction of Funkwhale and DSub.

Phone settings

At this point, you will have to set up your phone manually. For your convenience, a manual page will be created soon, containing all the main instructions. We plan on releasing the new cl-phone tool for phone configuration. The application settings are to be described in templates, so that configuring your phone from zero and installing the necessary software will only take a few minutes.