Replicant on Galaxy S3

I recently got my self and Galaxy S3 for testing out Replicant, an android image made out of only open source components.

Why Galaxy S3?

It is well supported in Replicant, almost every driver is already open source. The hardware specs are acceptable, 1.4Ghz quad core, 1GB ram, microsd, and all the peripheral chips one expects for a phone. Galaxy S3 has sold insanely (50 million units supposedly), meaning I won't run out of accessories and aftermarket spare parts any time soon. The massive installed base also means a huge potential user community. S3 is still available as new, with two years of warranty.

Why not

While the S3 is still available new, it is safe to assume production is ending already - 1.5 year old product is ancient history in mobile world! It remains to be seen how much the massive user base will defend against the obsolescence. Upstream kernel support for "old" cpu is open question, replicant is still basing kernel on vendor kernel. Bootloader is unlocked, but it can't be changed due to trusted^Wtreacherous computing, preventing things like boot from sd card. Finally, not everything is open source, the GPU (mali) driver while being reverse engineered, is taking it's time - and the GPS hasn't been reversed yet.

Installing replicant

Before install, from the original installation, you might want to take a copy of firmware files (since replicant won't provide them). enable developer mode on the S3 and:

sudo apt-get install android-tools
mkdir firmware
adb pull /system/vendor/firmware/  
adb pull /system/etc/wifi

After then, just follow official replicant install guide for S3. If you don't mind closed source firmwares, post-install you need to push the firmware files back:

adb shell
mount -o remount,rw /system
adb push . /system/vendor/firmware

Here was my first catch, the wifi firmwares from jelly bean based image were not compatible with older ICS based replicant.

Using replicant

Booting to replicant is fast, few seconds to the pin screen. You are treated with the standard android lockscreen, usual slide/pin/pattern options are available. Basic functions like phone, sms and web browsing have icons from the homescreen and work without a hitch. Likewise camera seems to work, really the only smartphone feature missing is GPS.

Sidenote - this image looks a LOT better on the S3 than on my thinkpad. No wonder people are flocking to phones and tablets when laptop makers use such crappy components.

The grid menu has the standard android AOSP opensource applications in the ICS style menu with the extra of f-droid icon - which is the installer for open source applications. F-droid is it's own project that complements replicant project by maintaining a catalog of Free Software.

F-droid brings hundreds of open source applications not only for replicant, but for any other android users, including platforms with android compatibility, such as Jolla's Sailfish OS. Of course f-droid client is open source, like the f-droid server (in Debian too). F-droid server is not just repository management, it can take care of building and deploying android apps.

The WebKit based android browser renders web sites without issues, and if you are not happy with, you can download Firefox from f-droid. Many websites will notice you are mobile, and provide mobile web sites, which is sometimes good and sometimes annoying. Worse, some pages detect you are android and only offer you to load their closed android app for viewing the page. OTOH I am already viewing their closed source website, so using closed source app to view it isn't much worse.

This keyboard is again the android standard one, but for most unixy people the hacker's keyboard with arrow buttons and ctrl/alt will probably be the one you want.

Closing thoughts

While using replicant has been very smooth, the lack of GPS is becoming a deal-breaker. I could just copy the gpsd from cyanogen, like some have done, but it kind of beats the purpose of having replicant on the phone. So it might be that I move back to cyanogen, unless I find time to help reverse engineering the BCM4751 GPS.