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le: 2026-09-04

Free Software on phones has been of major importance over the past decades. Android is a big cornerstone in that area, but which distribution suits your use case? Which one respects your freedom and supports your daily life? In this series, we will try to answer those questions.

As part of an update to our Free Your Android campaign, the FSFE took a closer look at several of them, installing and using each one to see how well it respects your freedom and how it works in practice. Starting on 4 September 2026, we will publish our findings weekly, one distribution at a time.

Smartphones are the computers we carry with us everywhere. They have information on us such as our location, who we talk to, and what we read. Yet most of the phones you can buy run software that their users can use, but not study, share, or improve. They also usually come with deep ties to a single company's services. With our Free Your Android campaign, we have long encouraged users to regain control over their mobile devices.

Since the beginning of this campaign, the ecosystem around Android has changed considerably. Questions about privacy, device support, and ease of installation are what users need to know ahead of time to make informed decisions about what to run.

Developers of Free Software Android distributions do important and increasingly difficult work for software freedom on phones. And users have a real choice between different distributions thanks to those extensive efforts. For this update, we examined several of those distributions in detail. We looked at usability, privacy aspects, and of course, software freedom. We will release the results one distribution at a time as part of a larger update to Free Your Android. This way, each distribution gets the attention it deserves and you can follow along, perhaps try things out, and share your experience with us and the Fediverse.

• Report about LineageOS
• Report about Iodeos
• Report about/e/OS

Further articles will follow.Do not forget to keep an eye on our Free Your Android page and our Mastodon account.

"Smartphones are the most personal computers ever built; they typically know more about you than your closest friends do. Who should decide what happens with that information? Free Software operating systems on phones give users that choice. We looked into the differences and figured out what works and what doesn't so you are empowered to make a decision about what your phone does." - Florian Snow, Technical Advisor

Have you already liberated your own phone? Did you run into problems or did everything go smoothly? Then please help the developers of those distributions by sharing this information in a structured manner, by expanding their community wikis or by filing a well-written bug report. Do you have experience with a distribution we should cover? Then let us know!

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