Replicant operating system (OS) from the Free Software Foundation

Mobile devices such as phones and tablets are an increasingly important part in everyone's communications, and they are particularly subject to freedom and security concerns. So-called smartphones present a number of freedom, privacy, security, ecological, and social justice issues in a relatively small device.

The Replicant operating system (OS) is built and promoted by the Free Software Foundation and works to address these issues by enabling people to run fully free operating systems on supported devices. You can read more about the freedom, privacy, and security issues that Replicant addresses on the Replicant Web site. The site and wiki also give further information about Replicant, the devices it supports, installation instructions, the latest info about its limitations, and more.

At the beginning of 2019, the Free Software Foundation received funding from a program from the European Union called Next Generation Internet, through the NLnet Foundation. In that year, the nonprofit also received a sizeable donation from Handshake.

The funding from NLnet and the European Union enabled us to start working on building a new version of Replicant, which is now based on Android 11, with a kernel that has the fewest modifications possible from the upstream code. While working to update Replicant, we already managed to upstream a few patches in the kernel Linux.

Our work is now based on Android 11. We have working 3D acceleration, and very basic audio on the Galaxy SIII (GT-I9300). A lot was done to port our changes to the Android 9, 10, and 11 graphic stack.

In 2021, we will continue focusing on the work we have started, namely, making a release of Replicant 6, and making a Replicant 9 or later release.

More information

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/replicant-a-free-mobile-phone-os-is-more-important-than-ever-and-needs-your-help

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Replicant operating system (OS) from the Free Software Foundation

Replicant operating system (OS) from the Free Software Foundation

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