ClearOS Mobile smartphone: ClearPhone on Kickstarter

Maybe someone would be interested. It’s here

I thought it was worth the money, so went ahead and made an early bird pledge. I’ve tried their software many times since they got founded, and was always of acceptable quality.

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Ayyy. Imagine the awkwardness when a kids friend pranks the other friend by searching for porn on their Clearphone :joy::joy::joy::joy:.

Need ClearPHONE to protect your kids? If your child does search for porn, you would get a notification letting you know which website and when.

It does look seriously cool tho. Hope they do well. We’d have another FOSS OS on the mobile market space.

And those specs are pretty nice.

With a massive 3-day (6350 mAh) battery life, a 16MP front and rear camera with f/1.8 aperture, and edge-to-edge FHD+ screen, ClearPHONE has the features you want with the security you’ve been waiting for.

Edit: it’s not an entirely new OS

ClearOS Mobile is a highly modified version of Android 10

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Why not starting with a ROM like Xiaomi did way back? I guess it would’ve been much cheaper and would not make them start from scratch trying to sell you a whole entire phone with specs that don’t even match between the spec sheet and what they’re writing in the kickstarter page (spec sheet comparison says battery 5150mAh and the page says 6350mAh).
P.S. I hope they won’t include Swiftkey because that is, for me, a big anti-privacy thing since it’s something that uses a naural engine based on your inputs and surely communicates with Swiftkey’s servers in one way or the other to improve the app.

Because unlockable phones are getting ever rarerer. Most of the modern smartphones from the big companies can’t be unlocked anymore or you need to go through major hassle, while often also loosing functionality (Samsung Knox).

Additionally, you often have to use binary blobs to make those Rom’s boot. When building something with “privacy first” claims, dropping in blobs you don’t controll from companies you don’t trust isn’t the best idea.

The specsheet reads nice but is lacking more information on which SoC they use. 4G of Ram is also at the very low end for Android 9/10.
It’s also unclear (no pun intended) if/how android apps work, if they’ll be running their own appstore etc.

Assuming the SoC is decent, the price looks ok for what you get. I’d personally still take the librem 5 or pinephone over this, but this is certainly an easier to do and more likely to succeed option.

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Might be ok without majority of the background crap that’s usually running. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.

Should be possible to install apps from Google play.

the $1075 retail price

Excuse me… WHAT!

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I doubt that. For that your phone needs to be google play certified, which no custom rom is and neither are xiaomi devices for example.

Gapps might work or not, and F-Droid might or not. I highly doubt they’ll ship it with anything google on it when they are advocating privacy. I might be wrong though.

Yeah, it will be. At first. The Pixel 3 also only had 4G of RAM. Out of the box it’s fine, but it severely slows down over time. Plus, it’s also a question of how it’ll hold up over 2, 3 or 5 years.
But that’s largely down to software. iPhones also don’t have that much RAM and run fine. So if they can tune ClearOS enough, it might work great.

Meh. I am far more in favour of just doing your parenting rather than outsourcing it to, well who exactly? They mention there is a neural network that keeps searches safe and so on. So they are all about privacy as long as they are allowed look, there has to be some.sort of information back and forward to.make this work how do they make that safe?

Yesterday when I checked it out, someone had similar view as you have, he was offered to be a tester for them. Would receive source and open phone from them.

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According to FAQ on this site, it can run all android apps.

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That is applaudable for sure but still would not be for me. Either way it is not like I am some insane privacy conscious person, it is nice they look to be trying but I don’t expect much to actually come from it.

That next reply you have is kind of proof of that. If they really are privacy concerned then it absolutely would not be able to run anything from the play store. It may be able to install the apps by side loading but if it does not have the full Google framework a lot of them will just not function properly, but if it does have all of it then they are just allowing all your information to Google by default so there has to be something they are not saying there.

True, I don’t believe they are saying everything either. However it’s a tiny step in the right direction. I don’t really use any apps that can’t be replaced by a web frontend, so for me, it should be a reasonable smartphone without, hopefully, most of the crap other phones have.

I like there’s a choice, completely open or completely closed to the internet. I’m not fussed with their approach to secure it in regards to for instance browsing, from what I understand, it has to use their network as a gateway. Kind of leaves me thinking “The king is dead, long live the king”.

I will use my home network as gateway, setup my own system to spoof my location, get rid of ads, and so on.

Just the fact that there’s a choice to open it up and not have to authenticate here, there and everywhere is what made me back the project.

Think I’ll contact them and offer to be a tester, if they still need. Could be interesting to check it out thoroughly.

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If you get to do testing I would love to hear all about it and I am sure others would here too. Like my skepticism you would probably get people poking at various bits of their claims and it would be nice to see user verified yes and no’s to them.

For sure, would defo share any finds. Would probably start a post, where people could pitch in with ideas and questions, to get even more out of it. When it comes to skepticism, i’m as skeptical as they come. I live after something like “Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean I’m not being followed”.

Read up a bit on the backend they use for filtration of traffic, seems like it’s a module which I think is possible to install on their firewall/gateway/server distro. Might take a look at that at some point if I get the time, or if someone else knows something about it, please share, would love to know how it works.

Aren’t Iphones built on C or C++? Could explain why android needs 2-3 times more memory to run as smooth, Java and bloatware.

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That was quick. Just got contacted by them, have to send contact information and they’ll send documentation and anything else as the project moves forward. Will share what I receive along the way.

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