How to Live WITHOUT Apple or Google
- This live stream is being presented by DeleteMe. I'm really grateful for their sponsorship. They have re-upped their sponsorship for this channel for the year 2025. And yeah, they've been just an incredible partner.
I've really enjoyed being able to work with them. I'll be able to sit down with their CEO here in a few months as well. But I've got something really exciting for you today, and what we're gonna be doing is I have met a, a new friend, his name is Hakeem.
He is the CEO of above phone. And this is a phone that I have been testing for a little while now that is basically a d Googled d Appled version of an operating system and in a way of using a mobile phone that maybe a lot of us haven't thought of. And so that's what I wanna talk to him about. What does it look like? How do you extricate yourself from these walled gardens? And, and what do we do about that? So I hope that you are looking forward to this as much as I am.
And I am gonna go ahead, let's see if it is possible to record making sure that we're recording this. Okay. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and bring on our guest. His name is Hakeem. Hakeem. Thank you so much for taking some time with us today, - Josh, just the pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
- Yeah. Yeah. And so just gimme a, a quick introduction to Above phone, how long you've been working with them, and like your just background in this space. - Cool. Yeah, so my name's Hakeem. I'm the founder and CEO of Above phone. And yeah, our, our company was born out of the pandemic when a lot of us stayed indoors and were just on the internet. And I think a lot of people were becoming aware of how important privacy was at the time.
And so working within the community, I saw a lot of people were being taken advantage of by scammers and scammers. And then a lot of groups were actually being, being censored by big tech companies. And so I was trying to figure out what is the right way to change this relationship with technology so that it doesn't have so much control over our lives and really be as self-reliant as possible. And at the time, a lot of people were coming to me asking for tech advice. I started writing for a blog called Take Back Our Tech, and we released guides on switching over to Linux, switching over to de Googled phones.
And eventually there was so much demand, it's, we decided we would build a whole company around it. So we went on this really long journey of figuring out all of the open source solutions one could use, that were not, not just an alternative to big tech, not just an alternative to Apple and Google, but were actually better, better in the way they treat you and better in the functionality. And, you know, six months of research later we, we ended up with Above phone, which is this phone you see to the right of me. And I know you've been checking yours out as well, so appreciate you to giving it a shot. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And I, I mean, my understanding is, you know, a lot of the people that are looking at something like an above phone or looking at a, a phone, let's just say that has an open source operating system as opposed to something that has, you know, Google or Apple, right? So traditionally when people think of an operating system on a phone, they're thinking of iOS or they're thinking of some version of Android, whether that's Samsung or Google's Pixel or something like that. Can you explain what would be the primary differences between that and then going with an open source alternative? I know you guys, I think are based off of graphene, which is an, an open source system and I'm sure that there are plenty of others out there, but can you kind of just briefly explain what the primary differences there are? - Sure. There, there are, there it is a whole layers of, of differences between a proprietary phone, as we would call it, coming from Google or from Apple.
Meaning that you can't look at the code and and see what it does. So we kind of have to make educated guesses based on looking at the phone's network connections. And there's been independent researchers seeing that Apple and Google phones are, are connecting back home every five minutes. And they're also sending things like unique identifiers and logging different important parts of the phones. Anything from your contacts to, to different notes.
And we can't be exactly sure what we're sending, although we have some confirmation. But we just know that there is a lot of information generated and it's estimated from, this is from Google and or Google users alone in the United States. The number of users in the United States generate one terabyte of, of data every, actually, I'm sorry, that's 12 gigabytes of data every 12 hours. So that is a, that's a lot of data being sent from our phones. And those are just the logs. And there's all these things that, there's all these things happening inside the internals of the phone where you, what you can actually control it.
You might be given these privacy options, but they don't actually change anything within the phone. So a de Googled phone is, is the operating system is transparent, like you mentioned Graphos. There's one, there are zero connections to big tech by default. And we verified this when we first started working with the technology and you know, the public service announcement, not all Degod phones are the same.
There are, were some at the beginning that were connecting to Google. And, and so there's all these different features you can use on, on Degod phones, but the main differences is you're not being tracked and, and to these huge databases. And I can get into more in that of that, but there's things like location databases, there's the advertising databases and you basically disconnect yourself from that part. - Yeah. So let's talk about that for just a moment.
So I've got, let's say my iPhone right here. Okay. I, I recognize the fact that there's telemetry happening not just with my SIM card, but also by Apple tracking location at all times. What are, what are other ways in which the phone is, is somehow tracking what I'm doing? 'cause I know there are options in the settings to like, let's say turn off advertising, at least it says that that that it's turning off the advertising tracking or, or whatnot. Like what are the other ways in which that's happening? - Yeah, so with, so there are three layers of tracking in our mobile phones. The first layer is the operating system level itself.
And Google and Apple would always like to say, Hey, they're tracking things to make things better. And frankly they, you know, there is a real use case in that the question comes down to can you really trust them to do that? But when you look at some of these things that they're capturing, they don't necessarily need all of this info. Like a good example of this is they're getting the, they, they're capturing your unique di diver device identifiers. So there's, there's, there's IDs like the phones IMEI that get sent to Google and Apple, they don't necessarily need that, but they're using it 'cause they've registered your device to you. And that's, they can also use other IDs like your Android ID or your Apple advertising id. And these can be shared across any device you are logged into your Google or your Apple account from.
So when you're logged into multiple devices and you're part of this ecosystem, anything you do on one device can be shared with other parts of it. And that's why you get these amazing ads. You know, you, you, you want, you wish something there it is, it appears. And, and so that's kind of how all that works. It on, on the most base level, it's, it's due to just money. You know, the, these, these big tech companies want to make the advertising bucks and they do a really good job at it.
But on the other hand, this is also all information get that gets loaded into secret databases that a lot of us don't know about until it comes to the surface. A good example about this is a Google's sensor vault, which Congress didn't even know about until the New York Times wrote an article on sensor vault. But that was a secret geolocation database that anyone using Google Maps was a part of. And that's not just anyone using an Android phone, but anyone using Google Maps on iPhones, right? So we've all been in the secret DA database at one point and it essentially allowed for these really powerful warrants where law enforcement could pick a date and a time and see all of the, the Google accounts in that area.
Now they didn't have the exact identities, but they had the Android id and then they could just subpoena whatever was next in line, whether that was Google directly to get that. So this technology was actually how they caught the, the protesters that were at the capitol, the US Capitol on January 6th. So, you know, it's really crazy how that data could be used against us.
- Yeah, definitely. So then, you know, the average person though, like honestly most people that I meet with this type of technology like this is, this is we, we trail behind this kind of stuff where we're using an open source. A lot of times the people that are adopting this first are either those people that are extremely worried about their privacy or more often than not people who are high profile, high net worth, those kind of individuals. I'm assuming that that is kind of the, at least the backbone of a lot of your clientele for the above phone. What is it about what you offer that makes that so attractive to them? Like what is it about an open source phone that, that makes that Yeah, use Yeah, that, yeah, go ahead - Josh.
Well, I mean, we have people from all walks of life, not just not only the extremely paranoid and, you know, you think about it, it's, it's a, it's a good way to live because the CEO of Google, you can't even, you know, you can't even find them when you're calling on them. So, so these, these high net worth individuals, they understand the value of privacy. Governments understand the value of privacy. I, I really think it's us. It's time for us to understand the value of privacy too. And this phone is, is really meant for everyone.
It's not only meant for, maybe you could call them paranoid or wise or whatever you wanna use, but this phone actually has more features than, than your normal phone would. And in that sense it's a, I mean you did this really good video recently on, on your nighttime privacy habits, which I think is a nighttime health habit. Yeah. So when you start using a private phone, you,
you do notice improvements to your psyche, like not being bombarded with notifications, not being bombarded with ads. It is, it, there is this, this supplemental benefit to, to using a phone like that and having peace of mind that it's not constantly listening to you, but you also get different things like, and I don't know, can I play around with the phone? Is it able to, can we see it on screen? - Yeah, here we go. I'll, I'll put it up here so that people can see what they're, what you're looking at here. - Cool. So this, this is the above phone. This is what you would get out of the box and we have a special for you guys later today too.
But essentially this looks like your normal Android phone, right? So this isn't, you're not logging into some hacker terminal or anything like that. This is a regular phone. You've got your different apps, you have your different app stores here as well. You've got a private app store, which you can find replacements for pretty much everything. And you can see we've already found the best free and open source replacements for your apps. You have private ways to watch YouTube, look, I'm subscribed to the All Things secure channel and also I can download Josh's videos from right here.
I can download them straight to my phone. So this is unlocking functionality. Yeah, this is an app called a New Pipe and it's really, really great 'cause on a road trip, you know, I don't want to use all my data in the car.
I want to download the stuff I'm listening to ahead of time. I do that over ethernet and then I'm free and clear on the road trip. And there's a lot of different apps like this. Like here's another one where you can navigate completely offline. So you could have your phone on airplane mode and just be using GPS. So we've got some points mapped out here in Tennessee and you can actually save the points to your map.
You can download the maps to your phone ahead of time and then you can just start driving with your phone, not making any connections to cell towers and you can still get to where you're going. Right? So it's unlocking a lot of these features that you wouldn't normally find on a normal phone. It's changing our paradigm of technology and there's a lot of other things that I can get into as well. - Yeah, that, that's really fascinating.
And I, I think from the perspective of somebody that has been using like an iPhone or an Android phone for practically their whole life, I think there is, and I know this, you know, this is true for me. There's, there's a fear of moving away from everything that you're used to and everything that you've already become comfortable with. Right. Okay. So I I use iMessage with my family. I mean a lot of this is, it's not just adopting a new operating system like to, to remove, to live life without Apple. And Google means you have to actually change some, some habits and change some, I guess even apps that you're using.
Is that correct? Like, what are the primary things that you've seen that people have to change either habits or apps in order to live without Apple and Google? - Yeah, you, well, you know, there's some, there are some downsides of the big tech infrastructure you leave behind. iMessage is a big one. You know, it doesn't exist outside of an iPhone and that's unfortunate, but you know that that's, that's an Apple's court. What we can do Josh, is, is, you know, this isn't just about usability for us, but you know, when we're, when we're using these technologies, I like to think about it as we're, we're building a network and the technologies we invest into that are open and free, hopefully more people will be able to join, will be able to join those ecosystems and enough of us are on it then it actually gives us as much value as iMessage or FaceTime. And to tell you what you would use on the above phone, you would use something called jitsi, which I'm sure you've heard of before. But this is a video conferencing tool and if you want someone on an iPhone to use this, it's actually really easy.
You just join a meeting here and then once you join this meeting, you can send them a link, which they can join from their iPhone or they can join from the web browser. And this is a video conference, it's end-to-end encrypted. It's really, really great. And it, and it's not iMessage, but see the people like with iMessage, you have to also realize too, when you use that, that actually means your text messages and calls go to Apple before they even go to your phone, right? Because Apple's kind of being the middleman with all that infrastructure.
So I, it just doesn't have to be like, this doesn't have to be like a cold Turkey type of thing. A lot of our customers will get the above phone to kind of experiment with and to start pulling different services off of and they'll still keep their iPhone for doing things like FaceTime and group messages that are really important. And then meanwhile they'll, they're using this above phone for all the other cool different features that it has. For instance, you can, you can make calls and texts without a sim card using this built in VoIP app and service that we have. And then you can also - That for free.
- Yeah, there's two services involved. One is we run our own suite of software services called Above Suite and we run this messaging protocol called XMPP. And so this protocol lets you send messages, it lets you make calls, it even lets you do video calls, but it's only for one to one person. And then there's another service on top of that called JMP. And this lets you register a US or Canada phone number and do calls and text messages straight through this app on the phone, which is called Gram.
So this is a really, really fun one. 'cause now you get to have two phone numbers on your phone and it's really, really great to use too. You can see that people are calling me and when I call them, I just appear as a normal phone number too. - That's really interesting. Okay, so like, because I, I've been doing the same thing where I've got my iPhone, I've got the above phone and I have like, just because I have the above phone doesn't mean that I've thrown my iPhone away.
I am using both of them still in part because I, I haven't fully understood how to remove myself from the Apple ecosystem entirely, but I have, like I, I had put a data only sim or it was an EIM in into the, the above phone. And I have another one that's just a straight Graphos phone that I've been testing as well. So like it does, I don't even have to do that because I could just use these wifi messaging and phone apps over wifi.
Is that correct? - That's a hundred percent right. You just need to be connected to the internet. And in your, in your bedtime routine video, you talk about, you know, not wanting to get a call or a text message at the middle of the night that that would never happen. What, but what if I told you you could actually get a call or emergency text message in the middle of the night and not have your sleep disturbed.
And you could do that by connecting your phone through ethernet. So it could be on airplane mode, not generating any radiation at all. And then, you know, it could be there to go off if you, if you want now.
And, and, and my house, everything is wired for ethernet. Like there's dongles galore, people come over, they ask, what's the wifi password? I'm like, no sir, here you go. Here's a dongle. There you go. Play around with that. Really.
And yeah, yeah, yeah. It's Can - I ask like what, what, what, what is the, what is your reasoning for that? Like not wanting to have wifi in your home? What's the, what is the risk factor that you are optimizing for - There? There is a lot, and I mean this is, it's a controversial subject because a lot of us don't wanna look at the potential dangers of having all this wireless radiation in our home. But there are bio effects. There are like, there are responses, negative responses we see in humans. Anything from anxiety, depression, cancer, and just de general not feeling well when you're overexposed to wifi. And nowadays people, the wifi routers are extremely powerful.
I think one thing everyone should be doing is to get a meter and put it next to your microwave, see what the power output is, and then put it next to your phone and you're gonna find that they're really not far apart. And you know, I've, as I've learned so much about, as I've learned so much about ourselves and how they work, like electrical signaling is the basis for a lot of their communication. I mean, they use electromagnetic waves to communicate within it. So, you know, I think there's a lot of disruption that can happen now for anyone who's interested in the science. There's a, there's a consortium of scientists, they're called the Bio Initiative 2012 and they have released like a mega collection of every study that has shown negative effects through wireless radiation. So I encourage everyone to look at the science and, you know, think for themselves and look into it personally.
I feel I'm, I am sensitive to it, you might have heard people that are sensitive to it and they feel the effects. I'm one of those people and so a lot of our customers care about this and we've got solutions for them. - Interesting. Would you be willing to walk me through you,
you mentioned a couple of alternative apps that are either free and or open source alternatives to Google Maps or alternatives to let's say Google Meet or Apple FaceTime. Can you kinda walk through from the app store, you know, 'cause I know that there's a, a different type of app store to the kind of apps. Would you be willing to kinda share some of those alternatives and whether or not they're free or paid? I think a lot of 'em are free, if I remember right.
- Totally. Yeah. That's one of the best things is you, you won't be paying for apps anymore unless you wanna sign into a Google account. 'cause, 'cause that's how that works. So, okay, so there are two app stores you can use on the above phone.
One is Aurora store. Aurora store is made by this gentleman, Rahul. And he's based, it's like so many people use this app, but it's a way to download apps from the Google Play store anonymously.
Now I'm gonna show you the really cool thing about Aurora store. Now, Josh, have you ever like gone into the store and then like found a snack you like, and you look at the back and you see, you read the ingredients and it's like a bunch of stuff. You're like, what is, what is this actually, what am I putting in my body? - Yeah, - Well Aurora store is exactly that. But for apps, now look at this, this is Adobe Acrobat Reader reading PDF files on your own, you know? Yeah. What, what privacy implications could it possibly have? Well, Aurora store will tell you how many trackers are embedded.
So you can see right here, there's actually nine different companies in this PDF reader. And so Google, Facebook's in there. Adobe's in there of course. And you know, these are, these are, these are typically analytics and advertising services, but they can also be telemetry. And they have the same permissions that the underlying app does.
So on average, on the Google Play store, there's five of these per app. It's ridiculous. And that's why most of these apps are free. 'cause they're, they're selling your data. So now because you can read the nutrition facts, you can see what apps are junk food, you can make in more an informed decision about what goes in your phone. Interesting. So, - So that's - Really cool. And yeah,
- So looks like that app store has a lot of the apps that we're used to using. Now I would assume though, that you still have, like if I wanted to use Instagram, I would still need to log into an Instagram account, whereas it looked like with YouTube there was maybe a way that I could, you could watch and download videos, which by the way, normally you would have to have a YouTube premium account in order to download videos. So you're saying that that's just something you could do for free using whatever this app was, right? - Totally right. And that's another example of this isn't just an alternative, it is, it is better. A lot of these features that are paywall you're getting for free.
And so Josh, yeah, you're, you're right, you know, you can get all these apps, you can get Instagram, you can get Snapchat, you can get Facebook, it'll work. It's not that you won't have these things anymore. You have the freedom to choose and to use these apps on the phone and it's gonna be a more private way to use them. But you know, you're still gonna connect to these big tech companies. So for the most part, everything except 3D games and some banking apps, those are the only apps that may not work on the above phone because of its high security requirements. And then Google's enforcing these, which I don't think it has anything to do with security, but these new APIs that let the phone validate, Hey, is this a fully Google compliant operating system? So those are a few of the apps that may not work, but I would say 90, 97% of apps you would find on the app store will work, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, you know, you name it a lot of big tech apps will work as well.
Even even Google Zone apps, Gmail, Google Drive, you can still use those two and I'll, I'll get into that a little bit later. But you can install Google services if you would like using Graph Os. Now the other point to that question you were asking is you're asking about the features, right? You're asking about new pipe. So this is an app called New Pipe and, and yeah, these features that were paywall, like for instance, there's no ads on new pipe.
So that's one that's great. You can play it in the background so you can, - Yeah, - Might be able to hear yourself on the background right there. But you can play music that way.
And it's those, so those are some really good features you get. You can, and you don't have to sign in, you can subscribe to different channels. Let's see if I can go to my subscriptions here. There we go. We have everyone we've ever been on an interview with over here. So you can subscribe to it, you get notifications, you get updates. The only thing you can't do is comment and you know, so yeah, still really cool.
- That's interesting. Okay, so you've got new pipe instead of the YouTube app itself. Is that something that's only available on an open source platform? You know, the graphos above phone, something like that? Or is that something that I could even start using on an iPhone or a a Android phone? - You can, so you can get new pipe on on Android as far as I know. I don't think it, there's anything for iPhone unfortunately.
But maybe there is, you know, there might be a YouTube alternative out there. But Android is a really good thing for anyone who has an Android phone to download. 'cause these are the free and open source apps I was talking about. And there's plenty of alternatives for everything. Typically more private, typically offline first or, or local, local focused. So yeah, this is the, this is the free and open source app store and you can get all sorts of different type types of apps here.
There's bible studies apps, there's Bitcoin wallets, there's private, there's VPNs, and there's, they're putting new stuff on it every day. So I would say that like throughout figuring out what apps you want to use, you can look at the asteroid store first and then if you can't find it there, you really need to go to Aurora store. You can do that. But all of the apps on the phone, with the exception of one app, which is Magic Earth, which is, it's not open source, but they have a pretty good privacy policy. It's like a turn by turn navigations, you know, incorporates traffic, all that sort of jazz.
Everything else is free and open source. And we pretty much have all of the alternatives laid out here. - Yeah, I did notice that. Like, so I went through, just for my own experience, I took an, what is the, it's a Pixel seven or a Pixel six personally that I had purchased from Google and I flashed it with Graphos and it, you know, it took a couple hours I'd say it was not a difficult process, but certainly not something that my mom or dad would necessarily feel comfortable doing. The alternative and what you guys offer is the above phone, which comes and it came to me, it's a very similar, it's a Google Pixel phone that's been flashed with Graphos as an o as an operating system, but then it had all of these apps and the privacy settings already set up. And I think that that would be one of the big advantages of, of having the above phone.
Are there other things that are happening behind the scenes with your phone versus just a traditionally flashed, you know, Google Pixel phone with graph? - Absolutely, yeah. So it's a custom image and so it's got all of the apps on there, it saves you a lot of time. It's also got a lot of the settings that would normally take some time to figure out and set up already set up on there. And it's really easy to use.
You just turn it on, put in your pin code and, and you're pretty much ready to go. You can start, you can start playing around with it right away, right? So for those of us that value time, it's really easy to get up and started. And we have excellent guides and knowledge bases on how to use this thing. So, you know, you talk about how we, we, we don't necessarily need to get to perfection, but we need to find out what's, you know, what will work for us. And so what we've aimed to do is try to get 80% of the most important stuff, boom, done right out of the way.
And we've, you know, we've helped people from all walks of life. We've helped 80-year-old grandmas. This, we've, the above phone has been the first phone a kid might get at 15 or 16 years old. And yeah, we, that's, that's kind of what we do is we help people get o onboarded really quickly.
In fact, one of the things we do that not many other companies do is every time you purchase a phone, you actually get a free support call with a real life person. So kind of like, just like how you and I are sitting here, one of our support people would help you move everything over from your iPhone, your phone numbers, your contacts, your photos and videos and get you set up on the above phone. So we take care of a lot of the support education, the phone's already set up. And then we also have our suite of software services, which I'll mention really briefly. They're optional, you don't need to use them for the phone. But as you know, Josh, how important A VPN is, we, we offer that service.
And so we offer several different services for a single subscription of a hundred dollars a year. Right now those services are VPN email, calendar, encrypted voice calls, video calls, video conferencing through jitsu and an internet phone number and a search engine. So yes, you get all of those things for a hundred bucks a year. And yeah, we're using open source software all the way through. So that's what we do is we want to give you the whole package right outta the gate. So you're off and you're running.
- That's really interesting. Okay, I wanna ask you some more questions about this in just a moment, but before we do that, and I'm really excited, Hakeem has been very kind in offering in, in like, there's gonna be an offer for the above phone, but I did wanna mention the fact that this live stream is, is being sponsored by DeleteMe. You guys know that I've been using and talking about DeleteMe for years now. I started using them back in I think 2022 or 21. So it's been a little while now.
And during that time they have continuously found. So when we're talking about privacy and we're talking about ways that we can make sure that we are, are protecting our personal data, one of those ways, there are just so many things that we talk about. One of those ways is making sure that your data is not your personal data, your phone number, your address, your email address is not just out there on the, on the, on the web. It's not being bought and sold by data brokers. And so DeleteMe goes, it finds your information, you give them the, your phone number and your, your address and all this stuff.
You don't give them your social security number. You don't give them a, a credit card number in order to go search for that. But you find you have give give you all this stuff and you, and and they'll go find it and they'll make removal requests on your behalf. And so this is something that I recommend for my parents and for a lot of people it's just very easy to set up and use and just have in the background. So if you go to joindeleteme.com/allthingssecured,
you can get 20% off of any plan. And yeah, so go ahead and grab that. There's gonna be a link in the description here.
Hakeem, going back to you, you know, I had a question here talking about cloud storage with any kind of de Googled or dappled phone, how, how do you go about making sure that like right now I can connect, like a lot of what I do on this phone connects to my laptop or it connects to other parts of my life. Is that possible when we're dealing with open source os when we're, when we're extricating ourself from Google and Apple? - Yeah, most definitely. And and the cool part is, is you can be completely responsible for it as, as well.
And there are different apps that we use that will sync files between your phone and your computer. I actually have what we, we do a private laptop as well and I thought I would pull out a demo it, but I won't worry about it. But right now I have, so there's this app called Sync thing and you can set up your folders, you can see I have my camera set up here to sync and it will actually, whenever I take a picture in maybe like 30 seconds, that that picture will show up on my computer.
So all the data can be backed up and this is really good solution that you can use to back up your files and folders and stuff. And then there's more manual things to like A USB that you would use. Now this is kind of like, we don't run a cloud storage service, but if we did, you know, we might, we might recommend that.
I don't really have a current recommendation right now, but I think it's always great to be completely in control of your data and you know, and, and so this is a really good way to do that. It's called Sync Thing and you can set it up from any device. - Very cool. Alright, let, let me, I'm gonna walk you
through a couple of the apps. I'm looking at my phone, my, my Apple phone right now. And I want you, if you can to just share with me, just off the top of your head, what is the alternative app that you're using for this? So some of them we've already already talked about, right? We've got YouTube and the alternative to that. What, what's that app called? - It's called New Pipe. - New Pipe, okay. Podcasts. I listen to my podcasts often on my phone.
I'm assuming there's a, some kind of open source or foid alternative to that. What would that be? - It's called Antenna Pod. Yeah, antenna Pod. Let's see if I can find you here. All Things Secured.
- Oh, I don't, no, I don't have a podcast. - Oh, you don't have a podcast? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although that'd be interesting if it just showed up - There.
There is, there's a one that's that's similar but yeah, so here we go. Yeah, you know, you can find whatever podcast on there too. And it's similar to New Pipe too. You can download it to your phone, you can stream it, you can subscribe. - Okay. All right. And so then Google Maps or Apple Maps, the alternative to that is wh which, what, what did you use again? - Osmond, O-S-M-A-N-D-O, Osman, Android.
- Okay. - So OpenStreetMaps is what it stands for. - Okay. Lemme see here. You talked about banking being kind of, it's a hit or miss. It depends on the bank that you have, but would you even recommend having your a banking app on, on a pri on a privacy phone anyway? - I would, I mean I think this is, I think Graph eight OS is the most secure phone that anyone could buy right now. And so if your banking app does work, that's great.
I have a local credit union and that app works on, on my phone, so I'm pretty happy with it. Chances are the bigger the bank, you know, it might be a little bit harder. Some people what they like to do is they actually have like a dedicated web browser and a second profile, which we didn't even get to that, but you can actually have phones within phones here.
So you can create a second profile, which is, for instance, I have this travel profile here. This is a separated encrypted container which can't access anything on the main phone and vice versa. So you can see it's in a different language. I've got different in here and you can use these separate containers for your banking apps or you can visit it within the web browser and try and keep it clean and separate from the rest of your web browsing activity on the main phone. So this is a feature called a user profiles and it's very, very popular.
Pretty easy to use too. - Okay, very interesting. I didn't realize that that, is that possible with all Graphos or is that an above phone thing? - That's possible with any phone that's - Graphos. Okay. So then from here, like what about the, one of the other things that I do with my phone is I will, I'll read, I'll use, I'll either use Audible or I'll use Amazon's Kindle.
I wish I could be away from Kindle, but like they, it's, it's been hard to like a, I've just got a lot of books there. I'm assuming I could download Kindle. Is there like an, the way that they've got their, their protections in place, I would assume that you can't just do an open source and pull in your Kindle books, could you? - I don't, I don't think so. I think they're, the publishers are really heavy on their DRM. It's kind of the same thing, like trying to get your, your music library out of iTunes or Apple Music or whatever it is nowadays.
But, but you know, you can always read PDFs online and there's definitely PDF readers on the above phone and there's different, different sites that you could get PDFs from. - Yeah. - But it's not as easy to use as a Kindle. - Yeah. What about, what about reading or sorry, listening to music. I'm assuming you can, you can download Spotify, maybe not Apple Music, but yeah, Pandora, those type of apps.
- I was gonna say, I'm not a hundred percent sure on this, but I think Kindle would work on this phone. - Okay. - You can always ask if you guys want to know, you know, are curious about whichever app you can go to abovephone.com, there's a little button the bottom right
and that will go to our support team, which they're up to date 'cause they deal with so many people. But music, yes you can, you can download Spotify and there are ways to watch music. Well there's ways to listen to music off of YouTube music for free as well.
And then what did you ask about? What was the last thing? - Yeah, music. I was Spotify, Pandora, apple music stuff, - Everything except Apple Music should work. - Yeah, I would, I would assume that, yeah. Okay. Alright. So you know, we've talked about that. I, I know that, you know, you can, you can sign into your Gmail account but there, you know, if you're gonna make your, if you're gonna take the time to move over to something like an above phone or any kind of open source os it, it's actually worth setting up an encrypted email. It sounds like you guys have something that you offer and you know, I've got proton mail that I've like and, and have used a lot.
Like I I assume it would, it would operate pretty much the same here with that you would when you're checking your phone on or checking email on any other phone, - Correct. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. And, and yeah, so our email service, it's, it's not encrypted like proton. Okay. So it's not, doesn't have that end-to-end encryption,
that proton offers, but you can always encrypt it yourself. And what we offer is just an email that is private. It's, it's not logged and when you delete the emails, it's, it's completely gone from, from our servers and there's a whole thing about email and you know, how encrypted you can really make it. But I'll leave that for another day. So we've got this, this email and then we've also got a calendar that you can use. And these, these are actually SYC together.
You can see I've got groceries, all the stuff going on here. Badminton, apparently I play badminton and, and this is hooked up, it's connected to the email. So you can create an event here and it'll send out an invite to all of your friends.
And then of course we have this encrypted messaging app. This is called XMPP and Josh, you might, you know, you might wanna check this out or I'm happy to share some ideas with you later. But this is a free, decentralized, completely open source messaging protocol. It's called XMPP. It's been around for 25 years, believe it or not. Oh wow.
Google Hangouts was built on top of it. WhatsApp was built on top of it, but they never told you what they were using under the hood. So it already does everything that iMessage could do with just getting people to use it.
But it's really easy to sign up. It's free. We offer a private XMPP server for within that a hundred dollars a year subscription. And so our server doesn't do any logging and it's, you know, just really well kept, well maintained. And then you can run this internet phone number service on top of it. So you can see kind of, you can text people, you can have contacts in here, you can send pictures to people. And so you've got that.
And then I will show you the video conferencing tool once again, which we looked at that. The VPNI think this is good. This is our VPN service, wait for it to start up here.
So you can see we have five different sites around the US where you can connect to our VPN service and then we have one in the eu. So yeah, this is similar to most VPN providers using A-V-V-P-N protocol called wire guard. Yeah. And it's, we've just made it super, super easy to use. It's integrated with everything else, so, - Yeah. Yeah, that's, I I I think that's great.
Wire guard I know is one of the newer protocols that has been proven to be a lot faster and more lightweight than something like open source or open VPN, is that right? Yeah, - That's right. Yeah. - PPTP and a lot of those other types. Okay, well great. One more question and then I'll open it up, see if there's anybody out there that has some, some questions for you.
If you do, go ahead and just leave them in the comments and we'll try to address those as we can. But my question for you is, as you've done this, as you've worked with a lot of people, what have been the biggest obstacles that either you or other people have had to overcome in order to live without Apple or Google as much as possible? Like are there things that you've just seen over and over again that it's just, this has been really hard? Or is it it it's just people like we build it up in our head to be di more difficult than we realize? - Yeah, I, I don't think, I mean, I think the people, people don't realize you can't send large video files through text message. You know, I think, I think iMessage has spoiled, you know, people from not even understanding, right? How text messages actually work.
'cause they're kind of used to the ecosystem on iPhone. So I think that's been the kind of the biggest piece of it. But, you know, we're, we're building solutions around every single thing we can find. We're working on a solution that will, you can upload a video to it and it just sends off as a link so you can send it by text message.
I think for most people we can meet all of their needs. There's only slight quirks or just different, it's a different mental model for most people. And then of course, the people who really are bought into Google or Apple's ecosystem, they, they, they have to go to that transition process where either they switch their data over or they make the choice, Hey, okay, I've got an, I've got an above phone, I've got a private de Google phone, but I will use Google Drive on it because at least it's more private than it would be on a normal phone. And they, they have the freedom to do that.
So that's it for most people. And then those people who are really dug in will usually keep that first phone to them. And that kind of works too because as you know, you know, making different identities online is, is something that works. So some people, sometimes people wanna create a new private identity online that they do their research with or they, you know, maybe they're starting a new business with. And so the two phone solution really works well for that. - Yeah, I really like that because I think for, even for me, as I was thinking through it and like, okay, I'm gonna move from my iPhone to, you know, the above phone and I was like, oh, like the, the anxiety over, I don't know how everything's gonna transition or how, well how, how I'd be able to stay connected, let's say with my family that's not in Thailand.
It, it, it was a little overwhelming. And so I do like this idea and I think it's, it's good for people to hear this because one of the things I talk about a lot on this channel is, hey, privacy and security doesn't have to be this like binary, you know, you're either, you know, not private and secure and then all of a sudden you change everything in your life and now you're private and secure. It's, it is a small step-by-step process.
And so even just this idea, which is what I've been doing myself of, of having both phones and maybe keeping iPhone on airplane mode when I don't need it for, you know, the day-to-day use and using the privacy phone when, you know, for, for most of what I'm doing is, is a great way to just kind of take those steps and then slowly introduce the apps that I feel like I absolutely need on my open source phone and then, you know, try as much as I can to, to not be using the ones that require me to log to, to different platforms, which is, which is hard to do. It, it, it takes a little bit of time. - It, it's, it's, you know, and it getting, it's, it's, it's all about that first little uphill run and once you get over the hill, it's, it really is smooth sailing for, for most people they learn in about two weeks and they've got a really good handle on the phone.
But yeah, what you suggested is, is a really good idea too. I mean, that actually helps your productivity, right? Kind of being in one zone for one phone and then being in another. So when you are using your family phone, it's all about connecting with your family and getting, you know, getting all of those things worked out. And then when you're on your business phone, it's all about business. It, it ends up making you more productive. And that's how I like, you know, that's how I would like people to start thinking about this is an investment into your own relationship with technology. So
- Yeah. Well we're gonna close this up in just a moment with Hakeem by asking him how we can get started with an above phone or with Graphene os But before we do that, I wanna say one more thank you to DeleteMe who sponsored this live stream. If you want to have your data, your personal data from your phone number, email address, your cell phone number, your, your at your physical home address removed from the internet, you can use their service. They continually monitor and, and make requests, legal requests to take that stuff down. You can get 20% off using the link here, which is joindeleteme.com/allthingssecured.
So Hakeem, as we close out here, can you share like what are the best next steps for somebody who, let's say somebody who wants to just kind of dip their toe into this, you know, living without Google and Apple and then somebody who's willing to invest, let's say a little bit into something like an above phone. What are, what are the options next steps for them? - Yeah, beautiful. I would think for the person who's dipping their toe in, do you just learn more about what we've got going on and you could go to learn.abovephone.com and I've done a lot of webinars on the subject, so if you're not sure, like how am I gonna communicate with people, what do I do? You have a bunch of different courses and these are, these are all for free too. You, you can just go in and watch them put in your email, you'll, you'll be able to watch them.
But we have a lot of different things here breaking out of tech addiction, the security of, of graph bnos and open source navigation, all that kind of stuff. So if you wanna learn, you can go there. Again, that's learn.abovephone.com and then if you go to abovephone.com/ats - "ATS" for All Things Secured, you can actually see some specials that we're collaborating with this channel on. And we have these different phones and stock here.
So we've got the seven, the nine and the nine Pro XL here on sale. They're gonna be in sale for the next week or so. And if you have any questions, there's this chat with us button in the bottom right. But these three phones, these are really solid phones at different price points. Of course I recommend the nine for most people, you're gonna get almost seven years of updates. So it's gonna be a phone you can use until 2031, which is really, really nice.
Not having to buy a new phone in a really long time. And they're also really, really great phones. We've got tablets which are actually running the same operating system as the phone. So you can do everything except put a SIM card into it. And that's something I didn't mention earlier. These phones will work with any cell service anywhere on earth.
You just plug the, your, your SIM card in and you've got the text and calls working pretty much right away. We also have our Linux laptops, which we can get into later, but this is, we're running an advanced version of Linux. Again, really easy to use all the services that we've mentioned today, you can also use on the laptops.
So just ask us if you have any questions using this button. The bottom right, we'd be happy to help you. We have people all throughout the week that are responding. And yeah, again, if you decide to get a device, we will sit on call with you for an hour and we'll help you get transitioned over. You've got a lot of support, you've got videos, you've got educational guides, and you'll be really well supported. So don't feel scared or anxious.
You can do this and you've already started, you've shown the intention by following this, the awesome all things secure channel. So yeah. - Yeah, that's, that's great. I mean, I think to hear everybody like for you to hear clearly like this open source is stuff that you, you can set up Linux on a, on a, a laptop.
You can set up graphos on, on a phone. But I've, I've done that and it's not always the most intuitive. So if you're the, if you're wanting to have this just kind of out of the box all set up privacy, security settings, just to fine tuned in, that's where going to something like abovephone.com/ats and you can check out the different options they have there. Or like Hakeem said, I'll have links to all this below once we're done here. But you can go to learn.abovephone.com
and you can learn about a lot of these open source alternatives that he was, that he's been talking about here. So Hakeem, I wanted to say thank you so much for your time and sharing with us. I appreciate everything that you've been able to, to share and, and hope that we can stay in contact.
2025-02-28 23:08
