The Freedom Phone advertises itself as a “Free speech and privacy first focused phone”. As documented on the features page, it runs ClearOS, an Android-based OS produced by Clear United (or maybe one of the bewildering array of associated companies, we’ll come back to that later). It’s advertised as including Signal, but what’s shipped is not the version available from the Signal website or any official app store – instead it’s this fork called “ClearSignal”.

The first thing to note about ClearSignal is that the privacy policy link from that page 404s, which is not a great start. The second thing is that it has a version number of 5.8.14, which is strange because upstream went from 5.8.10 to 5.9.0. The third is that, despite Signal being GPL 3, there’s no source code available. So, I grabbed jadx and started looking for differences between ClearSignal and the upstream 5.8.10 release. The results were, uh, surprising.

First up is that they seem to have integrated ACRA, a crash reporting framework. This feels a little odd – in the absence of a privacy policy, it’s unclear what information this gathers or how it’ll be stored. Having a piece of privacy software automatically uploading information about what you were doing in the event of a crash with no notification other than a toast that appears saying “Crash Report” feels a little dubious.

Next is that Signal (for fairly obvious reasons) warns you if your version is out of date and eventually refuses to work unless you upgrade. ClearSignal has dealt with this problem by, uh, simply removing that code. The MacOS version of th