Mobile devices are impressively efficient, mainly in hardware:

• Power management. Both the batteries are good and software manages well.
• Fully-featured. Sensors, microphone, cameras, screen, speaker, wired and wireless interfaces. Everything you'd need to consume technology.
• Lightweight.

But despite all this advancement we also get limitations and drawbacks:

• Mainly a proprietary environment.
• Vendor lock-ins (even for quitting Android, in case of Xiaomi)
• Decrease of user control. Sensors are always-on, soft limitations are imposed (i.e., microphone and camera only used by a single app at same time)… This list is endless.
• Aggressive espionage.
• …

I decided to separate a phone for personal use, and keeping it fully offline. It's my "handheld note-book" (featured with camera, sensors and location tracking). Seems cooler than a plain note-book and pen.

I have a intensive habit of dumping thoughts, and a "never-ending note-book" is more than enough.

But technology and privacy doesn't conciliates well, and when outdated, the problem is worse.

So after a long period ignoring the nightmare under my bed, I updated reseted it, and with the decision to never connect it to the internet.

Updates requires internet, and it becomes unreliable.

So the solution I found was to format the phone, and aim a reproducible installation.

This was not easy, I didn't found much guidance in this goal, so the current solution got kinda mediocre, but it kinda worked:

• It downloads the defined APKs and needed data to setup the apps
• I copy that into a SD Card
• I try my best to save everything into SD Card

Yeah, far from "reproducible", but hey, this is the first prototype :)

You can check the repo in Codeberg: thisago/phoneSetup.