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Comment by Jason_Protell | Hacker News Reader

Freedom Phone comes with Newsmax and OANN apps pre-installed. This takes red flags to a whole new level.

https://www.freedomphone.com/

The website states

"Pre-Loaded Apps Some of the most popular banned & unbanned conservative sites & apps. Come pre-loaded directly on your Freedom phone."

It's basically "Conservative Phone"

"con phone" for short

The guy in the Freedom Phone video seriously compared Donald Trump to MLK and Abraham Lincoln. lol?

He also says "we don't ban apps, period", and the website even calls it "truly uncensorable" – I wonder how that works, but there's no technical details. I also wonder how they'll deal with spam, scams, malware, and other stuff of, ehm, questionable value that will inevitably pop up.

I couldn't find much of this "truly uncensorable" app store on the Freedom Phone website, other than the name "ClearAPPS", so I assume it belongs to ClearOS. The ClearOS website is anything but clear though; even the corporate maze sites of HP, IBM, Lenovo, etc. are more clear than that ... thing. I eventually found https://www.clearos.app, and I assume that must be it(?) I installed it on Android Emulator, and it's installed as "ClearAPPS", so I guess so.

The thing bills itself as "The Marketplace Built On the security of Decentralized Storage", whatever that may mean. If I press "News" on the app's homepage there are exactly four apps: "Fox News", "Fox Nation: Celebrate America", "America's Voice", and "Just The News". Actually, that's not true: if I select an app and go back I have 8 apps: the app list gets duplicated. If I select "Categories" and go to "News" I see much more. As will surprise probably no one, the entire thing is a buggy piece of crap.

When you first start their app it downloads the repository list from their servers; this must be the "truly uncensorable decentralized storage" they're talking about shrug. I couldn't find any clear Terms of Service for this entire thing in either the app or on the website.

Source isn't available either as near as I can find; ClearOS has a GitHub, but last update is from 2019.

[1]: https://www.clear.software/pages/marketplace-terms-of-servic...

That marketing video on the homepage is... not particularly convincing, and watching it gives me secondhand embarrassment.

Ha ha, the "PatriApp" store.

Is this guy a Libertechian?

Does that video... actually have the "Activate Windows" watermark in the thumbnail?

How did they even manage to put that watermark there in the first place?

Did they just take a screenshot from an unactivated Windows machine?

This whole project is a joke.

...It does!

I honestly don't know what to do with this information. Is this an intentional message? It's extremely overt.

I wonder if it's similar to how some phising emails will contain intentional grammar and spelling errors. I've been told that this works as a filter, since savvy people will be put off by such things leaving only the easy targets.

Wow. With "secondhand embarrassment" you have deftly labeled a feeling I have had so many times in my life but have never been able to succinctly name.

That term even has its own Wikipedia page:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_embarrassment

It’s a pretty popular German word as well: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fremdsch%C3%A4men

It's also called 'cringe' in gen Z speak

You mean you weren't convinced by the argument that if MLK or Lincoln didn't have access to Facebook the world would have been a different place?

Or was it the credentials of "I bought $12 of Bitcoin when I was young and it increased in value" that didn't sell you?

It seems like a slam dunk from over here, so I'm confused as to what you didn't find convincing....

Wow. Is this a parody phone or something from The Onion?

“They’re not sending their best.”

Reality has become indistinguishable from the onion since somebody actually built and shipped a five blade razor

Reality overcame the Onion when somebody actually built and shipped a seven blade razor. I wish I were making this up.

They went full circle and now Gillette is selling a premium razor for sensitive skin… with two blades. No kidding: https://gillette.com/en-us/products/razors-trimmers-and-blad...

Jillette, the best the Gullible Man can Get! - Now with over 24 rotating nano-blabes!

I think this also happened years ago in a whole different context when some marketing genius invented the "shampoo without balm".

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