Calling All Grifters: On Hawking The Freedom Phone

Screengrab From the Freedom Phone Website

Those of you who travel know the way it works when you book hotels. The hotel with the most ads and the biggest online footprint has a room listed for, say, $250. But…there’s a special discount available just for you! If you book through this website or use this code or hop up and down while clucking like a chicken, you can get this room for the low low price of $200! Which would be a great deal if the room weren’t actually worth $150.

Trump Tower, for example, as of this writing has $736 rooms available for $626. $771 rooms are available for $655. If you’re a really high roller, that $2352 two-room suite can be yours for the low-low price $2000. Which would be a great deal except that nearby quality hotels have rooms at a fraction of that price, right there on the same website. But some people will still take the pricier room. Sometimes because they think it must be better. But in this specific case, some people will pay extra for the “privilege” of staying in Donald Trump’s hotel.

I thought about that last week when the MAGAsphere exploded with advertisements for the so-called “Freedom Phone”, complete with amazing discounts if you used the name of the Right Wing commentator advertising it. What is the Freedom Phone? Good question:

Erik Finman, the self-proclaimed “Bitcoin millionaire,” has launched a new smartphone designed to fight back against Big Tech companies by promoting free speech and security.

The Freedom Phone comes with its own app store, which will feature apps that are blocked or banned by Apple and Google, although the details haven’t yet been given. It has already been endorsed by conservative commentator Candace Owens.

Maybe it’s just me but “22-year-old Bitcoin millionaire Erik Finman” sounds an awful lot like “teenage investment fund millionaire Jacob Wohl”. You can watch his announcement here and see if you get the same “arrested on a Chinese dissident’s yacht” vibe that Andrew did when we talked about it.

The Freedom Phone operates with its own FreedomOS software and comes with lots of storage, a 6-inch screen and a large camera. As is the case for the app store, however, details on the features are still scarce.

According to Finman, the Freedom Phone “does everything your current phone does, except censor you and spy on you.” Unlike Apple and Android devices, the Freedom Phone will have no app tracking, no keyboard tracking and no location tracking.

Finman said the handset will feature Trust, a security tool designed to warn users whenever an app or website is tracking them, and it gives them the chance to stop that from happening.

Now, there may be several questions that occur to the more savvy among you. After all, Apple and Google are massive companies with thousands of employees and facilities all over the globe. How can one “Bitcoin millionaire” suddenly create a competing phone overnight?

The answer is that…he probably can’t. After noticing that the website contained no technical details on the phone, reporters began trying to figure out what exactly was being offered. The consensus seems to be that it’s a cheap knockoff Chinese phone that usually retails for $120:

Freedom Phone’s website is nearly totally devoid of technical information about the device. Finman declares in the promotional video that the Freedom Phone is “comparable to the best smartphones on the market” and “truly is the best phone in the world.”

In fact, Freedom Phone appears to be a simple rebranding of a budget phone called the “Umidigi A9 Pro,” made by the Chinese tech company Umidigi. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Finman confirmed that the Freedom Phone was manufactured by Umidigi, but couldn’t say immediately which Umidigi phone it was based on.

The Freedom Phone’s $500 price tag would represent a substantial markup on the Umidigi A9 Pro. That phone is available on Chinese retail giant AliExpress for $120 — less than one quarter of the price of a Freedom Phone.

As of this writing, there are still no technical details on the website. There are just lots of “buy it now” buttons. And, notably, there is a note that the phone cannot be returned once it is opened, which is a much harsher return policy than supposed technodevils Apple and Google employ.

I am skeptical about this product in the same way that bees are skeptical of murder hornets. I’m not going to say it’s a scam, since we have so few details. But it’s coming with flashing neon signs a mile high. People are being encouraged to buy an unreviewed product with no technical specs sight unseen. And while it’s easy to remarket cheap phones, building your own app store is not. An app store is a gigantic technical challenge, both to build and to maintain. And promising an app store that is “uncensored” sounds ridiculous. Are they going to allow apps that circulate kiddie porn or allow terrorists to coordinate attacks? I don’t think so. Even if they have set up their own app store, you can bet that Google and Apple’s lawyers will be looking at it extremely closely. Ars Technica has a rundown of all the reasons to be suspicious of this thing and sheds some light on the supposed app store.

As pointed out by XDA’s Mishaal Rahman on Twitter, the phone’s “PatriApp” Store appears to be no more than a rebranded Aurora Store, an open source client for the Play Store. This isn’t an alternative app store like F-Droid or the Amazon App Store—Aurora connects to Google’s Play Store servers and is the Play Store app catalog; it just uses an alternate client. Sure enough, videos like this one show that the app store has all the mainstream Google Play apps you would expect, like YouTube, Google Photos, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, Snapchat, and more. It would be possible to rig up the open source Aurora client to connect to something other than the Google app store, but the presence of so many major app vendors indicates that the Freedom Phone is simply piping in the Play Store. The only other (much less likely) explanation is piracy.

The OS itself seems to be mostly cribbed from open source Android OS. Finman needs to be careful here on exactly what he’s doing. There’s a non-zero chance he may trip some regulatory wire or infringe on intellectual property in some way. If so, I expect the ensuing lawsuits to be cast as “BIG TECH TRYING TO SILENCE US!” That might even be the point because there is nothing the shambling creature calling itself conservatism these days likes more than victim status. But as Andrew put it so eloquently on Twitter:

Gravity is oppression when you jump of the building and smack the concrete

— Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) July 16, 2021

Maybe this will work out and we’ll have an OS tailored to conservatives. But this smells like the early stages of a Trump-adjacent grift. There were the folks who grifted millions out of Trump supporters to build the border wall that then embezzled it. There were the grifters who were going to challenge the election and mostly raised money off Trump supporters and racked up giant legal fees. There was the recent hilarity when an organization for young conservatives “accidentally” invited a porn star to their convention and then kicked her out. I don’t know if the MAGA world will wise up to the money treadmill they’re on and decline the Freedom Phone (assuming such an object ever exists). But they should. Because, as Gizmodo points out, there are far better-established options if privacy and Big Tech are your concern:

The funny thing is, if Trump voters are looking for a way to get off the “Big Tech” grid, there’s no need for them to buy this sketchy shit. There are actually entire subcultures within the phone industry dedicated to escaping the Android/iOS paradigm. You can wade into the de-Googled phone sector, for instance—where Android phones are sold that have ostensibly been refurbished to rid the devices of code that will “send your personal data” back to the tech giant. There’s also the Linux-based Pinephone, which sells at a fraction of the Freedom Phone’s cost (between $150 and $200), and is a favorite of those in the privacy community. All of these come with caveats, obviously, but the point is that there are much more transparent and affordable options than the Freedom Phone.

And this fact — that there are well-established, readily available, secure and detailed options to get around Big Tech — exposes what the Freedom Phone is really all about. It’s about the same thing Trump’s ongoing grifts and the associated griftlets being run by various Trump remoras always is: euchring more cash out of Trump’s supporters. And what they’re counting is not concerns about privacy. They are relying on Trump’s supporters showing their loyalty to the political cult. All of this — not just the phone, but everything that has gone on since the election — has been about telling the emperor his clothes are great while simultaneously implying that if people fail to give money to the tailors, they’re not real patriots. You can make a living that way. Assuming you can sleep at night.

To the extent that there is any principle involved, it’s not about “censorship”. The Right Wing is quite happy with censorship if it involves Critical Race Theory or the 1619 Project. And I suspect very very few Trump supporters want a phone, an app store or a social media platform that fails to get rid of truly objectionable or illegal content. No, what this is about is free speech…for the Trumpists. What they mean by “CENSORSHIP!” is not true freedom of expression or some absolutist position on the First Amendment. What this is about is creating a space where conspiracy theories and offensive gibberish can be spewed with impunity. Dave Weigel wrote recently about the conflict between base and cringe that defines much of the political debate around Trump.

It’s not complicated, so long as you ignore the usual liberal and conservative labels and view political debate through two frames — “based” or “cringe.” Based means behaving how you want to behave, confident in the belief that you’re right, and that your opposition knows it. Cringe means following rules that you did not write, hewing to norms and tradition and nuance, and broadcasting your own sensitivity to the feelings of others. The cringe politician assumes that the world is changing, and he or she had better get ahead of it; the based politician assumes that he or she can stay in the old world and force everyone else to adapt. Nobody claims to be cringe, but plenty of people claim to be based. Part of the fun of declaring yourself being based is getting to label the other side as weak, wrong and pathetic — and, well, cringe.

To be honest…I can….kinda see the appeal here? Our cultural landscape has become so littered with rhetorical landmines that it seems like celebrities, politicians and media figures spend half their time apologizing for things no one was actually offended by. We are constantly being fed new paradigms of what constitutes acceptable language — a debate of which very few of us are part — and being told that failing to hew to that paradigm means one is bigoted.

But…conservatives are just as obsessed with offense as anyone else. Or maybe I just imagined Colin Kaepernick being black-balled out of the NFL. Or just hallucinated the constant calls for boycotts because some corporation did something they didn’t like. Maybe the uproar over every utterance of Nikole Hannah-Jones is actually a reality TV show.

Like Weigel, I like to think the bulk of the American people are running out of patience with this nonsense. They are tired of both the folks who stomp around online looking for things to be offended by and the folks who say offensive things and then act like they’re victims when they receive any blowback. It may be one of the reasons we went with a president who — despite 74 years of being a non-stop source of gaffes, punditry and confusion — has made the last six months the quietest of any presidency since George H. W. Bush was on his motorboat.

In that light, I think it will be very interesting to see what happens with this Freedom Phone. I’m not sensing a lot of enthusiasm among the rank-and-file Trump supporters, which I hope is a demonstration of their basic common sense. But if a phone marketed to people with the explicit message of “you can say whatever offensive thing you want and no one will stop you” fails, maybe there’s hope we can one day escape the perpetual outrage cycle.

The gripping hand, of course, is that Freedom Phone may turn out to be complete vaporware. We don’t have an actual product yet, which is why Finman reminds me so much of Wohl, whose “shocking revelations” turned out to be giant mounds of nothing. If we see him on someone’s driveway slumming with Milo, we’ll know for sure. But I do note one of the biggest reasons to think this is much ado about nothing: Some of the biggest names hawking the Freedom Phone, like Candace Owens, are doing it from…their iPhones.