The Offline-First Mobile Setup

Offline-First Emergency and Private Phone Setup

Most of the tracking by companies are done using online connections. So the fastest and easiest way to prevent that is to take your phone into airplane mode, assuming your phone manufacturer didn't put any backdoors in airplane mode function (they probably did, but it is still a valuable feature).

The second use case for going offline-first is being able to use your phone in an emergency when internet services are not available (examples include earthquakes and regular service disruptions an ISP/GSM can have).

Third use case is you are guaranteeing being able to access what is necessary for you in a censorship situation. What you already downloaded can not be deleted remotely in most cases (there was a case Huawei phones deleting photos from peoples gallery apps to censor info related to protests).

What do you need from a phone?

Put your phone away and think what will you miss first if it didn't even existed. Here is a table of what I thought and solutions I found:

What do I need?	Description and Solution	Download Link
Being able to research information	Internet is a valuable research tool. We will download the information before needing it to solve this issue. Download Kiwix in your phone. Then download sources which you think it will be useful. My recommendations are: Wikipedia: Try to download the largest edition of Wikipedia from the list. It will cost a lot of storage. But it worths it since you can use it as a dictionary too. You can download Wiktionary too if you want a separate dictionary. Gutenberg Project: A lot of books, costs 71GB as of writing this. StackOverFlow/StackExchange collection: If you have a computer you need to fix, consider adding them to help you. Arch/Alpine/Gentoo Wiki: Specialized wikis when you need Linux manuals. iFixit: Hardware repair guides. Xkcd: If you are bored you can look at several Xkcd comics and move on. This should cover most needs. You can always download more resources afterwards.
Communication	Phones original reason to exist. Being able to send messages between people. You can use Briar to send messages without needing internet but you will need to convince other people to install it too. Briar can send messages using WiFi (no internet just LAN), Bluetooth and Tor (if you want internet as a fallback). If your city has many people using Briar, the coverage and range will be better. Alternatively you can use Meshtastic devices paired to your phone if there is a volunteer-run MeshTastic antenna near you.
Navigation	Being able to navigate without doxxing yourself to GSM towers is important. That means your location will be known by one less entity. Also do not trust coverage of your GSM, it can just fail. Use CoMaps (fork of Organic Maps) or OSMAnd+ and download maps for your city and other places you can been to. CoMaps doesn't have Bus support still afaik so I keep both apps installed just in case. If you need a nice UI and bus support, you can try using MapsMe but it is proprietary.
Using LLMs?	If your phone has a powerful CPU and plenty of RAM you can try running LLMs on it. It can be sometimes faster to ask an LLM instead of searching inside archives I have downloaded. The con here being heavy battery usage and risk of hallucination by LLM software.
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