I've come to the conclusion that I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case (so long as you're running a userdebug build with the ability to adb root in when needed), most of people's issues aren't really with Android (although Google reducing the AOSP release schedule isn't a good sign).
I think the real problem is Google Play Services. It's far, far too tightly integrated in a way that it just seems like Android was designed to be unusable without. It's installed as a location manager internally, which gives it a shitload of permissions by default that you never grant it. There's absolutely no reason everything (notifications, the app store, some location services) has to be packaged together into one thing instead of each having its own module that can be removed at will. Play integrity just plain shouldn't exist and as far as I'm concerned is purely there to ensure no one creates a real play services alternative or another mobile OS with Android compatibility.
The ideal outcome for me would be keeping Android but effectively dissolving Play Services and instead having the concept of a core services, where instead of apps choosing to use Firebase for notifications, they instead bind to the system notifications service, and as the user I choose which implementation I want, preferably with it not installed as a system app. I'm well aware that's not going to happen, but it seems like the most practical way to break up the Google/Apple monopoly to me, Android's great but Google's services aren't.
There is microg, which implements some of this by re-implementing Google Play services but allowing you to choose your own provider for services where this is possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroG
> I think the real problem is Google Play Services. It's far, far too tightly integrated in a way that it just seems like Android was designed to be unusable without.
This is somehow by intention. In the ramp-up of Android adoption, Vendors and carriers started to fork Android and deviate too much from the core. Google needed a leverage to tie them to stay compatible to the ecosystem, Google Mobile Services (GMS) was the tool to do so. "Pass the compatibility test suite and you qualify to preload GMS".
Then, at some point, Google implemented API's in the OS which call Google's cloud infrastructure (e.g. Location services), which they didn't want to commit to the Android source for the risk of them being forked and modified, so they started to implement them in a precompiled "Google Play Services" module.
Over time, it seems Google Play Services became the preferred vehicle for Google to rollout any kind of API-changes to have them applied on all devices immediately, without waiting for the vendor to do an OS-Upgrade.
The result is that Google now promotes Google Play Service API's as the way for the most widely compatible implementation of an app. Which is...not wrong, but in the larger picture also the reason why Android is not considered "real" open-source (anymore).
> The ideal outcome for me would be keeping Android but effectively dissolving Play Services
Agree. There is still a very good OS in there, clearly written by considerate SW-Engineers.
I wonder if further developing microg or similar would be a better use of resources than Postmarket, Ubuntu touch etc? Would that be a faster path to wider adoption and therefore better chance of challenging the Android/iOS duopoly?
> Over time, it seems Google Play Services became the preferred vehicle for Google to rollout any kind of API-changes to have them applied on all devices immediately, without waiting for the vendor to do an OS-Upgrade.
> Google needed a leverage to tie them to stay compatible to the ecosystem, Google Mobile Services (GMS) was the tool to do so. "Pass the compatibility test suite and you qualify to preload GMS".
Yeah, it wasn't even totally the wrong thing when it happened. It was something I liked because you had both the manufacturers and the carriers getting in the way of OS updates.
For example, I bought a new Samsung Galaxy 4 years ago from Tmobile. Tmobile NEVER updated the phone past the initial release, even though samsung did the next android version (I forget which exactly, 9, 10?). But even samsung had dropped support for the phone basically after that single update.
The google move to pull things out of the OS and push them into the play store was welcome because it meant you were less likely to have unfixed bugs and problems due to vendor laziness.
But of course greed has taken over and now google is trying to change Android from an open source OS to a closed source one. Increasingly making it hard for the likes of GrapheneOS to exist.
> I think the real problem is Google Play Services. It's far, far too tightly integrated in a way that it just seems like Android was designed to be unusable without.
Wasn't the point of Play services to enable keeping OS "updated" regardless of the manufacturer schedule? Which is to say: they are tightly integrated because they were designed to be part of an operating system that Google can keep updated through Play Store even if the device OEM is slacking on porting upstream updates to the users.
I think it was one of those cases where "the road to hell was paved with good intentions".
I'm old enough and was very pro-android in the early days when it first released. I absolutely remember the frustrations around having vendors just REFUSE to update the OS on devices. Even things that were brand spanking new often got left to rot, and the OS updates in those days were genuinely meaningful software updates - Lots of new capabilities.
So I was actually ok with Google going down the route of moving critical software into an installable package that they controlled, that would provide a way to get new capabilities onto devices that manufacturers didn't give a shit about anymore.
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But the problem is that "Google" today sure as hell isn't the google that I liked back then (and even that google was starting to shift tone).
And now this package is a backdoor that they can use like a beat-stick to force vendors to stay on their version of Android, and it functions to make "Android" (the distro that users actually use) functionally closed-source and non-permissive.
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I still strongly believe that the appropriate regulation for this situation (across both iOS and Android) is that the company that makes the OS should be prohibited from running any sort of app store, and app stores must be selectable at device initialization (ex - the Internet Explorer ruling, but for app stores).
Somewhat, but only relevant when it comes to things like WebView but not other things. If there is a vulnerability elsewhere, your device on an older OS that the manufacturer has stopped supporting will not get any patches.
Google may think it's important to keep WebView always up to date with Play services. I couldn't care less. I still have to buy a new phone to get all updates.
> I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case
Just no. I developed for android for a long time and I have seldomly seen a worse and more confusing SDK and code base. I can give you many examples but the core layouting algorithm having quadratic complexity with the number of widgets and the single base-view class having 60.000 lines of code are just the tip of the iceberg.
I stopped in 2018. I realize that a lot has been done since then, but the base code wasn‘t changed, otherwise old apps wouldn‘t run anymore.
My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software. Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.
> Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.
And you are positive that this hasn't change in almost a decade?
> My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software.
As opposed to what? This thread is about Linux on Mobile. Are you saying that Linux on Mobile is a lot more efficient than Android? Like do you get more battery life with Linux on Mobile for the same usage?
I don't know what exactly do you mean by Android system. Does storage count? The idea of how applications aren't allowed to access each other's storage is very bad from the user perspective, for example.
Permission model of Andorid is hostile to the user and is designed to the benefit of the manufacturer. It undermines the users' ability to take advantage of their computer but allows the manufacturer / whoever installed the system to have undue and unwarranted access to the device.
My experience of using Android is very similar to using a corporate laptop configured by the least competent IT department of a large US bank: you are not allowed to do the basic and useful things, you are required to jump through a lot of hoops to have the remaining absolutely necessary things done, you cannot eliminate hostile functionality, you cannot be sure your personal stuff will remain personal (if it ever was...), it's a system that will automatically do things to you that you don't want done...
Basically, using Android sends me back to the early 2000s when this kind of setup was typical for MS Windows computers given to employees in large US companies.
I dunno, I wish Android had a cohesive backup strategy the way iOS does. iPhone is terrible but losing your phone and switching to a new is insanely easy, with all state back to exactly how it was before.
Android doesn't have it per se, but Seedvault runs on various Android-derived systems (notably but not only GrapheneOS) and does a bang-up job of backing up both applications and data
"Bang-up" is a good description of what Seedvault does, because your backup will have holes in it. Anything made with Android's backup system has the same problem.
Applications can specify that they can't be backed up, and you as a user have no way of overriding that. Highlights on my smartphone are Fennec (Firefox), Termux, Cromite, Element, Syncthing, various videogames and other utilities.
I absolutely want these backed up, and on any sensible system I'd just point restic to their storage locations and be done. On Android I need an arcane mess of Titanium Backup and TWRP, and god help me if I ever have to recover from a backup.
I think you are in the minority of people that feel Android is a well built "OS". Maybe from an end-user point of view it "does what you want" but its underlying architecture I think is pretty poor.
I have spent the past 2 years off and on modifying AOSP (for "reasons") and I am constantly amazed the poor quality of the code base and badly architected the overall system is.
It's a bunch of re-inventions of the wheel (start-up daemon manager, IPC, HAL, GUI, etc) with the "upper layers" written in Java with a mix of C/C++. Mixing the metaphor of a Java "run time environment" with a Linux-based kernel results in a hodepodge of pieces and having seen it up close it makes sense why "Android" user experience varies so much device to device.
Did Android need it's own bastardized libc for example (bionic)? Did Android need to have it's own start-up daemon manager? A "HAL" in C++ (wrapping Linux kernel capability) with a bunch of bridges to Java via JNI?
Writing an application for Android is also a byztantine mess of NDK, SDKs, Java build systems (Maven, Gradle, etc), XML files, Java, Kotlin, etc. Why can't icons just be SVGs, why do these have to be in some XML-formatted resource? The list goes on.
If only a few techies will be able to use Linux phone, banks will freely lock payment services access down to two platforms: ios and android. No way out, it's happening right now (in the name of "security", of course, but surprisingly it does not stop scam from happening).
Web will be locked down too, via secureboot stack browser integration (not -s, it's already actually monopolised to chrome only, as FF lives on full life support from Google).
Even when I'm still using a "classic" bank with card and a website that don't even use JS, I can't afford to use Windows Phone as my daily because it doesn't have the ride hailing apps used in my country. My current and previous office use proprietary app for clocking in and out, that are also only available on iOS and Android. Even public servants in my countries in all levels have to carry either of those two for location tracking.
Imagine traveling somewhere, and run through the things you'll need to work without tinkering. Camera, eSIM, GPS/maps, more "exotic" messaging apps that for some reason people use instead of Whatsapp.
It seems like most Linux phones are barely suitable for someone that just goes home to work 99.999% of the time.
I don't have to imagine. I've already traveled internationally with the Librem 5 and it can do what I need it to do. Esim is supported with an adapter like those from JMP, but I use a local SIM card from that country. Whatsapp I never use, Signal and Delta Chat work fine.
Perhaps we can think of this? Use a linux phone and an android phone as VM. For apps that are not immediately available as Linux apps, we continue to use the android VM. We continuously make better apps available on Linux and maybe, just maybe eventually switch completely to Linux phone.
It makes sense to have these kinds of checks because of rootkits, but sadly the poweruser is fucked.
There isn't even an option to say "I know what I am doing and if a hacker takes all my money I won't cry to the bank". Probably the banks prefer that no emulators can snoop and see how exploitable their apps are.
Still a thing with some of the Finnish banks, as I've recently learned. In my bank it costs ~20€ - unless you can't physically use a smartphone, in which case it's free. But you kinda have to know that it exists.
Barclays use both the physical hardware code generator in the UK as well as a virtual version in the app. The Bank staff also use the same physical hardware in the branch so I guess it will stay around for a while.
I use my bank's card reader to authenticate in the hopes that it will signal a need to keep supporting it. But the vast, vast majority of people just use a banking app so I fear it's a lot cause.
In Spain at least you can. I know 4 or 5 banks that let you auth via SMS, coordinates card, etc. If yours doesn't, I suggest that you complain. Some colleagues had to call theirs and insist that the bank's application didn't work on their phones. Reluctantly at first, they eventually changed their method to SMS.
The interesting thing about SMS is this isn't always usable while traveling.
For example my phone provider has really overpriced international fees ($10 / day) so instead I use an eSIM which usually only comes with data. That means I lose the ability to use text messages or phone calls for any form of verification. A number of banks and other sites also block Google Voice / VoIP numbers.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If my bank wants me to run proprietary shitware, they can supply me with their proprietary secure processor to run it on, and we're good.
Also the bank card is really part of the bank system. It doesn't do anything else, and it has to interoperate exactly as they want it to. While I may feel the right to hack on it, I'd do so entirely at my own risk. It's probably better that I don't mess with it as long as it fulfils its purpose. I can use my own device for my own stuff.
I feel the same way about ISP modems (not routers). As long as I get an Ethernet port and the modem isn't doing anything untoward, I don't see any problem with letting the ISP's network termination equipment exist inside my house. Some people think there should be a right to hand off the connection as DSL or fiber and buy your own modem, and I think you should be allowed to do that at your own risk, but I don't think the ISP should have to support it. Particularly with PON fiber or CATV, it's actually a bit dangerous to let the customer use random modems as it's a shared medium with half your street and you wouldn't want to jam them.
The frustrating part is that security increasingly means proving you are using an approved device and software stack, rather than proving that you are actually the account owner
Yeah, and currently the hivemind-approved response to people complaining about apps not working in either GrapheneOS or Linux phones is to "just use the browser. Your bank has a website, right?"
Well, I fear that loophole is quickly closing with little fanfare.
Pixels (barelly) running a binary-blob-heavy port of android is far from what is being discussed here. In fact, that is intended as a misdirection and you fell for it by bringing it in here.
It's what felt like what really killed Windows Phone. Too many things became "only available" through an iOS or Android app. Windows Phone was free as in beer towards the end and there's a possibility there would have still been a small but devoted techie audience on it, if so many things weren't already so broken from disappearing/vanished app support.
It always seemed insane to me that people accepted so easily to have everything locked behind "app stores", crazy garbage, even worse having SO MUCH PREINSTALLED BLOATWARE OUT OF THE BOX.
> buyers have to choose between the products that are available.
That is how a free market works, however it doesn't really cover the "I need to function in society and there are no good options for this device type that have the features I care about" problem.
When your choice is between the NutPuncher 9000 and the BallCrusher 17, it's something of a false choice.
The push against technical literacy helped a lot in having the masses accept all this crap.
A great deal of people don't even understand the concept of installing software if it's not via the App Store, nor do they understand what's involved in the process. Explaining the issues of having a central authority is one degree further.
It's unfortunate that democracies foster a system of corporate corruption here.
I notice this often when I try to, say, use firefox and my bank says, sort of "nah, use chrome only". And they only ever assume people to use either OSX or windows; Linux is kind of forbidden in the sense of "won't support it". But often it does not need any support, those browser or OS checks are wrong to begin with.
What banks care about is complaints volume and account closures. If you can't use your bank on your phone, go complain in person to your bank. Just do it even if you think nothing will happen. Best case they unlock the website for your account, worst case nothing happens but they still got a complaint and will have to do something if they get enough similar ones.
Don't go in person. That just wastes everyone's time as corporate will never hear about it.
Instead, call them. Insist to talk to a human. Corporate really doesn't like call center calls, and they usually have monitoring set up to track why people are calling.
Doubt that. They care about average call metrics but not why people are calling, and the call center operators have absolutely no ability to fix anything and will just work to get you off the call as quickly as possible.
Not in my experience. My bank wouldn't even talk to me when they discontinued support for a phone I had. They don't even have anyone to complain to, which is by design. You can complain about non-technical stuff, but there's nobody to report problems with their Android app. They know full well that it's more important to you to have it working than it is for them to make sure it works for you. You will throw away almost your entire monthly paycheck to have a new phone to be able to access your bank account. They won't do as much as redirect your complaint to /dev/null.
It happened because even here on HN there are many tech people that were dismissing DRMs, secure enclave and remote attestation as "it's not a big deal" or "they have their part because an evil maid sent by a state actor could steal your disk".
It sucks but I'm not sure there much I can do about it personally. If/when the banks stop supporting browsers completely, I'll be glad I have a phone that can install the app
Why do they actually need to do it? They all allow web access from just about any browser. I haven’t tried but I’m sure there must be one where the web interface works from Emacs. Why are apps different?
I really want to love mobile Linux, and have given it multiple shots before. But I just don't see how it will catch up with iOS/Android in the same way it caught up with Windows/Mac:
- OEMs have poured an enormous amount of resources into the camera software, Linux cameras are years behind from what I understand.
- Android/iOS have thoroughly optimized the UX in all sorts of subtle ways, the big one being their keyboards. I literally can't type a single correct sentence on any of the mobile linux keyboards that I've tried because there's so much proprietary magic needed under the hood to figure out what the user is trying to say (autocorrect mostly, but I recall something about how apple also virtually adjusted the sizes of the keys to make it easier to type)
- GPS, banking, and now keys for your house and car all need to work.
Linux cameras can be made to work well, it's a matter of software. Case in point, newer Ricoh/Pentax cameras actually run an a Linux firmware. (See: GR IV and K-3 Mark II/III). Parts of the software stack are already there, but noones had the will to glue it together correctly for a mobile device usecase, yet.
It's not about will. You need quite some HW for proper calibration, or cut corners a bit. Calibration is otherwise a few step process with some steps having substeps for each light source type.
That's true, but you can cut corners and still end up like 90% there. The software pipelines that can even consume detailed calibration are a pretty recent development anyway. The "cameras on Linux phones are bad" meme is induced purely by the fact that until recently there were like two or three people who have ever sat down to seriously work on this topic across the entire community. Fortunately, it's changing (although the biggest driving factor appears to be the fact that some laptops need a similar treatment now).
Well, rkisp1 driver that drives ISP on RK3399 on Pinephone Pro is available upstream in fully supported manner for like 4 years. It also has full docs in publicly available Rockchip datasheets and partial docs in calibration manuals.
What have people done with it? Some mediocre support in libcamera? :) I don't think lack of handholding is an issue here.
Pinephone is a low volume product. What you need is to get the firmware for some common device that has shipped millions of units so that the number of people with the incentive to make it work is high enough to actually build a community.
I don't know what the deal is with Linux and cameras. I've got Fedora installed on this old Retina MBP and apparently Linux somehow stopped supporting the built in webcam. I've never heard of a device losing Linux support but here we are.
Once the code is in the mainline kernel tree, things tend to stay supported indefinitely.
Some devices "work" without having real support by having some binary blob or third party code which is written against a specific kernel version. The code has to be updated when the kernel changes, which is why it's supposed to be in the kernel tree, but because it isn't the kernel developers don't know anything about it and aren't maintaining it. So then instead of working indefinitely it works until whenever third party stops updating it for current versions of the kernel. Which is why all the drivers should be in the kernel tree.
Of course, Apple isn't really that interested in supporting Linux since it's a direct competitor to macOS rather than a way to reduce their dependency on Microsoft/Google, so their hardware is more likely than most to be stuck using some reverse engineered alpha driver or proprietary blob extricated from the macOS one.
There are many such devices already. What is limited is number of people interested in FOSS/independent camera stack development AND usage/users, not lack of devices. Pine64 built and shipped about 60k phones to audience that could be the most interested/receptive - and it made about 5 people interested in doing indepth real work, that I know about.
Also RK3399 is not just pinephone pro, it's way more prominent in other things - notebooks, SBCs, ... whatever. Same ISP is in i.MX SoC, which covers another whole range of devices.
Not sure what 100's of millions shipped units to disinterrested audience achieved?
Ive been really annoyed at my iphone keyboard recently because it seems like a slow drift of whatever optimized state it was in was getting slower and slower. It seems to freeze partway thru typing something frequently now.
Years behind is not bad. Pinephone Pro has solid camera sensors and dated but good enough ISP pipeline. Original Pinephone's camera situation is limited by SoC having no ISP so at best you can try using GPU to perform the transformations, or completely rely on ISP embedded in the sensors.
I don't think the differential with software is as big as it seems. If Google completely shuts down side loading or otherwise kills AOSP as an open project, you'll get a flood of millions of people into Linux devices (my rough estimate is that it's in the low millions of people using custom Android ROMs), and that's more than enough people to start building out the software ecosystem, especially with gen AI to help speed things up.
keyboard text prediction is no more complex than some of free/open AIs that we already see in the wild.
If google doesn't shut things down, then just continue to use AOSP, which is a fine open source OS for most people's use cases.
I don't expect linux phones to catch up to ios for the mainstream, but I can see them working for me. I usually carry an actual camera with me so I don't care much about my phone one other than random utility shots / photos of receipts. And very much don't like the trend of forced app usage so having a device that physically won't run these apps helps me avoid companies that don't have a functional website.
> I don't expect linux phones to catch up to ios for the mainstream, but I can see them working for me.
That's the thing that allows them to catch up for the mainstream. Some nerds can use it and tolerate the rough edges, so they do. But the rough edges are still rough, so as more people use it, the small percentage of people willing to actually do something about it becomes a larger absolute number of people, and then more of them get shaved off. Which causes more people to use it.
The point when the devices are usable comes long before the point that they're what the majority of mainstream consumers are buying. Desktop Linux has been there for more than a decade and year after year its market share slowly goes up.
There isn't going to be a single year when its market share goes directly from 3% to 97%. There is going to be a year that its market share gets into the double digits and then continues slowly going up.
How so? To make it work on Librem 5 I had to fix some issues in Waydroid's gralloc and hwcomposer implementations, but that was back in 2022. It has just worked out-of-box ever since.
I have autocorrect and predictive text on on the iPad and off on the iPhone and it is fascinating how much better it is on the iPad. One of the things that particularly killed me was the iPhone correcting three or four words away from the cursor. There's an option for it to highlight when it does that (which it really shouldn't) but something about iPhone apps the highlights never work. iPad apps they actually work. (Maybe because every phone app thinks it needs to implement their own half-baked text boxes but iPad apps have fewer "designers" doing stupid things like that? I don't know, it's weird.) Still frustrating that there isn't a way to turn off "don't touch anything too far behind the current cursor), but being able to actually spot them when they do change is a big deal.
Over the past few years I've felt the iPhone keyboard has degraded in quality so much. At first I thought I was just getting old, but I've seen so many people with a similar sentiment that I think it is actually the devices fault.
Agreed. I got an iPhone from work and I can barely type on that thing while my Pixel with Gboard just works and gets it right 95 % of the time even if I type gibberish.
also the retrograde auto corrections drive me nuts ... like i type a word (correct) then next word and it adjusts the previous word. attempted several times to deactivate that "feature" - didn't figure out how.
Yup somehow I typo so many things or it auto corrects things I dont want it to allll the time I hate typing on my iPhone it sucks. I've personally been keeping an eye on e-ink phones. I'd really like to move off of having the ability to use websites and apps except for basic stuff like texting.
Are you all seriously arguing/considering that the barrier is something like "innovation" or "UX" or "hard work at improving the OS?"
Like seriously?
Come on. By now we should know what actually happens. The entrenched carriers will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. That's the real threat. It will look like the above, but like e.g. Google lying about why it got rid of Google Reader, the real story will be "monopolies gonna monopolize."
some small company licensed the blackberry brand and sold really good devices with physical keyboard. They had support up until 2 or 3 years ago. Gone now.
If the Clicks Communicator had an adequate camera (definition may vary by person, I take a lot of photos) and ran Linux it would be an absolute winner of a device.
Linux desktop is still not caught up with Windows/Mac in regards to graphics, gaming, and laptops hardware support.
Gaming, it is mostly Windows games via Proton, hardly any different from using MAME, FS-UAE, Amiberry,...
Graphics, most of the well known commercial packages for VFX, 3D modeling, visualisation, lack a Linux version.
Laptops, just two years ago I failed to make UEFI work with the myriad of distributions I tried out, unless booting from external USB drive, and even then there was the whole termal configuration.
Linux desktop has always worked, and was better for me. There will always be stuff you can't have on one OS that works on another, this has been true since before Linux. The question here is of what we are given be iOS and Google Play Services is enough, for many of us it is not.
I daily drive SailfishOS on Jolla to see if it can be enough.
I can't really speak to laptops but I ditched windows last year for Linux and it's pretty damn good for gaming I have no reason to go back to windows at this point every major game I want to play works flawlessly.
The only issue I've had is the new rust desktop from pop os, but I just pop back into gnome and everything is golden. I hope they get their issues solved soon but it was just released 6 months ago or so. I can understand there's some bugs to work out.
I installed PostmarketOS with Plasma-Mobile on my ancient Pixel 3a a month ago as something to play with and I was actually astonished at how polished it seemed. The keyboard was perfectly usable, apps were quick to load, I could do silly things like open full-fat Blender or OrcaSlicer on a tiny phone screen if I desired. Sadly old Pixels don't support video out over USB-C for whatever reason so I can't do what I really wanted to do and dock my phone into a USB dock for a desktop experience, but it's good enough to have me considering buying a more modern supported phone so I can try out daily-driving the experience.
I bought Jolla Phone 2026. Was thinking about Pixel 10 and another round of GrapheneOS, but changed my mind.
Was using Sailfish OS on Sonys phone but drove me nuts for two reasons:
- had to reverse banking up to kick out the checks each time when new version came out and I became quite proficient at it (decompiled into git and each new version over it, then git diff, and fix the checks, committed the changes)
- worse part was that there was no bluetooth to android bridge and local bus company required it for contactless paying
There was nothing I missed from the phone, even reversing banking app was not really an issue, but bluetooth was just needed.
I defected to GrapheneOS after two years, now I am moving back, I hope for good. The fixed the bluetooth while for hardware I dont care.
I have solved the banking app issues by changing the bank and getting cheap old pixel just for banking app. It doesnt even have SIM, only wifi and used Automatize to turn on airplane mode on lock screen and turning it off for unlock.
I dont care about NFC payment or any other android junk, for photos I have EOS and phone just doesnt cut it, while camera is good enough for taking shots at everyday things like shopping list.
I really hope I wont need to see android ever again.
Android basically ran a long bait and switch game. It came out as open source, achieved wide adoption, important online services like banking and government-related moved to it.
In "Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System" by Chet Haase (a book you shouldn't waste time on), it is very clear that making Android open source (i.e. AOSP) was almost by accident. Google was pretty confident that Android could be just as successful if it were a more closed ecosystem.
And it seems to be that Google is increasingly regretting that decision and closing things down bit by bit, from Play store policy, all the Play services BS, to how they ship security patches, and now all the developer verification. Google discovers that it's easier to make money if they just control everything.
Folks around here that repeatedly mix Android with Linux, should also be happy that for whatever internal political reasons, they ended up not rebooting it with Fuchsia, or simply replacing the Linux kernel with Zircon.
As everything else, especially anything with a GPL license, has been removed already, with exception of the Linux kernel.
It's a kernel per se, and any OS built on it is considered a Linux OS. "The Linux kernel is the core of any Linux operating system." - kernel readme
Linux.com refers to the kernel itself as an OS though, I think to relate to people who have only heard of OSes like Windows. And calls Android a platform based on the Linux OS :S
Pity that Android doesn't run any Linux userspace application, unless one makes use of workarounds, like termux having to fit within the constrains of Android sandbox and NDK limitations.
This read like a lot of pain and suffering. I've tried this for kicks myself. There's a lot of sacrifices to be made. But I'm rooting for anything Linux on smartphones.
What diminished the day-to-day difficulty for you? Is it because the ecosystem became more mature, or did you "crack the code" for how to interface with everything you needed from your phone? Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user?
It's really cool to hear that someone is successfully daily driving it and making this ecosystem work for them!
> What diminished the day-to-day difficulty for you? Is it because the ecosystem became more mature, or did you "crack the code" for how to interface with everything you needed from your phone?
Neither! I just got accustomed to doing without stuff. That’s an effect I wildly underestimated.
Many things are still difficult (looking at you, CloudFlare [0] and DataDome [1]!) but I think I’ll manage.
> Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user?
I've been daily driving Linux phones for the last 18 years and I would never switch away. Sure, at the beginning it required you to make it your hobby, but you were being rewarded for it. Sometimes when I'm looking at Android/iOS devices being used over someone's shoulder I'm quite horrified at what I see and what people consider normal these days and so glad that my phone works for me rather than anyone else.
Everything I do online when I'm not in front of a PC I do on that phone. Web browsing, RSS, instant messaging, e-mail, social media, banking, navigation, public transport routing, TOTP auth, music playing, photo taking, weather checking, "smart" home stuff, conference agendas, occasionally some games or even software development (but not a lot these days - I used to program on my phone a lot when I was a teenager though). I even ran Jamulus on it to jam online during covid because it achieved better audio latency than my laptop, long before it got its Android port. Oh, and phone calling sometimes too, even though I've never been a big fan of that. Anything I need to, really.
Everything happens on my terms. The phone never tries to grab my attention unless I explicitly make it so. All the things I use are FLOSS. I can patch anything I want down to the kernel and bootloader, often on the phone itself (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191008). The OS is managed the exact same way the OS on my PC is and all my skills and knowledge directly transfer over, so I can script it or write applications the exact same way I did on PCs for decades. No "side-loading" shenanigans whatsoever. I can use any browser I want with any extensions I want. I've even used it at a game jam once - plugged a screen, keyboard and mouse in and made a game with the same tools I would have used on a PC (QtCreator, Allegro, GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, LMMS) and cross-compiled it to Windows and macOS right from the phone using the exact same tools and workflow as usual.
I could probably go on and on. It feels like my little personal pocket computer rather than an appliance that someone lets me play with on their terms.
BTW. Funny how it can go from "it can't possibly replace Android/iOS" to "how is that different from Android/iOS?" :)
I'm currently using a Librem 5 with PureOS 11 and Phosh. PureOS is a bit behind on software releases compared to other available distros, but I find it to be the most polished and stable experience.
In the past I have used a Neo Freerunner (with Om2007.2 and later SHR) and then a Nokia N900 (with Maemo 5). The former demanded plenty of your attention but could be made to work well enough, while the latter was a really nice yet exceptionally hackable consumer device. Before I switched to a Librem 5 I had carried a second phone with Android for about 3 years as the N900 was already too old for comfortable web browsing and there was nothing else on the market that I'd consider worth switching to for a while - but that was the only such exception.
Was hoping someone mentioned the N900. The best keyboard i have ever used on a phone was the N900 physical slide-out. Maemo 5 also included word prediction and autocorrect features that just worked, perhaps its nostalgia but I always recall using that keyboard as a great tactile experience and great example of nokia build quality. Still have that phone with me.
Do you take photos or use Bluetooth? What's the experience like for multimedia SMS (assuming no RCS), Whatsapp, banking or other apps normal people expect you to use, or file transfer? Are there any devices that can do NFC?
Taking photos is one of the things I got accustomed to not having. The picture quality on my Librem 5 is just too disappointing [0].
In the past I used Bluetooth for keyboard and mouse when I connected the phone to a monitor. (I no longer do because the USB port on my L5 has broken down so badly that it can no longer maintain a DisplayPort Alt mode connection.)
I’ve never used Bluetooth for music or similar, it keeps stuttering horribly on my L5. No idea why it does that!
I’ve never used multimedia SMS either. Almost no one uses SMS or MMS in Germany. Signal barely works via the Electron app (and signal-cli), so that’s what I use for messaging. WhatsApp doesn’t work because I have no iOS or Android to tether it to.
I can’t use public transport apps, which is a shame because I live in a city center where I depend on public transport. I download my public transport ticket from a private API once a month via curl.
For file transfer, I mostly use rsync, Git, or Unison.
Banking only works thanks to a dedicated bank card reader. [1]
> Taking photos is one of the things I got accustomed to not having. The picture quality on my Librem 5 is just too disappointing [0].
The quality of taken photos is fine (as long as you keep the lens clean :)), it's the quality of raw data to JPEG pipeline that's underwhelming. The default pipeline has been significantly improved recently, but it's still very basic, which really shows in low light. There's a huge room for software improvement there. You can always open the DNG file in something like Darktable or RawTherapee and develop it better, with proper denoising etc.
Smartphones(android, iphone) is just smart OTP now. Bootloader unlock unavailable(i hope this is just security concern for AI era), attestation is now a thing(regulations?). Most application(incl ChatGPT, X) says Android-available, but in fact it's Google-Android only.
As daily driving Linux desktop/laptops, I mostly find that android(at least samsung galaxy-flavored) is next gen of Microsoft Windows, in bad ways. At least you can "hack" the Windows to customize something by your own, android does not. Performance also questionable nowadays, not for gaming but browsing purpose for me, may drain more battery than expected. Also MS acknowledges the issues and made statements to fix while I haven't seen samsung's.
Anyway, My opinion is, If you are nerd like me, I would buy one phone that
1) can unlock the bootloader
2) can root
3) at least kernel source available, some companies do not disclose until legal? actions
4) optional, linux port-able (via community)
5) optional, officially supporting linux(not aosp)
and then buy second phone, that has great security support, e.g Apple iPhone or Google Pixel, and use it like a wallet(banking/cam/gps/... I would not like to support other vendors, what if they abandon security patches, and then phone being vulnerable). I believe more android application will be more restrictive than before in the future.
For linux, you own the hardware. Because it's open source, you can audit and harden the every aspects, e.g You might able to use proprietary bluetooth codecs, which vendor disables in android ROM. When AI era, you may able to investigate and mod stuffs which you don't fully understand. This take risks, and we have right to take the risks instead banning it.
I need a phone I can root and still have their shit attestations. Rooting alone is not even that important anymore, you can’t install almost any app that’s useful or use payments. So can’t be your main daily phone. Then what’s useful for? You could potentially browse internet with a custom app, and run some tooling kind of apps that can’t be installed on regular android? besides that nothing useful.
Rooting is important so I can mock provide fake data for: location, other sensor data, contacts, files, etc that’s what’s a a truly owned device. He does what I say.
Not what the app wants. If apps says you can work only in location X my phone takes the app side instead of mine. That’s not mine.
I can’t copy this text or take screenshot because restrictions: fucking stupid. I’ll just take a photo with my second device (or output to usbc device that can record screen) and parse the text. My phone just made me waste my time. I still can do what I want, just extra hops. Because, again, is not truly my phone. Is an adversary to my daily use.
Anyway it’s a lost cause. The only hope is for ai to bypass their security and allow owners to truly own a device.
Preventing you from faking data is exactly what attestation is designed to do. You want something different from what the folks requiring attestation want. That's fine, but just don't expect to be allowed to use those apps.
FWIW, While I do not suggest to use, Somewhere in the community has been spoofing the attestation(google), IIRC it worked for me few months ago. Might your needs.
I've tried a few times over the years to make Ubuntu Touch work. God how bad I wanted it to work here in the US. The lack of apps and VoLTE support really soured me on it ever working here.
If you're outside of the US, the availability of useable mobile OS's outside of Android and iOS is pretty abundant compared to the situation here in the US.
Ukraine. Diia (open-source govt services app) likely won't work. monobank either. on banks there is also Oshchad, Privat, Pumb, and none of them will work on Linux. GPay is a staple, I don't even have a plastic card (mono customer) because it's so good to just not fuck with keeping plastic around. plus there is a strong Quick Share culture, which I don't see working on Linux particularly well
just don't want to. it would be nonsensical to get it since all functionality that was provided by ATMs in pre-mobile age mono provides only via an app. ATMs log in through app and only exist to accept cash, so I can't use it as a "secondary authentication method" in ATMs or check my balance outside the app.
well, me being in Ukraine also means readiness to move out of my house whenever the need (or opportunity to escape abroad! I hate this war and kidnap-conscription) may arise. it's as much convenience as it is preparedness
That's why I don't mind carrying around plastic cards, they just go in my wallet with my ID and a small amount of cash anyway.
Even if I was willing to use GPay, I don't like the possibility of my phone dying locking me out of my apartment and preventing me from paying for things.
Diia and plastic are treated equally valid within Ukraine, but losing my ID is going to deal more damage than losing my phone. so no, I don't carry ID with myself at all times - why when I can just scan the QR code and keep the "real stuff" locked at home?
well fix that? start carrying your bank card everywhere you carry your phone? There are even phone cases with card pockets in them if you want to look like you're swiping your phone at the terminal.
Which part of having all your money locked behind six technological barriers requiring pervasive infrastructure to be working is preparedness? Preparedness is having several thousand euros in cash.
everyday transactions and subscriptions still go through banks and apps. also,
> Preparedness is having several thousand euros in cash.
totally agree. not that I, much like any average Ukrainian, have more than €400 behind my name, but I agree, and by that definition only the wealthiest ~10% are truly prepared
In this context? Being able to put your foot down and say fuck Google, I will no longer put up with the anti-user direction of their platform, and switch to something outside the duopoly
I wonder if thinking in a binary way (convenience over freedom) is a good description.
I bought mobile devices that I could root over the ones that I couldn't. I favor companies that are less shitty. I preferred Linux over Windows as main OS even when Linux was harder to use (now I think in fact might be easier). But life is made of trade-offs and I did not see particularly good arguments of why Android is "that bad". You can root some devices and one can even avoid lots of services if you don't like Google (maps, mail, etc.) - which I also do.
So for me Android manages to stay in a unstable equilibrium : good for what I need, trustful enough for some stuff (money), not more spying that others (GSM towers), some levels of customization if you really want. Could it go "evil"? Sure, but considering what happens in the world, I am more worried my neighbors would have idiotic ideas than the fact that Google will be so evil.
You stopped using cash? It is one of the most insane things I ever heard.
You transactions are tracked, I assume? The rule in the eu (PSD2) is that a dozen private/public/hybrid/other databases, of unclear substantial identity, will record your transactions.
And what if you had a an infrastructural shortage? No transactions then?
How can people think of "cashless society" as something outside a dystopia?
A great deal of shops in the Netherlands don't take cash.
Some didn't before 2020, but during 2020 the trend accelerated, and many shops stopped taking cash. Aside from hygiene, it's also easier to deal with safety for the store (i.e.: nobody can steal the cash register).
The supermarket in my neighbourhood has ~30 self-checkout machines. Only one of them takes cash. The human-checkout also takes cash, but is usually closed.
Is there such thing as a palm-sized mobile PC that can just run a desktop Linux distribution (or Windows for that matter) that supports mobile features (calling, SMS, and data)? Even if it has rough edges or compromises?
AUR isn't a traditional repository but more functions like a paste bin for package build scripts you have to go out of your way to enable and use at your own risk. It is not how actual Linux repositories work which are way more safe than google or even apple app store.
> way more safe than google or even apple app store.
Probably because of how people submit directly to the commercial app stores and the app store staff are expected to accept them as long as no malware or other problems are detected. Such problems are generally explicitly listed on Terms of Service and app submitters may be able to dispute rejections. Meaning problems generally need to be concrete and justifiable. Also, because of the sheer number, problems are likely scanned for, rather than each app being personally considered by a developer.
FOSS distro package repo maintainers generally don't have any such pressures. They get their absolute pick of what to include from the wild, only taking as much as they're able to handle.
Also, distro repo maintainers handle the building from the source code themselves, while app store apps are closed source to the app stores. Their ability to inspect apps is very limited.
If something bothers me with my phone's UI or if I want to change the behavior of some system service, I can do e.g. "apt source phosh", patch it and then "apt build-dep .", "dpkg-buildpackage -b" and "apt install" it right on the phone. I can even send the patch for upstreaming from there.
How easy it is to do an equivalent thing on Android?
UI-wise, termux can run Xorg and you can modify the interface you use there. You're right about services. Can't run systemd, but they can just run the service programs in the background (e.g. they can call sshd directly). Regarding modifying programs, maybe not that convenient directly on termux, but if it's rooted, you may be able to run docker and modify them in a debian environment.
The neat thing about non-Android phones with respect to what you mention is that you can do those things just like how you would on any other computer, without having to worry about Android workarounds that may one day stop working via an update.
"interface you use there" - yes, with a strong accent on "there". Sure, you can even run a x86 emulator in a browser and run anything you want there as long as it's performant enough, but that's a very different thing to actually controlling the OS you run - and even if you do happen to be in some control, modifying anything in Android without reflashing the entire thing is still a massive PITA. And of course you're not gonna pass the attestations once you assert the control anymore, so why not just ditch Android completely at that point?
people shouldn't have to buy a mac mini to run openclaw, they already have an always-on computer, they just can't install anything computationally useful with it
Currently Google is planning to lock down the Android platform to only Google Play store software repository. See https://keepandroidopen.org/ for more info.
For starters, the Librem 5 costs $799. The Liberty Phone is a version manufactured in the USA, which is not something everyone will care about.
Also, PinePhone is so much slower than Librem 5, which in practice feels closer to the (now discontinued) PinePhone Pro. Their specs only seem similar on paper, and only if you don't dig into the details. Though of course, Librem 5 being a 2019 design isn't a speed demon these days either - but I'm still using one and it's manageable.
They're very much not. I have both of them on my desk right now. All the things that make the PinePhone so painfully slow (GPU performance, RAM bandwidth, eMMC speed, small caches) are significantly higher spec'd on the Librem 5. It also takes much longer to thermal throttle. Performance isn't defined by CPU cores and RAM size alone.
Original Pinephone is good enough for smartphone apps. It can run a typical smartphone UI smoothly on a single core fully throttled to 648 MHz with a lot of room to spare, probably much better and more responsively than your typical similar class bloated Android phone. Also have it sitting on my table, doing just that. :D
It would be a bit ridiculous if it was not, given what UIs/games people run on 50MHz 486 if like 40-80x faster phone could not move some pixels around smoothly at 60fps.
Thank you for the recommendation, but I have a Pinephone Pro and I find it to be so utterly useless because of how slow it is and how buggy the software is. Maybe what I want is just something that doesn’t exist.
I get it. Got one. Compromises are many. Speed-wise, it clears the bar for me of being able to watch Youtube on Firefox and use the controls, but yeah it's got bugs and other issues.
I may be able to tolerate the speed because of how I used my netbook many years ago. Windows XP was completely useless because of how laggy the GUI was. Archlinux with i3 and a focus on using the shell (e.g. hardly ever touched a file manager) with a very light terminal (urxvt; others like gnome-terminal were too heavy) and other very light apps made it very responsive. I've kept that habit of a core set of light programs even on desktop computers. On the PPP, SXMO with sway WM/composer, foot terminal, and wvkbd as a keyboard is very responsive, too. The only gripe I have speed-wise is that makepkg (an archlinux script) is weirdly slow to start up.
Maybe GUIs that have animations are too laggy to be useful; I haven't tried. The eMMC is likely faster than your microSD if the disk is the problem, though I'm on a microSD without issue.
Pinephone Pro had a very small developer community and thus quite undeveloped software. It was discontinued for this reason. Librem 5 is being developed by both a community and a company, so it's much more usable.
Agreed. Despite endless assertions from someone that Pine and Purism are where we should place our hope for better mobile devices, I can't put my trust in either company. Their track records are too hard to overlook.
I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves. They've just been the only ones to ship Linux phones that don't depend on anything Android nor significant closed source code at all. I for one just want to see the same distro diversity with the same amount of open-source OS control over HW on phones and other devices that I do see on desktops/laptops. Linux phones in general are kind of a miracle to exist, given how long we went without them. However, given the low demand for this specifically (a lot are satisfied with termux or hybris-based OSes), they're kind of a miracle within a miracle.
They deliver beyond that too, with support for Alt-DP over USB-C for instance, open schematics, parts obtainable from independent distributors of electronic components, available detailed datasheets, and external batteries that can be hot-swappable (at least on PPP, haven't checked the others).
> I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves.
I respectfully disagree. Pine's MO was basically "create hardware and hope people create software for it". A bit tongue in cheek, but that's it. Which is fine as long as they're up front about it, which they are.
But in order for this to work, a community needs to form around the device. Pine doesn't have to be the ones to manage it, and some would say it's better if they don't, but they're surely a big part of it if for no other reason than they're the makers of the hardware. The infant PP community was doing quite fine until they announced the PPP and confused the hell out of everything. Couple that with some seriously brain dead choices (IMHO) around booting and charging, led to them not only torpedoing the pro but sinking the original PP as well. Probably in no small part because they split what little community had formed.
The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
By my statement, I meant that it isn't blind fanaticism towards the brands. Yeah, they fucked up by what I read and I haven't interacted with them directly, maybe they're unpleasant (Customer support definitely wasn't. They're very nice.), but both Pine and Purism have delivered more than anyone on this puny market. They net positive.
The strategy, "create hardware and hope people create software for it," is valid too.
I think both sides maybe overestimate the other. People state the above like a complaint that they don't make themselves responsible for the code, but maybe that's their limit of what they can do. People tend to think of companies like things that can do anything with unlimited resources, but just like people they can have limits. In general, the posture, "I don't like this company for X reason, so I'll find another," is valid and good, but when you only have 2 suppliers... maybe a little more tolerance is needed to get your goal, the product.
They may have overestimated the abilities of the market too. It's tiny and part of the appeal is being able to treat your phone the same as your computer. A good part of the market is likely going to be people whose programming experience may be limited to computers with a BIOS, native compiles, etc. I for one took a bit to just understand the boot process in detail (how it differs from a computer). Crucial details are spread across websites and blogs. There are unique challenges too like needing a virtual keyboard in initramfs. Needing to cross-compile can be new and surprisingly complicated, depending on a lot of things (e.g. language). On and off, I was/is looking at the battery driver to add hot-swapping support. That also involves learning a lot of things on multiple levels. You want to pull people that can quickly write camera drivers from this. Also not many people have all that much free time outside of work. A lot of patience is needed here, too.
Megous was talking about there being no lack of hand-holding. I'm sure everyone appreciates it (I appreciate it), but the gap can be very wide.
A lot of momentum was being lost before LLMs even came into the picture, improved and gained momentum for coding agents, etc. If the PPP had been released e.g. this year, things would likely be different.
> The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
Yeah, I've noticed details on the PPP. In their defense, it's supposed to be the explorer edition, not the final product. Also, as I understand, the PP and PPP are subsidized by Pine64, so I wouldn't see it as greediness, but rather desperation.
That's surprising. They burned through a ton of goodwill by holding many people's money for many years, while being non-responsive to depositors, refusing refunds if they did respond, and so on. A lot of ink and footage has been spilled over it. Their laptop effort seems to have evolved into something almost reasonably non-scummy, but the Librem 5 put a lot of people off.
Current complaints, from what is (by all appearances) a tiny user base, about the state of the device and its lack of usefulness are also common enough, e.g.:
The more-viable alternatives are not without their own tradeoffs, but they are at least actually viable for normal people. I can't see putting family members on a Librem 5 or a PinePhone (much less a PinePhone Pro) without it being an absolute train wreck of a time for anyone but the most extremely basic and patient user.
Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages, given how anemic the SoC is. As others have pointed out it would have been a midrange Android chipset well over a decade ago. How exactly that works when one needs to use a site requiring JS to function has me feeling like I'm daily driving Nokia N-series tablets in the late 2000s again, except Nokia tablets were somehow a more polished experience two decades ago than one gets today out of either the Librem 5 of PinePhone due to the lack of real manufacturer and community support.
We need a viable Linux slab with a radio, and I want one to exist. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs and was reasonably power efficient, but that's currently a fantasy completely out of touch with the state of available radios. I would carry my Linux ThinkPad with a built-in cellular radio or an external hotspot everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a basline level of utility value.
For someone who wants to check simple IMAP email, send and receive SMS messages and load basic websites, and are satisfied with poor camera performance, size, weight, battery life, and durability, while feeling good about the hardware they run (even if its hardware and software security is poor), then they may be quite happy with it.
> We need a viable Linux slab with a radio. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs but that's currently a fantasy totally out of touch with the state of available radios. I would genuinely carry my Linux ThinkPad with a cellular radio everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a baseline of utility value.
The PinePhone (Pro) is there. They work as a laptop replacement. Their problem is more on working as a phone. There's even a repo out there to turn the touchscreen into a touchpad. With a bluetooth keyboard, it's basically a laptop.
> Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages
YouTube works on the PPP. If YouTube works, likely any JS works. Google Maps on Firefox also works.
Purely an akchally, but there is the Fujitsu F-07C. Topologically it was a Windows 7 stick PC duct taped to a 3G flip phone that acts like a KVM console and a modem.
GPD Pocket / GPD microPC seem to be the only "small PC" products nowadays. But they do not support calling and SMS (they have 4G modem option for data, but it's not seemingly not very good).
At that point I think I might get one of those and use them as an everyday computing device (with Waydroid for Android apps) plus a small light Android phone for calling, tethering and locked down apps that do not work otherwise.
Show up to the government office. Say you don't have a compatible phone. Wait until they find a solution for you.
I guarantee the government is not forcing 95-year-old Betsy in bumfuck nowhere with no cell coverage to learn how to use a phone. They have some solution, they're just not making it obvious.
My government's solution to this, is a physical office, where they will file the paperwork for you. You may have an average wait time of four hours to be seen, and so must devote an entire working day to the effort, but can submit without a phone.
I'm that kind of person, but my opposition to the "digital key" things like this is mainly about them being out of my control and not having the ability to opt out of user-hostile activity. With a digital key, I expect things like the parent said: being forced to use proprietary corporate apps, facing random limitations like maybe the key stops working if you lose internet connection (or when Cloudflare decides to block you, or anything like this), useless error messages that don't let me know if I can resolve something easily myself, and such things. I do use and like the "digital key" things sometimes, when they are as free and reliable as the "physical key".
FWIW I think tesla app works fine on Graphine/Lineage OS as a digital key where the BMW system (and maybe other MFGs) use something with Google Wallet which requires something with Google Play Services to work.
Not to mention that your android/ios device is still shipping a bunch of bluetooth tokens for "track and trace" system. Cryptographically signed to you.
That's a bit of an oversimplification that makes this sound more concerning than it is. Not that it's 100% un-concerning, but I suggest that anyone concerned about this read the linked docs. It really was designed to be quite privacy preserving, though it's obviously a difficult challenge in this context.
Isn’t this GPS data to see where Covid has spread? Even if your name is anonymous, a GPS point that every day goes to your work and then your home is surely you?
Most probably, yes. But how would you know who I am and where I live? And if you do know both of those things, are there other ways of figuring out my routines? Yes, there are.
Keeping the name out of that data does a lot for privacy. With a name in there, you could use the data to find my name and figure out my address. Without the name in there, you don't know which point I even am without knowing some of my locations from another source.
The face alone that if you spend 10 minutes within someone's proximity will get flagged is 100% concerning. Of course they keys will only be handed to government health officials, but we all know what that means.
It is encrypted ciphertext rotated every 10m in lockstep with your Bluetooth identifier.
You will need to turn off your Bluetooth if you want to stop advertising a rotating random number.
The only difference with the contact tracing is that a key, on the device, can correlate the ciphertext. I have it off because the utility was never demonstrated.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver on my main personal computers for years. You could say that I love Linux and it has treated me very well.
That being said, I consciously chose an iPhone b/c I want my phone to "just work". I had a Blackberry Storm for a year and it was buggy, had to be restarted everyday just for it operate etc etc.
The iPhone has always been great. It just does what I need it to do b/c clearly someone cared about making sure the end user experience was phenomenal. While Linux has gotten better over the years, it just doesn't feel the same.
In addition, I recently started using a MacBook and the fact that the phone sync WITH THE LAPTOP makes the iPhone an even bigger plus. For example, if I set keyboard shortcuts on my phone they also work on the laptop. Photo sharing is a breeze and even integrated iMessage "just works".
Now, I don't fault people for wanting Linux phones. It's just not right for me.`
Windows Phone was a great idea and worked so well. But it was killed by the fact that people didn't want to maintain apps for 3 platforms. Nowadays when most of the things runs on web/electron anyway, isn't this the time to rediscover that idea?
Make something novel? RTOS like response like blackberry, secure, fully opensource and such? With the era of LLM accelerated developement (don't crucify me), this wouldn't be such unreachable goal.
We would have to sacrifice bank apps but imho still worth it.
Is there a regulation preventing them from doing 2FA other ways in some countries? Chase bank in the US supports passkeys and SMS, you don't need the app. My wife doesn't even have a compatible phone.
These are problems the PC solved but we lost with mobile. Standard processors, BIOS, interfaces and general API's for use so it made systems kind of generic. Looks like those who made these things didn't want to repeat that mistake again.
Unfortunately, I suspect things like RiscV are just going to accelerate this as it means anyone can make any spec they want so long as the application code compiles to it.
Smartphones are much tighter and more specialized. It's not like they decided against standardization for lock-in reasons, cause even within a single manufacturer there will be so many differences.
I've been using Sailfish OS since the first Jolla phone came out in EU and Canada both. It has some hurdles but if you pay for the android subsystem it works fine. There are a lot of great native apps and you get the full linux experience.
Just received mine. Sure, the interface is far, far slicker than what is available on the Librem 5, but there are already hints of "you are not really the owner of the device" (for instance default "safety" contacts in the contact app that you cannot delete, the inability to easily use "reverse tethering" (getting Internet by USB through a computer) and so on) that will make me keep the Librem 5, with all its own issues, as my daily driver for the foreseeable future.
(And the Jolla's "hardware privacy switch" feels like a bad joke: yes, the switch is hardware. What it does (if anything) is fully handled in software.)
I switched to Sailfish OS. A lot of rough edges, but it can can be workable—tho largely due to Sailfish having an Android layer to run those apps. It’s getting better OS-wise, but the Sony devices that you can get access to internationally are much lower priority on their list. On top, if you try to pay, the lock you to Western countries… & I have no idea why.
Speaking of Linux on mobile, I have about 300 of these things for sale with some associated hardware and software if anyone is interested (in Australia but can ship obviously) https://www.openstick.de/
Well I have spent a LOT of time working with these devices, and I took a look through the website, and I didn’t see anything that looked wrong.
But not exhaustively no, because why would I? it’s just the first google result for ”openstick”.
It’s a pretty cool project with a cult following. If you’re interested you could spend years working with the same devices and then verify the information yourself.
I have thought about buying one of the Pinephone things, because I want to actually own the computer in my pocket, but I have always hesitated because the hardware is always kind of ancient for these things. The Pinephone doesn’t even have 5G, so I am not even sure that my phone service will let me activate it now.
What I would like is to take my existing iPhone 13 Pro and install a real Linux on it so I could guarantee decent hardware. You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.
> You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.
I don't remember all the details but I had a Mac G3 around the same time I started using Linux: I don't remember the story about installing Linux no Mac hardware as being a particularly easy one.
Now I'm not saying that years after the fact, Linux wouldn't run fine on Intel Macs. But if I recall correctly it always has been a bit of a bumpy road.
I didn't have a Mac in that era, but I did have a Macbook Air from 2014 and I ran Ubuntu and NixOS on it just fine, even at the time. I had to use rEFInd but it wasn't terribly hard.
On modern Macs, it's pretty easy to install Linux with Avahi.
To be clear, I don't necessarily need it to be easy to put another OS on there. I just want it to be possible. As far as I'm aware, there's no way (officially or unofficially) to install another OS on any recent iPhones. Someone might eventually figure out how to break the bootloader on the iPhone 13, but I personally think it should be something that the owner of the phone is allowed to opt into.
5G is probably not a requirement for your phone service (although I can’t say for sure). The critical bit on networks in the U.S. and many other countries without 2G or 3G is VoLTE for phone calls and texts, which it does support. Some carriers have device whitelists that are only loosely related to technical features, though.
I really want to leave the Google and Apple Ecosystems, but I still need "these" Banking Apps. Some Banks don't even offer a Web based experience anymore.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted (or why IE6 is being brought up in 2026). But yes, banks are super-highly regulated and for good reason. They’re subject to all sorts of accessibility laws, there’s loads of precedent here.
..sure? I don't personally care what either enforces, since I'm in neither jurisdiction. I wouldn't have thought the US is any more (or even as) likely to personally, but sure. I said Brussels because comment I replied to said EU.
EU botched even API requirements on banks. We could have had open API to every EU bank, but nope, it must have been some bullshit for big companies to slurp data en-masse, instead of API for end users to use their data privately and comfortably from whatever app they wanted, incl. their own.
Open/individually accessible APIs would have to have be a movement, like the one with open formats for interacting with eGov.
We even had open APIs for every bank in Germany, in the form of HBCI and FinTS. With fancy things like optional RSA smartcard auth. The EU killed it all in the name of "omg, security!" (a total bullshit argument if you've ever looked at the specs), now with the new PSD2 the only ones getting proper API access are lots of shady payment providers, credit databases, data brokers and the like...
While Sparkasse and Volksbank in Germany aren't the most ideal banks cost- and interest-wise, they do still offer transaction authentication via debit card, without the need for any smartphone.
I tried repeatedly with several credit unions, with poor results. The final straw was the patelco hack that made the entire bank unavailable for over a week. In the aftermath they implanted crazy security measures where talking to a rep required 6 layers of increasingly invasive authentication. But... The hack was of the bank infrastructure. It had nothing to do with individualized fraud, all accounts were affected --it was just security theater. I went back to a major bank after that.
Yes. I need to pay someone. Get notified when my credit card is used. If any important banking communication happened. What do I do with a phone without: banking, uber, messenger like app, ? Same as holding a piece of a rock. Useless.
How did we do it before phones? Instant online payment is nice but rarely a requirement. Most times we split a bill with friends in a restaurant we agree on paying someone but although we technically could we don't all grab our phone at the exact moment, preferring enjoying the real social conversations we have. We tend to pay them later, and that later is more often than not at home and when I do a swift transfer to someone I'd rather have my complete laptop screen anyway to verify the banking data.
As for Uber and messaging, you are moving the goalpost.
uber still worked from the webpage last time I checked.
I would love to do this. It's shocking how little Android offers for the hardware it uses. Recently I was thinking if I could install Windows 98 on my phone, even that would be better. At least I could have more than one app open without it burning all my work just because I dared to check info on a web page while filling a form.
Oh yes, the endless joy of "We have sent a one time code to your email." Yes, but if I switch to my email then I will lose my browser session and thus the code is useless. So you have to get out a laptop to open your email just so that you have 2FA on your phone.
And "please confirm this payment in your bank app". That one's even worse because the payment goes through while the site forgot what you were paying for. If you're lucky it gets refunded.
My LineageOS setup used to do that; until I found that someone found a script that would adjust the memory allocation and OOM killer to more sensible values. I just have that run on boot. No side effects.
Unfortunately, that's not an option for most people, the only choice is to complain - but not like there's any other option on the market that behaves better. Or there's some other drawback, or different UI to learn...
Sure; it was one of many posts in xda for a cheapo mid-level Chinese device. I haven't gone through it too deeply to understand and optimize further, works fine as-is to me.
> While the AOSP isn't exactly dead (yet), it kind of feels like it's just a question of time.
The writing's been in the wall since the renamed the Android Market to Google Play Store. Frog's been boiling all this time, and every update my croaks grow weaker.
> If I have an issue or something I want to tinker with I can just ssh over from my PC either wirelessly or via USB.
FWIW one can also do that on stock Android or its GrapheneOS variant pretty conveniently, including storage access, am, boot background processes, etc. It is not as complete as being root on Linux proper but still.
This is often said but if you want to "diagnose" something then the terribly limited Android shell is about the last place you want to be, and a sandboxed one on top of it is worse ....
I'm all for using a Linux phone. The caveats thereof are mentioned in this thread.
I've a wish list of one, though: make the Web the primary GUI front end. Essentially, apps are a specialised browser window. That way, I can program (both the front- and back-end) in plain text, just using regular Linux tools and a text editor -- no bloatware and gargantuan IDEs mandated.
Switching from Android style Linux HAL to FreeDesktop style Linux HAL… I honestly think we need more Linux HAL options than just those two, when one is threatening to self-destruct and the other is arguably the single worst interface design ever conceived, by all measurements.
Can you expand on this? I did follow the “Moblin/Maemo/MeeGo” forks back in the day and it struck me as odd Android pulled off the HAL layer but “Linux” was unable to.
Every [Linux based] OS usually needs some sort of HAL to wrap [ioctl] driver calls into APIs that can be consumed by more than one process at a time. Nokia/Moblin/Sailfish use Freedesktop style HALs, i.e. stuff like Wayland, Pipewire, anything accessible over DBus (which also implies extremely slow IPC by any standards; mach ipc on apple's darwins is probably faster [sobs]).
Basically I'm suggesting that we might need a whole new OS on top of the Linux kernel.
Nah, DBus itself is plain bad interface design. Perhaps they could just piggyback off Binder if DBus itself weren't beyond saving. Also, despite a common sentiment online, it's not at all a complex process to implement a Binder userspace (given you have a sensible IDL in the first place, that is…)
Wrt/ torvie's narcissistic snarks linked above, the most important task for a kernel is still to facilitate fast IPC. The only viable forms of IPC in Linux are UDS and Binder. The former is slow and clunky. The latter is not a valid choice for DBus. So DBus devs have to manage slow, clunky, ill-suited legacy IPC. When a kernel can't be bothered to accommodate one of the most important operating systems built upon it, that seems really bad.
I introduced myself to this space a couple of weeks ago with a PineTab2. I bought it for reading but some tinkering. I am running Plasma Mobile on it. It's rough, but OK (and can't expect much from the hardware.) I don't know what the user experience out-of-the-box though. While I can run some 'important' apps in Waydroid (e.g. bank app in Norway), smartphones are not that interesting. I never wanted one, but it's increasingly something you have to have anyway and I usually don't realize it became so integrated in life (funny this comes up - I had a dream forgetting my phone and not knowing what to do next)
Most distributors are based in the US with the exception of large integrated circuits that are made in a variety of countries where those companies do fabrication (US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan); an example is the NXP CPU we use from their fabrication in South Korea.
Boards:
M.2 Modem Module China, inquire for USA/EU options
M.2 WiFi/BT Module India, inquire for more options
It's not going to win the market, but I applaud anyone providing more choices.
Anyone looking at this should recognize that the hardware itself is nearly a decade old (and has performance of a mid-range Android from 11 or 12 years ago), the software is buggy and not fully baked (the version of Debian they JUST moved to has lost normal Debian Security team updates and maintenance has moved to the Debian LTS team) and the company has a history of extreme delays in shipping and customer service.
People can spend their money however they choose, but I wouldn’t spend $1800 on a phone like that if you want to actually use it as a phone. And before buying it as underpowered “portable” Linux computer (the battery life is not good even though I hear suspend mostly works now), this is still outrageously overpriced even by current hardware pricing.
All valid points to consider.
I'd like to add that I'm for one don't need the latest and greatest apps, don't run games so email, SMS, messaging, YouTube or Netflix are all that are needed in terms of compute.
I'm surprised even those things work for you considering how unbearably slow Phosh and Linux apps are on the Furiphone with much more modern everything.
The slowness of Phosh is purely a consequence of the current, unoptimized software state. When I run Waydroid on PureOS on my Librem 5, it feels much smoother, despite being another layer on top of the OS.
I find it interesting to track the reality of using these free-er devices well after launch. Sadly it always seems incredibly painful and hinted at post-launch improvements tend to be small if they come at all.
I wish these devices were ready to be viable alternatives for anyone not possessing a religious extremist's level of zeal for it, but they's still so far from ready. It's a shame, since we need something like this to be viable.
The promise of, 'it's FOSS and these issues will be addressed,' sure didn't pan out with the PinePhone Pro, and it isn't panning out for the Librem 5. And that's setting aside hardware specs that would have been challenging over a decade ago.
It turns out that when the basic user experience is terrible, adoption rates are almost non-existent, and therefore nobody develops for it. The companies themselves have also done a seriously insufficient job of supporting their devices.
I'm getting tired of all this exaggeration. I don't think there's any significant component in the Librem 5 that has even existed a decade ago already. Perhaps the audio codec. Sure, it can be underwhelming today when it comes to performance, but it's still usable and was absolutely nowhere near "challenging" back when it was fresh - also, the software got significantly more usable and performant over time. I have recently booted an image from around 2020, the progress was stunning.
I'd love to do this, but sadly I don't see it happening unless my lifestyle significantly changed to the point where I wasn't frequently traveling to new countries.
There are just too many very useful services that only work with Android/iOS. Take taxi apps for example. I've used over a dozen in the past few years, many of them local to a specific country or region that made getting around much much easier.
I‘m lucky that my part of the world doesn’t yet require apps for taxis & they accept cash. App users often end up paying more if they don’t know even basic negotiations.
In Thailand? I guess it depends where you are. I've been in 20+ provinces and speak some Thai, but it's still so much easier using grab/bolt/lineman/muvmi and not having to explain the directions.
I'm not completely switching yet, but I'm also exploring SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch to see how far they will allow me to go. We really need at least a third viable option; it is clear that only having Google's Android and Apple's iOS is not benefiting the individual user.
May as well just get an old school Nokia and skip the smartphone technology all together. Get yourself a nice flip phone and go back to the early 2000's. If you need to do something online, just bring your laptop with you - some are so small that they're easy to carry around in a backpack or side bag.
I haven't used it myself but every now and then, I'm tempted to try a Furiphone. Just from what I've read, it looks like the easiest out-of-the-box Linux experience on a phone. Does anyone here have direct experience with it?
Yes. I have been daily driving one for almost 2 years. No it's not as polished as an iPhone of Samsung, but it also doesn't have the backing and history those phones have. In the time I've had it, the improvements have been huge. Some say it's a bit laggy - I don't think it is, I think this is down to not having animations to tide you over between this view and that view.
It works. It can run banking apps in Android. It doesn't have to run android. It's a 6 core CPU. The later models have 8GB ram (mine has 6GB and it's fine). I have tried Pinephone and found that to be horrifically slow. I like that I can write my own apps and also use a mouse with it if I want - then you have the dock to use a monitor. Out of the phones mentioned in this article, it sounds like the Furi phone would out perform most of them.
I figure supporting this effort is my little way to make a change in the world and help bring freedom back to our devices, which I now have :)
the right answer is to deliver a usable SECOND device which happens to be linux based, and which has serves a purpose. Then over time, apps get ported.
realistically, this device would need to tiny to justify the extra weight, device-to-keep-charged, etc.
one idea: make it wifi-only and tether from your primary mobile device. This skips all the carrier nonsense, to focus entirely on the core use case(s).
I already have a second usable device and I don't mind the extra weight that much most of the time. It's called a laptop computer.
As soon as we get to a point that Linux on the phone works at all, I'm happy to switch completely.
Here, "it works" literally just means it works. Not "GPS doesn't work," "camera only half works," "interop with Android/iOS apps that you're forced to use doesn't work." That doesn't mean "it works." And of course "only works for 2-3 years and then the device gets abandoned" doesn't mean "it works" either.
Although I'm supportive of your cause I find it ultimately futile. Developing and maintaining a mobile operating system is a hugely expensive endeavor. Only a wildly profitable company like Google could do so and give it away for free.
Linux simply isn't up to the task despite there being some touch-enabled user interfaces available for it. There's so much more people expect from their mobile these days.
The best option would be to use /e/OS or GrapheneOS to limit your exposure to Google's incessant spying and tracking.
Maybe you should write a blog about it. I'm interested.
I'm afraid there will be too many corners cut. The most important being the lack of available software. I'm of the notion that a computer without software is nothing more than a box of wires.
My bank forces me to have an iOS/Android phone for online payments. So at best I'd have a cheap Android phone in a drawer in my house in case I need to make online payments.
I'm surprised WhatsApp works on his non-Android OS?!
If they ever figure out how to get Linux onto a phone with a good camera, I'd pounce on it. I would be willing to put up with app issues and weird bugs and all the jankiness that comes with early adoption, but I simply can't give up being able to take really good photos with my phone.
The (hardware) camera quality is about what you'd expect from a phone from 2019. Software processing to get JPEGs out of raw data is worse (with a huge room for improvement), but you get the raw DNGs and can employ any processing you want afterwards. Video recording, however, is the real Achilles' heel of the Librem 5, at it lacks both hardware ISP and video encoder (there are only hardware decoders). This means that any real-time processing has to happen on the GPU (replacing the ISP) and CPU (replacing the encoder). I can record indefinitely at 526x390 30 FPS and I expect 1052x780 to be achievable at a reasonable framerate with more work (currently it's at about 15 FPS IIRC), but I don't expect it to ever go significantly better that that. Of course, short clips (that fit into the RAM) and low FPS "timelapses" are possible to record at much higher quality, but these are fairly specific use cases.
That said, what's there already is enough for me to have plenty of fun with the camera anyway.
Those are probably the best I've seen from a Linux phone, but still far too much of a downgrade for my uses. Even some of the photos taken in decently well-lit locations are noticeably grainy, so I can only imagine how poorly it'd fair in worse lighting. Tons of props to this photographer -- I have great respect for the art of getting good shots out of low-end equipment, but it's not what I want for my daily carry device.
I'm not exactly a photographer, these are just random point-and-shoot photos I took with my phone. I am, however, a programmer who has spent a bit of effort on making the photos taken on this phone look reasonably good, which is all it took to get to "the best you've seen from a Linux phone" state. Imagine what someone who actually knows what they're doing could achieve there ;)
The reason some of them are grainy is that there's no denoising applied to them at all. The current GPU-based pipeline only does debayering, lens shading correction, highlight clipping, color matrix application, tone mapping and barrel distortion correction so far. You get the raws though, so you can apply whatever you want post-factum. Patches are welcome too.
Now that making apps is easy, and it's the apps and eco system etc that makes an OS take off and adopt, starting a new OS for phone like devices shouldn't be as big of a problem as it used to be.
Given fair phone exists, it should now be able to get all kind of apps anyone wants.
The problem isn't missing app functionality that anyone can build. It's access to proprietary third party services that are too useful to go without. And they're not going to let you build your app to access their services.
Ever tried using Linux on real mobile hardware? Phosh and updates via Flatpak are unbearably slow. I have yet to see a way to try Plasma Mobile, etc or have much of a way to customize the filesystem and lower level services to make things better.
I have Furiphone and F(x)tec devices. They ought to work well as mobile Linux devices, but they very much do not. They are unbearably slow, which I attribute to poor storage I/O optimization and Phosh being an obese sloth.
Both Furiphone and F(x)tec phones are Halium devices. They rely on Android layers underneath the GNU-like userspace. They don't really work as actual "mobile Linux" phones at all, so they're not a particularly good representation.
Something has to, Phosh runs well on much less powerful devices and several components need to be patched to work on top of Halium, so you're not really running the mainline Phosh environment there anyway.
I have a F(x)tec device. It had the issue were it no longer boots when the battery is fully depleted. It also came with Android vs Linux. It is now e-waste. To my knowledge the company died off.
I have a PinePhone. That was just a toy gadget and nothing of value as a daily driver. Another e-waste device.
I have a FuriLabs FLX1S. It is a complete pack that is mostly plug and play. The latest update improves a lot. Wayland layer works great for when you need to run an application that has no Linux equivalent, such as Kore. It still rough around the edges.
1) Chatty, SMS application, needs more features to better incorporate modern SMS communication protocols.
2) The phone dialer takes too long to start up.
3) The microSD path is hard-code so it does not play nice when being encrypted drive were /run path is used.
4) Gnome Files works better the the Index file manager but there is no proper tie-in for password management. This means you must enter your encrypted microSD password every time after a reboot.
5) Convergence station cannot handle an ultra-wide, 3440x1440, screen monitor.
6) Firefox has a buggy user experience were there is no way to hide the tabs listing or options popup from with-in the application. One must swipe out of the application into the desktop and go back to Firefox.
7) Some of the UI time out settings are too short. Such as watching a video in full screen mode. Press to show the controls and by the time you start engaging with them the controls auto-hide again.
8) Don't know of a way to export SMS history from Android and import to Linux.
Once it is a little more polished the FLXS1 will become my daily driver. It has become my Bluetooth music player. I also use it more than my actual phone daily.
This is the future I want.
I will keep fighting for it.
But my braveheart pinephone is showing it's age.
And I need it to be dependable for pagerduty etc, or else have some other alerts proxy capable of waking me up in the dead of night.
Note that “I’m switching” here means “I’m now carrying two phones because I have to use Android.”
FTA:
> The no waydroid means that I can't access some apps that I need be it for online verification for logging onto bank and government services in Norway
I don't particularly care for the messing around. I'm of an age now where I've done that and prefer to spend my time not working around self-imposed tech issues.
Also, good luck finding a bank in the UK that can support that (without messing around with desktop web instead on mobile instead of the app).
I have said it before: the only practical solution is two phones. Use a budget one for boring banking and government stuff. Use Linux phone for all that stuff that ad companies are actually interested in and totally cut them off from that data by virtue of actually having control. They can shove their security theatre up their ass.
The top of the article addresses this a bit: yes, Android in theory is AOSP [Android Open Source Project] which is still Linux based. (For now, lots of rumors every Android release that a kernel switch is coming.) But AOSP has lost a lot of power as Android moved so many things to Google Play Services [closed source], which leaves room for Linux-based phone OSes that disown/disavow AOSP entirely because what's the point of playing ball with a half-closed ecosystem anyway? (The article discusses the Ubuntu Touch fork still seeing some maintenance despite Canonical giving up and decides on Sailfish OS.)
You can build various, vastly different operating systems around the same kernel. When people refer to "Linux phones", they usually mean the family of systems often referred to as GNU/Linux distributions, which Android very clearly doesn't belong to.
One of the issues is the network effect self reinforcing by the organistions you'd normally trust to be above this sort of thing. Like government bodies requiring that you use one of two american phone OS. No webpage and no other options for you...
Example, across the whole of my 2.8 million people city, parking is app-to-pay. No meter, no ticket box - just a sign announcing to pay by app and a QR code.
QR code points at a webpage announcing which very limited selection of apps you have for iOS and android and the backup option to ring a number.
Ringing that number means you talk to a person, make an account for only one of the apps over the phone, then use the phone menu system each time you need to park.
If you have a dumb phone(can't scan a QR code) or no phone... you're fucked. No way to pay for parking. Expect your fine and go through the bullshit processes.
The world should NOT think it is great to be so dependant on two US companies, but here we are.
Pixels with GrapheneOS are your best and safest bet.
In my specific case, I couldn't use Pixels because the terrible PWM on the screen was painful to me. Bought a cheap Motorola G Power 2024 with an IPS screen. Never logged into Google. Used Obtanium and FDroid for most things. Used Aurora for the one Play-only app that I needed. Running Netguard (a non-root firewall) with a whitelist so almost nothing phones home. Deleted or disabled almost all the non-essential built-in apps.
I like the Moto but wouldn't recommend it due to the lack of OS updates. But this setup could be easily duplicated on almost any Android without needing root or roms.
i read on mister RMS's website that he refuses to use phones except for the most basic things, preferring a laptop for aught else, mostly because phones are computers and 'software on computers should be free'
ngl, that is the most charming darn thing to hear in 2026-- and it lowers the bar considerably here. like if all you need to have is a computer, sky's the limit on how you want to run this.
sooo with a little help from Claude I have a xmpp server running from home base+jmp for calling / sms, a portable router and a cute construction grade wp836 grandstream phone (annoyingly I can't seem to route SMS to it yet, but they route fine through xmpp on a terminal).
if you're voiping, you really don't need a voip phone though.
i have zero compunction so my computer of choice is a macbook neo... which acts as a dumb terminal for aforementioned xmpp server / wasteful videogame computer / claude butler (open the floodgates ladies and gentlemen); if i wanted cred sometimes i carry the old thinkpad around instead.
i can't say that it's any more secure than Android (using claude == i don't know what I'm doing), but it's fun? expensive fun though. JMP is a subscription, proton (for MFA and everything else) is a subscription, you need a domain for your xmpp server, ...this 'homelabbing' thing is expensive, using a map is awful (so wife is navigator...with her phone). There are many failure points, me included. but god, so fun!
i usually leave the actual cell phone at home. i do still have one. that's a hard thing to drop... but not impossible! the only holdover is learning how to use a proper camera and setting up the media server.
Been daily driving ubports for about 4 years now (OP5T, Noble). The system has its quirks, it sometimes reboots without reason (though its rare, I experience something like that once a month), the videos in web browser sometimes glitch in a weird way and sometimes don't play at all, the camera stops working and needs a reboot. The lack of banking apps and maps with live traffic is irritating (although unav is great, shoutouts to the guy who made it), a problem that could be solved using waydroid but I don't want to use it out of principle. Otherwise it covers all my needs, has working phone, SMS and MMS (I'm from Europe), web browser, matrix and mail clients, TOTP manager (necessary for work), and is totally linux which allows me to do cool things like using pulseaudio sinks to connect my laptop to phone that is connected to speakers and use it as wireless aux (works janky, but it works :) ). It obviously hasn't got many apps compared to the competition, but new ones are continuously being developed by the community. I tried developing an app myself but haven't got the time, fortunately it's much easier now with AI because I remember that one attempt at creating a simple app for enabling some daemon a few years ago was cut short by not-quite clear documentation of the clickable app development system. It needs to be said that I'm certainly not the greatest programmer in the world though :)
If you're a technical guy and you feel like the android and ios are both pretty much destroyed by corporate overlords, then I sincerely invite you to try UBports or SailfishOS (from my research I find these two the most beginner friendly). The experience most certainly will hurt (at the beginning), but the sooner more people start using it, the sooner more people will start contributing to linux on phone and make our systems better. I was nervous that I would not survive without android and its entire app catalog and maps, or that a moment would come at work or in some critical situation that I would need android for some dumb reason and wouldn't be able to do something and spaghetti would fall out of my pockets, but for the last 4 years nothing like that happened. The most painful thing for me are probably the maps, but when I need long distance GPS with live traffic, I'll most certainly be driving with someone, so I just ask the passenger to navigate :) for less important voyages the unav is completely fine, there's also puremaps which I haven't tested.
>I've become more and more dissatisfied with the path Google has taken with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Be it the dependency and insane tracking of Google Play Services
AOSP does not include nor depend on Play Services.
>locking down of device trees to hinder custom ROM development
Most manufacturers do not distribute these either. The user doesn't even have a pixel so it is not relevant.
>all the AI stuff being put into the system
The AI stuff is not part of AOSP.
>or most recently (and perhaps worst), removing the ability of installing apps per your own wishing - it's become sort of like a "death by a thousand papercuts" situation.
Again that is not a feature of AOSP, but one bolted in on top of it.
I think the author would benefit much more by using a different distribution of AOSP.
Strange, I've been using it for about 15 years on many different devices and it works just fine. Maybe that is related to the fact that I tend to shun closed-source applications whenever possible? The few closed-source apps I do use - Swedish BankID, Deutsche Bahn 'Navigator', Dutch DigiD - also work as intended even though some of them - mostly the Swedish BankID - claim they 'need Google Services to work'. Click away the popup and it works just fine without it so that is clearly not true. On some devices I installed microG to see whether it does what they claim but while this seems to be the case I don't think it is needed for those keeping their devices mostly free from proprietary applications. This is not a hardship, far from it. Nearly all the types of applications I want to use are available as free software which also tends to make them ad-free, spyware-free and generally less of a nuisance than proprietary alternatives.
I have run graphene OS on my phone for 3+ years and I don't use Google Play or Google Play Services. You use F-Droid to install Aurora Store and anonymously download real apps. I can use my bank apps and it's quite functional. My wife even doesn't complain about it. Camera is decent, not as good due to the software being non-proprietary, but decent.
>At the end, you're always going to absolutely need that one app that won't run without Gplay.
Then you can install GMS into its own user profile with that GMS-dependent app, and when not using it you can log out of that user and put it fully at rest.
Yes, Google is trying their best to make sideloading apps harder and harder. They also are giving the ability to some apps to only allow to be run if it's verified by Google through their Google Play Store. At the same time, Google keeps losing lawsuits forcing them to open up and allow third party app stores. GrapheneOS also sandboxes Google Play and Google Play Services so you can turn it on and off difference access at your pleasure to prevent God mode and super spy mode, so this mitigates issues even if you use Google stuff. It's a losing battle, but the phone is the battle to fight over
Well AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth (not even the emulator) so you also have to take into account the reality of what Android is on the ground.
AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a proper call manager nowadays
I wish nokia would have ultimately opted for their own android fork. That would have eventually lead to a more open linux kind of OS, like we saw with maemo.
Flop-Elon was the worst guy at the worst time in the worst position. It was 110% obvious windows mobile would flop. Everyone knew it, it was just a panic decision.
Why? The phone I've been using for the last 6 years, Librem 5, can just be docked to a screen, keyboard and mouse and used this way, running a Debian system. It's not even the only one available with such capability. Your dream has been there for a while now.
Sailfish has some proprietary stuff to deal with the Android & Sony as well as Qt being Qt. Much of their software is open source—& collaborative with translations & forums for feedback. Out of the box, you on Sailfish you get root support which lets you actually be the device owner. You are allowed to install whatever software from wherever you want… things Android no longer is. It’s not a flawless platform, but Android in practice gives you so, so little control over your actual device.
you can have Android without google play services and AI and it will be still less painful experience than trying to use Linux phone as your daily driver
Some things are still funny to me, though. As Google transitions towards
full Evilness, people less frequently advertise a "I was employed at Google,
what a wonderful place". Google totally changed things here, to the worse -
that's fascinating. Meanwhile the google graveyard is growing almost daily:
I wish we'd see some progress on this from the phone makers. It's so disappointing what a stranglehold Android somehow has. Nokia was so on the eve of greatness before they threw it all away and burned their good platform.
Motorola at least seems to be moving to unlock bootloaders. ARM gpus have some ok drivers now (thanks collabora & many others), which, a decade ago seemed like way way way more than the universe was ever going to allow.
I still think Samsung, with their new mountains of market cap, should try to do better. Exynos is right there, with an RDNA GPU just begging for the world's best drivers to take advantage of the hardware you already ship. You could make a stunner! Why not try?
This perfectly captures the "death by a thousand papercuts" reality of modern Android. Google honors the open-source letter of the law with AOSP while systematically destroying its spirit by moving vital APIs into closed-source Google Mobile Services (GMS).We are seeing the exact same playbook play out on our wrists right now with Wear OS. Google recently mandated the Watch Face Format (WFF) via Watch Face Studio (WFS). Under the guise of battery optimization, they stripped developers of the ability to run executable native code for watch faces. It is now just a declarative XML format rendered by the OS.Whether it is the core OS framework or a simple smartwatch complication, Google’s strategy remains identical: hollow out the open ecosystem, deprecate local developer execution, and force everyone into their centralized, closed garden.
2. For every phone people in this thread switch from Android to "Linux", I'm going to switch 3 from "Linux" to Android. I have a budget of $14, $11 is earmarked for Chipotle. I should have plenty left.
"The mobile linux space isn't exactly looking good right now, but it holds some promise. Ubuntu Touch managed to survive being abandoned by Canonical, and postmarket is still seeing good development even if not having great hardware adapation at the moment."
I can confirm this holding OP6 (enchilada) in my hands — it's a flagship postmarketOS device. It also has other nerd options available — Sailfish and Windows (Renegade Project) — but obviously with poor hardware support.
I highly recommend keeping an eye on postmarketOS blog. [1] It's a fun reading, and development's been really rapid lately.
What stopped me from full migration to pmOS the last time I tried it about a year ago was poor support of Magisk and Xposed in Waydroid, two things I can't imagine using Android apps without.
But! With some tricks you can get pmOS dualboot on OP6. [2] Haven't tried it, but looks amazing.
I think with the current direction and velocity, pmOS is going to get really close to Android in usability on supported hardware in the next couple of years. Except for power saving parity that never gonna happen.
You misunderstood my comment.. this level of "support" is based on hacks = volunteer work, where the community working together (for free) is able to support one device "almost" completely after only 8 years, relying on hacks/reverse engineering etc..
But it's not like OnePlus or Qualcomm officially supports that, right? They didn't have any deal with any OEM where there would be someone employed to support the OS.. (even though they receive donations)
Like, all this is.. not serious.. the closest alternative to Android/iOS is GrapheneOS, because there are full-time employees AND they have a partnership with Motorola, so they won't have to rely on any hacks.. well obviously that's unaffordable but it's a different story.
> You misunderstood my comment.. this level of "support" is based on hacks = volunteer work, where the community working together (for free) is able to support one device "almost" completely after only 8 years, relying on hacks/reverse engineering etc..
I guess you have not seen any of actual Qualcomm code yet to say that, Qualcomm code is really what you would define as a pile hacks. Made by hardware engineers with no regards for code quality, maintainability or mainlinability.
OnePlus 6 comparatively is almost mainlined properly from start to finish, with a level of quality that you have nowhere in the mobile world.
Sure this smartphone a bit older but remember the Nokia N900 is still supported and it went out in 2009.
Mainlining mobile devices is very hard, but that's not hacks, that's how it's supposed to be done.
I'd say the waterline of mobile Linux "seriousness" is whether a device has a bootable mainline kernel build. Once SoC support lands in the kernel, it becomes a problem for a lot of people on high salaries (including some at Qualcomm). And hardware support doesn't get dropped from the kernel overnight. For everything above, in userspace, you don't need a deal with OEMs or their blessing to make things work. It's a pretty generic stack: Alpine, systemd, familiar WMs/DEs.
But yeah, I hope to see more deals like the recent Motorola-GrapheneOS announcement in the future.
True. I have installed PMOS on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and it is has great support for the hardware.
Amazed to see Linux booting natively on a palm sized device with full hardware support and computer capabilities was out of the world!
Given the fact that the device is more than a decade old, it still runs the mainline 6.x Linux kernel and the UI is good! (desktop manager which I've installed it is based on POSH Shell).
Looks cool and since calls, SMS, Wi-Fi and data works fine to a good extent, the only gripe was that camera is unusable in it's current form. Have not tried the android subsystem yet I don't think it'll work due to device limitations.
Have installed Tailscale and primarily using it for remote SSH administration of all my devices through Tailscale. The device build is still solid (which I don't see in the newer devices! due to planned obsolescence) and browser based netbanking access works fine.
Caveats of a small device, keyboard and user experience matters though I'm not complaining because I can pretty much see what happens on the device and I'm not feeding any unwanted signals to anyone.
Constantly on the lookout for pure Linux based devices. Unfortunately, yet to my hands on Librem based device or on a Fairphone!
I hope the world moves towards a Linux based device (being a Linux user for close to 3+ decades (since the early Sco Unix times with core systems programming, I always dream of it! BTW, being a hardcore C programmer who has worked across almost all OSes and CPU architectures!) and such wish and dream will fully be fulfilled only on Linux or on *nix with firm belief!
I've come to the conclusion that I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case (so long as you're running a userdebug build with the ability to adb root in when needed), most of people's issues aren't really with Android (although Google reducing the AOSP release schedule isn't a good sign).
I think the real problem is Google Play Services. It's far, far too tightly integrated in a way that it just seems like Android was designed to be unusable without. It's installed as a location manager internally, which gives it a shitload of permissions by default that you never grant it. There's absolutely no reason everything (notifications, the app store, some location services) has to be packaged together into one thing instead of each having its own module that can be removed at will. Play integrity just plain shouldn't exist and as far as I'm concerned is purely there to ensure no one creates a real play services alternative or another mobile OS with Android compatibility.
The ideal outcome for me would be keeping Android but effectively dissolving Play Services and instead having the concept of a core services, where instead of apps choosing to use Firebase for notifications, they instead bind to the system notifications service, and as the user I choose which implementation I want, preferably with it not installed as a system app. I'm well aware that's not going to happen, but it seems like the most practical way to break up the Google/Apple monopoly to me, Android's great but Google's services aren't.
There is microg, which implements some of this by re-implementing Google Play services but allowing you to choose your own provider for services where this is possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroG
> I think the real problem is Google Play Services. It's far, far too tightly integrated in a way that it just seems like Android was designed to be unusable without.
This is somehow by intention. In the ramp-up of Android adoption, Vendors and carriers started to fork Android and deviate too much from the core. Google needed a leverage to tie them to stay compatible to the ecosystem, Google Mobile Services (GMS) was the tool to do so. "Pass the compatibility test suite and you qualify to preload GMS".
Then, at some point, Google implemented API's in the OS which call Google's cloud infrastructure (e.g. Location services), which they didn't want to commit to the Android source for the risk of them being forked and modified, so they started to implement them in a precompiled "Google Play Services" module.
Over time, it seems Google Play Services became the preferred vehicle for Google to rollout any kind of API-changes to have them applied on all devices immediately, without waiting for the vendor to do an OS-Upgrade.
The result is that Google now promotes Google Play Service API's as the way for the most widely compatible implementation of an app. Which is...not wrong, but in the larger picture also the reason why Android is not considered "real" open-source (anymore).
> The ideal outcome for me would be keeping Android but effectively dissolving Play Services
Agree. There is still a very good OS in there, clearly written by considerate SW-Engineers.
Thank you (and the GP post) for the insight.
I wonder if further developing microg or similar would be a better use of resources than Postmarket, Ubuntu touch etc? Would that be a faster path to wider adoption and therefore better chance of challenging the Android/iOS duopoly?
Well microg is just the client side, but it still communicates with the Google servers, right?
> Over time, it seems Google Play Services became the preferred vehicle for Google to rollout any kind of API-changes to have them applied on all devices immediately, without waiting for the vendor to do an OS-Upgrade.
Not really. That's a different thing viz. Android Pony Express: https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/apex
> Google needed a leverage to tie them to stay compatible to the ecosystem, Google Mobile Services (GMS) was the tool to do so. "Pass the compatibility test suite and you qualify to preload GMS".
Yeah, it wasn't even totally the wrong thing when it happened. It was something I liked because you had both the manufacturers and the carriers getting in the way of OS updates.
For example, I bought a new Samsung Galaxy 4 years ago from Tmobile. Tmobile NEVER updated the phone past the initial release, even though samsung did the next android version (I forget which exactly, 9, 10?). But even samsung had dropped support for the phone basically after that single update.
The google move to pull things out of the OS and push them into the play store was welcome because it meant you were less likely to have unfixed bugs and problems due to vendor laziness.
But of course greed has taken over and now google is trying to change Android from an open source OS to a closed source one. Increasingly making it hard for the likes of GrapheneOS to exist.
> I think the real problem is Google Play Services. It's far, far too tightly integrated in a way that it just seems like Android was designed to be unusable without.
Wasn't the point of Play services to enable keeping OS "updated" regardless of the manufacturer schedule? Which is to say: they are tightly integrated because they were designed to be part of an operating system that Google can keep updated through Play Store even if the device OEM is slacking on porting upstream updates to the users.
No, the point was to keep Android proprietary.
I think it was one of those cases where "the road to hell was paved with good intentions".
I'm old enough and was very pro-android in the early days when it first released. I absolutely remember the frustrations around having vendors just REFUSE to update the OS on devices. Even things that were brand spanking new often got left to rot, and the OS updates in those days were genuinely meaningful software updates - Lots of new capabilities.
So I was actually ok with Google going down the route of moving critical software into an installable package that they controlled, that would provide a way to get new capabilities onto devices that manufacturers didn't give a shit about anymore.
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But the problem is that "Google" today sure as hell isn't the google that I liked back then (and even that google was starting to shift tone).
And now this package is a backdoor that they can use like a beat-stick to force vendors to stay on their version of Android, and it functions to make "Android" (the distro that users actually use) functionally closed-source and non-permissive.
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I still strongly believe that the appropriate regulation for this situation (across both iOS and Android) is that the company that makes the OS should be prohibited from running any sort of app store, and app stores must be selectable at device initialization (ex - the Internet Explorer ruling, but for app stores).
Why would you want a forced selection of app store? Just make it so you can execute executables. If the user wants an app store, they'll install one.
Somewhat, but only relevant when it comes to things like WebView but not other things. If there is a vulnerability elsewhere, your device on an older OS that the manufacturer has stopped supporting will not get any patches.
Google may think it's important to keep WebView always up to date with Play services. I couldn't care less. I still have to buy a new phone to get all updates.
> I actually really like Android as an operating system, the internals seem remarkably well thought out and ideal for the mobile use case
Just no. I developed for android for a long time and I have seldomly seen a worse and more confusing SDK and code base. I can give you many examples but the core layouting algorithm having quadratic complexity with the number of widgets and the single base-view class having 60.000 lines of code are just the tip of the iceberg.
> I developed for android for a long time
When was that?
I stopped in 2018. I realize that a lot has been done since then, but the base code wasn‘t changed, otherwise old apps wouldn‘t run anymore.
My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software. Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.
> Just enable the debug mode to see what portion of your screen refreshes and repaints and stand back in awe while nothing changes and you still get hundreds of repaints.
And you are positive that this hasn't change in almost a decade?
> My gripe with android is that I think it wastes a lot of resources by being very inefficient in software.
As opposed to what? This thread is about Linux on Mobile. Are you saying that Linux on Mobile is a lot more efficient than Android? Like do you get more battery life with Linux on Mobile for the same usage?
Well, neither Views nor their layouting code are really used anymore - it's all Compose now!
I don't know what exactly do you mean by Android system. Does storage count? The idea of how applications aren't allowed to access each other's storage is very bad from the user perspective, for example.
Permission model of Andorid is hostile to the user and is designed to the benefit of the manufacturer. It undermines the users' ability to take advantage of their computer but allows the manufacturer / whoever installed the system to have undue and unwarranted access to the device.
My experience of using Android is very similar to using a corporate laptop configured by the least competent IT department of a large US bank: you are not allowed to do the basic and useful things, you are required to jump through a lot of hoops to have the remaining absolutely necessary things done, you cannot eliminate hostile functionality, you cannot be sure your personal stuff will remain personal (if it ever was...), it's a system that will automatically do things to you that you don't want done...
Basically, using Android sends me back to the early 2000s when this kind of setup was typical for MS Windows computers given to employees in large US companies.
what about an android android hypervisor
I dunno, I wish Android had a cohesive backup strategy the way iOS does. iPhone is terrible but losing your phone and switching to a new is insanely easy, with all state back to exactly how it was before.
Android doesn't have it per se, but Seedvault runs on various Android-derived systems (notably but not only GrapheneOS) and does a bang-up job of backing up both applications and data
"Bang-up" is a good description of what Seedvault does, because your backup will have holes in it. Anything made with Android's backup system has the same problem.
Applications can specify that they can't be backed up, and you as a user have no way of overriding that. Highlights on my smartphone are Fennec (Firefox), Termux, Cromite, Element, Syncthing, various videogames and other utilities.
I absolutely want these backed up, and on any sensible system I'd just point restic to their storage locations and be done. On Android I need an arcane mess of Titanium Backup and TWRP, and god help me if I ever have to recover from a backup.
I think you are in the minority of people that feel Android is a well built "OS". Maybe from an end-user point of view it "does what you want" but its underlying architecture I think is pretty poor.
I have spent the past 2 years off and on modifying AOSP (for "reasons") and I am constantly amazed the poor quality of the code base and badly architected the overall system is.
It's a bunch of re-inventions of the wheel (start-up daemon manager, IPC, HAL, GUI, etc) with the "upper layers" written in Java with a mix of C/C++. Mixing the metaphor of a Java "run time environment" with a Linux-based kernel results in a hodepodge of pieces and having seen it up close it makes sense why "Android" user experience varies so much device to device.
Did Android need it's own bastardized libc for example (bionic)? Did Android need to have it's own start-up daemon manager? A "HAL" in C++ (wrapping Linux kernel capability) with a bunch of bridges to Java via JNI?
Writing an application for Android is also a byztantine mess of NDK, SDKs, Java build systems (Maven, Gradle, etc), XML files, Java, Kotlin, etc. Why can't icons just be SVGs, why do these have to be in some XML-formatted resource? The list goes on.
If only a few techies will be able to use Linux phone, banks will freely lock payment services access down to two platforms: ios and android. No way out, it's happening right now (in the name of "security", of course, but surprisingly it does not stop scam from happening).
Web will be locked down too, via secureboot stack browser integration (not -s, it's already actually monopolised to chrome only, as FF lives on full life support from Google).
Very sad how it was allowed to happen so easily.
There's still banks that have useful websites and physical locations.
Even when I'm still using a "classic" bank with card and a website that don't even use JS, I can't afford to use Windows Phone as my daily because it doesn't have the ride hailing apps used in my country. My current and previous office use proprietary app for clocking in and out, that are also only available on iOS and Android. Even public servants in my countries in all levels have to carry either of those two for location tracking.
Tell your employer to provide a phone for clocking in and out. Obviously.
Banks are only a part of the larger issue.
Imagine traveling somewhere, and run through the things you'll need to work without tinkering. Camera, eSIM, GPS/maps, more "exotic" messaging apps that for some reason people use instead of Whatsapp.
It seems like most Linux phones are barely suitable for someone that just goes home to work 99.999% of the time.
I don't have to imagine. I've already traveled internationally with the Librem 5 and it can do what I need it to do. Esim is supported with an adapter like those from JMP, but I use a local SIM card from that country. Whatsapp I never use, Signal and Delta Chat work fine.
Perhaps we can think of this? Use a linux phone and an android phone as VM. For apps that are not immediately available as Linux apps, we continue to use the android VM. We continuously make better apps available on Linux and maybe, just maybe eventually switch completely to Linux phone.
Alas, the android VM will fail safetynet by not passing bootloader attestation.
I really hate modern Google.
It makes sense to have these kinds of checks because of rootkits, but sadly the poweruser is fucked.
There isn't even an option to say "I know what I am doing and if a hacker takes all my money I won't cry to the bank". Probably the banks prefer that no emulators can snoop and see how exploitable their apps are.
That isn't a legal option for good reasons. If it was legal, every bank would make you tick it.
Waydroid, mentioned in the article, is approximately this
The problem is that Remote Attestation allows apps to reliably detect running in an emulator. Otherwise, it's already possible with waydroid.
Recaptcha requiring attestation also belongs in the list
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Also, you can use the bank's website for most tasks.
I think most non-techies could happily do this.
In Europe at least the banks website won’t function if you don’t auth with their app.
I live in Europe and I can use my bank just fine without their app.
I've read somewhere that some banks will let you use their SMS 2FA as long as you haven't already used their mobile app.
Cool, good to know. When I first moved to Ireland you could get a hardware code generator too but I don’t know if that’s still a thing
Still a thing with some of the Finnish banks, as I've recently learned. In my bank it costs ~20€ - unless you can't physically use a smartphone, in which case it's free. But you kinda have to know that it exists.
> unless you can't physically use a smartphone
Like, because of a disability, or because you don't have a smartphone? In the latter case, would it work to just go to the bank with a dumb phone?
or if you work in a highly controlled location like a prison, and aren't ale to bring in a mobile phone
Barclays use both the physical hardware code generator in the UK as well as a virtual version in the app. The Bank staff also use the same physical hardware in the branch so I guess it will stay around for a while.
I use my bank's card reader to authenticate in the hopes that it will signal a need to keep supporting it. But the vast, vast majority of people just use a banking app so I fear it's a lot cause.
Probably if you threaten to close your account they'll also change it. But you have to be willing to actually close your account.
I also live in Europe, and can use my bank in a webbrowser.
I used their App previously, and can just switch back to using the website, after authenticating via both sms and e-mail.
Huh, a Dutch one? ING perchance?
ASN:
https://www.asnbank.nl/service/browsercode.html
In Spain at least you can. I know 4 or 5 banks that let you auth via SMS, coordinates card, etc. If yours doesn't, I suggest that you complain. Some colleagues had to call theirs and insist that the bank's application didn't work on their phones. Reluctantly at first, they eventually changed their method to SMS.
The interesting thing about SMS is this isn't always usable while traveling.
For example my phone provider has really overpriced international fees ($10 / day) so instead I use an eSIM which usually only comes with data. That means I lose the ability to use text messages or phone calls for any form of verification. A number of banks and other sites also block Google Voice / VoIP numbers.
The problem is that one essential app being unavailable can outweigh the other 95% of the phone working perfectly
Capitalists know how to hook up the intended audience. Just disallow people to use their money with any FOSS OS. RMS is crying.
It's called a card. Get a phone case with a pocket. Put the card in the pocket.
RMS is still having two reasons to cry even in your case.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If my bank wants me to run proprietary shitware, they can supply me with their proprietary secure processor to run it on, and we're good.
Also the bank card is really part of the bank system. It doesn't do anything else, and it has to interoperate exactly as they want it to. While I may feel the right to hack on it, I'd do so entirely at my own risk. It's probably better that I don't mess with it as long as it fulfils its purpose. I can use my own device for my own stuff.
I feel the same way about ISP modems (not routers). As long as I get an Ethernet port and the modem isn't doing anything untoward, I don't see any problem with letting the ISP's network termination equipment exist inside my house. Some people think there should be a right to hand off the connection as DSL or fiber and buy your own modem, and I think you should be allowed to do that at your own risk, but I don't think the ISP should have to support it. Particularly with PON fiber or CATV, it's actually a bit dangerous to let the customer use random modems as it's a shared medium with half your street and you wouldn't want to jam them.
The frustrating part is that security increasingly means proving you are using an approved device and software stack, rather than proving that you are actually the account owner
the people deciding this are the ones selling the devices
I don't have issues with my Pixel running GrapheneOS in that regard. I have issues with goddamn banks doing that at the app level.
Yeah, and currently the hivemind-approved response to people complaining about apps not working in either GrapheneOS or Linux phones is to "just use the browser. Your bank has a website, right?"
Well, I fear that loophole is quickly closing with little fanfare.
completely missed the point, sorry.
Pixels (barelly) running a binary-blob-heavy port of android is far from what is being discussed here. In fact, that is intended as a misdirection and you fell for it by bringing it in here.
It's what felt like what really killed Windows Phone. Too many things became "only available" through an iOS or Android app. Windows Phone was free as in beer towards the end and there's a possibility there would have still been a small but devoted techie audience on it, if so many things weren't already so broken from disappearing/vanished app support.
It always seemed insane to me that people accepted so easily to have everything locked behind "app stores", crazy garbage, even worse having SO MUCH PREINSTALLED BLOATWARE OUT OF THE BOX.
Not just out of the box, some phones receive junk apps and ads after you run updates
What do you mean by "accepted"? In a free market, buyers have to choose between the products that are available.
> buyers have to choose between the products that are available.
That is how a free market works, however it doesn't really cover the "I need to function in society and there are no good options for this device type that have the features I care about" problem.
When your choice is between the NutPuncher 9000 and the BallCrusher 17, it's something of a false choice.
Yup, and a duopoly isn't a free market!
I’m fine with that being the default. I know plenty of people who would have emulated the Win malware situation on their phone otherwise.
I’m not ok with it being the only option.
People just want to press a button and see videos or their bank balances or whatever. They don't care about architecture.
The push against technical literacy helped a lot in having the masses accept all this crap.
A great deal of people don't even understand the concept of installing software if it's not via the App Store, nor do they understand what's involved in the process. Explaining the issues of having a central authority is one degree further.
> Very sad how it was allowed to happen so easily.
says everyone, using chrome. sigh.
You are quite right here.
It's unfortunate that democracies foster a system of corporate corruption here.
I notice this often when I try to, say, use firefox and my bank says, sort of "nah, use chrome only". And they only ever assume people to use either OSX or windows; Linux is kind of forbidden in the sense of "won't support it". But often it does not need any support, those browser or OS checks are wrong to begin with.
What banks care about is complaints volume and account closures. If you can't use your bank on your phone, go complain in person to your bank. Just do it even if you think nothing will happen. Best case they unlock the website for your account, worst case nothing happens but they still got a complaint and will have to do something if they get enough similar ones.
Don't go in person. That just wastes everyone's time as corporate will never hear about it.
Instead, call them. Insist to talk to a human. Corporate really doesn't like call center calls, and they usually have monitoring set up to track why people are calling.
Doubt that. They care about average call metrics but not why people are calling, and the call center operators have absolutely no ability to fix anything and will just work to get you off the call as quickly as possible.
Not in my experience. My bank wouldn't even talk to me when they discontinued support for a phone I had. They don't even have anyone to complain to, which is by design. You can complain about non-technical stuff, but there's nobody to report problems with their Android app. They know full well that it's more important to you to have it working than it is for them to make sure it works for you. You will throw away almost your entire monthly paycheck to have a new phone to be able to access your bank account. They won't do as much as redirect your complaint to /dev/null.
Yeah so show up to the branch and be like "let me access my money or close my account"
> If you can't use your bank on your phone, go complain in person to your bank.
At my non-existent bank branch?
It happened because even here on HN there are many tech people that were dismissing DRMs, secure enclave and remote attestation as "it's not a big deal" or "they have their part because an evil maid sent by a state actor could steal your disk".
It sucks but I'm not sure there much I can do about it personally. If/when the banks stop supporting browsers completely, I'll be glad I have a phone that can install the app
Why do they actually need to do it? They all allow web access from just about any browser. I haven’t tried but I’m sure there must be one where the web interface works from Emacs. Why are apps different?
I really want to love mobile Linux, and have given it multiple shots before. But I just don't see how it will catch up with iOS/Android in the same way it caught up with Windows/Mac:
- OEMs have poured an enormous amount of resources into the camera software, Linux cameras are years behind from what I understand. - Android/iOS have thoroughly optimized the UX in all sorts of subtle ways, the big one being their keyboards. I literally can't type a single correct sentence on any of the mobile linux keyboards that I've tried because there's so much proprietary magic needed under the hood to figure out what the user is trying to say (autocorrect mostly, but I recall something about how apple also virtually adjusted the sizes of the keys to make it easier to type) - GPS, banking, and now keys for your house and car all need to work.
Linux cameras can be made to work well, it's a matter of software. Case in point, newer Ricoh/Pentax cameras actually run an a Linux firmware. (See: GR IV and K-3 Mark II/III). Parts of the software stack are already there, but noones had the will to glue it together correctly for a mobile device usecase, yet.
It's not about will. You need quite some HW for proper calibration, or cut corners a bit. Calibration is otherwise a few step process with some steps having substeps for each light source type.
That's true, but you can cut corners and still end up like 90% there. The software pipelines that can even consume detailed calibration are a pretty recent development anyway. The "cameras on Linux phones are bad" meme is induced purely by the fact that until recently there were like two or three people who have ever sat down to seriously work on this topic across the entire community. Fortunately, it's changing (although the biggest driving factor appears to be the fact that some laptops need a similar treatment now).
We're going to be able to dump phone firmware soon and reverse compile with LLMs.
This will become an assailable salient soon and by 2036 we should have dozens of competing phone operating systems and vendors.
We're going to do the same for robotics and everything that gets shipped to us.
Well, rkisp1 driver that drives ISP on RK3399 on Pinephone Pro is available upstream in fully supported manner for like 4 years. It also has full docs in publicly available Rockchip datasheets and partial docs in calibration manuals.
What have people done with it? Some mediocre support in libcamera? :) I don't think lack of handholding is an issue here.
Pinephone is a low volume product. What you need is to get the firmware for some common device that has shipped millions of units so that the number of people with the incentive to make it work is high enough to actually build a community.
I don't know what the deal is with Linux and cameras. I've got Fedora installed on this old Retina MBP and apparently Linux somehow stopped supporting the built in webcam. I've never heard of a device losing Linux support but here we are.
Once the code is in the mainline kernel tree, things tend to stay supported indefinitely.
Some devices "work" without having real support by having some binary blob or third party code which is written against a specific kernel version. The code has to be updated when the kernel changes, which is why it's supposed to be in the kernel tree, but because it isn't the kernel developers don't know anything about it and aren't maintaining it. So then instead of working indefinitely it works until whenever third party stops updating it for current versions of the kernel. Which is why all the drivers should be in the kernel tree.
Of course, Apple isn't really that interested in supporting Linux since it's a direct competitor to macOS rather than a way to reduce their dependency on Microsoft/Google, so their hardware is more likely than most to be stuck using some reverse engineered alpha driver or proprietary blob extricated from the macOS one.
No you don't need to create the incentive to make it work. You need to actually make it work.
There are many such devices already. What is limited is number of people interested in FOSS/independent camera stack development AND usage/users, not lack of devices. Pine64 built and shipped about 60k phones to audience that could be the most interested/receptive - and it made about 5 people interested in doing indepth real work, that I know about.
Also RK3399 is not just pinephone pro, it's way more prominent in other things - notebooks, SBCs, ... whatever. Same ISP is in i.MX SoC, which covers another whole range of devices.
Not sure what 100's of millions shipped units to disinterrested audience achieved?
Ive been really annoyed at my iphone keyboard recently because it seems like a slow drift of whatever optimized state it was in was getting slower and slower. It seems to freeze partway thru typing something frequently now.
I’ve always wondered how hard it’s logging/uploading data for autocomplete/spellcheck…
It could be that the HN crowd is getting older? You age, your finger tips dry out, virtual keyboards get wonky.
if only age was cleared after a reboot too
Years behind is not bad. Pinephone Pro has solid camera sensors and dated but good enough ISP pipeline. Original Pinephone's camera situation is limited by SoC having no ISP so at best you can try using GPU to perform the transformations, or completely rely on ISP embedded in the sensors.
And all software is replicable.
I wonder how much of that is to do with patents? I imagine Apple and Google own all sorts of patents around tech to do with the camera/keyboard etc
I don't think the differential with software is as big as it seems. If Google completely shuts down side loading or otherwise kills AOSP as an open project, you'll get a flood of millions of people into Linux devices (my rough estimate is that it's in the low millions of people using custom Android ROMs), and that's more than enough people to start building out the software ecosystem, especially with gen AI to help speed things up.
keyboard text prediction is no more complex than some of free/open AIs that we already see in the wild.
If google doesn't shut things down, then just continue to use AOSP, which is a fine open source OS for most people's use cases.
I don't expect linux phones to catch up to ios for the mainstream, but I can see them working for me. I usually carry an actual camera with me so I don't care much about my phone one other than random utility shots / photos of receipts. And very much don't like the trend of forced app usage so having a device that physically won't run these apps helps me avoid companies that don't have a functional website.
> I don't expect linux phones to catch up to ios for the mainstream, but I can see them working for me.
That's the thing that allows them to catch up for the mainstream. Some nerds can use it and tolerate the rough edges, so they do. But the rough edges are still rough, so as more people use it, the small percentage of people willing to actually do something about it becomes a larger absolute number of people, and then more of them get shaved off. Which causes more people to use it.
The point when the devices are usable comes long before the point that they're what the majority of mainstream consumers are buying. Desktop Linux has been there for more than a decade and year after year its market share slowly goes up.
There isn't going to be a single year when its market share goes directly from 3% to 97%. There is going to be a year that its market share gets into the double digits and then continues slowly going up.
I think Linux need another "Wine" moment, but for android/ios.
The Wine moment was actually the Proton moment when Valve needed games to work outside the impending Microsoft stranglehold.
Because of Proton, Microsoft gave up its effort to block Steam and move all Steam games to the Microsoft Store.
In theory, Waydroid exist.
In practice, I've failed to ever get it running on several attempts so far.
How so? To make it work on Librem 5 I had to fix some issues in Waydroid's gralloc and hwcomposer implementations, but that was back in 2022. It has just worked out-of-box ever since.
Apple's mobile keyboard is the worst I've used. I basically have to correct about half the words I type.
I just got an iPhone as a secondary phone and hate the keyboard so much. How are people putting up with this BS?
Either they don't know better (the majority) or they use an alternative keyboard like GBoard
Just disable the autocorrect and predictive text to make it usable again.
I have autocorrect and predictive text on on the iPad and off on the iPhone and it is fascinating how much better it is on the iPad. One of the things that particularly killed me was the iPhone correcting three or four words away from the cursor. There's an option for it to highlight when it does that (which it really shouldn't) but something about iPhone apps the highlights never work. iPad apps they actually work. (Maybe because every phone app thinks it needs to implement their own half-baked text boxes but iPad apps have fewer "designers" doing stupid things like that? I don't know, it's weird.) Still frustrating that there isn't a way to turn off "don't touch anything too far behind the current cursor), but being able to actually spot them when they do change is a big deal.
And then I'll switch to Apple's voice to text which is equally awful.
Over the past few years I've felt the iPhone keyboard has degraded in quality so much. At first I thought I was just getting old, but I've seen so many people with a similar sentiment that I think it is actually the devices fault.
Agreed. I got an iPhone from work and I can barely type on that thing while my Pixel with Gboard just works and gets it right 95 % of the time even if I type gibberish.
also the retrograde auto corrections drive me nuts ... like i type a word (correct) then next word and it adjusts the previous word. attempted several times to deactivate that "feature" - didn't figure out how.
Yup somehow I typo so many things or it auto corrects things I dont want it to allll the time I hate typing on my iPhone it sucks. I've personally been keeping an eye on e-ink phones. I'd really like to move off of having the ability to use websites and apps except for basic stuff like texting.
Wait.
Are you all seriously arguing/considering that the barrier is something like "innovation" or "UX" or "hard work at improving the OS?"
Like seriously?
Come on. By now we should know what actually happens. The entrenched carriers will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. That's the real threat. It will look like the above, but like e.g. Google lying about why it got rid of Google Reader, the real story will be "monopolies gonna monopolize."
Honestly, I just want a hardware keyboard. I still miss the slider htc touch pro 2
some small company licensed the blackberry brand and sold really good devices with physical keyboard. They had support up until 2 or 3 years ago. Gone now.
If the Clicks Communicator had an adequate camera (definition may vary by person, I take a lot of photos) and ran Linux it would be an absolute winner of a device.
Linux desktop is still not caught up with Windows/Mac in regards to graphics, gaming, and laptops hardware support.
Gaming, it is mostly Windows games via Proton, hardly any different from using MAME, FS-UAE, Amiberry,...
Graphics, most of the well known commercial packages for VFX, 3D modeling, visualisation, lack a Linux version.
Laptops, just two years ago I failed to make UEFI work with the myriad of distributions I tried out, unless booting from external USB drive, and even then there was the whole termal configuration.
Linux desktop has always worked, and was better for me. There will always be stuff you can't have on one OS that works on another, this has been true since before Linux. The question here is of what we are given be iOS and Google Play Services is enough, for many of us it is not.
I daily drive SailfishOS on Jolla to see if it can be enough.
I can't really speak to laptops but I ditched windows last year for Linux and it's pretty damn good for gaming I have no reason to go back to windows at this point every major game I want to play works flawlessly.
The only issue I've had is the new rust desktop from pop os, but I just pop back into gnome and everything is golden. I hope they get their issues solved soon but it was just released 6 months ago or so. I can understand there's some bugs to work out.
So you only play native Linux games I assume, nothing of that Windows crap via Proton?
I installed PostmarketOS with Plasma-Mobile on my ancient Pixel 3a a month ago as something to play with and I was actually astonished at how polished it seemed. The keyboard was perfectly usable, apps were quick to load, I could do silly things like open full-fat Blender or OrcaSlicer on a tiny phone screen if I desired. Sadly old Pixels don't support video out over USB-C for whatever reason so I can't do what I really wanted to do and dock my phone into a USB dock for a desktop experience, but it's good enough to have me considering buying a more modern supported phone so I can try out daily-driving the experience.
> Sadly old Pixels don't support video out over USB-C for whatever reason
Google opted against putting the physical components needed for USB-C DP out until the Pixel 8.
I bought Jolla Phone 2026. Was thinking about Pixel 10 and another round of GrapheneOS, but changed my mind.
Was using Sailfish OS on Sonys phone but drove me nuts for two reasons:
- had to reverse banking up to kick out the checks each time when new version came out and I became quite proficient at it (decompiled into git and each new version over it, then git diff, and fix the checks, committed the changes)
- worse part was that there was no bluetooth to android bridge and local bus company required it for contactless paying
There was nothing I missed from the phone, even reversing banking app was not really an issue, but bluetooth was just needed.
I defected to GrapheneOS after two years, now I am moving back, I hope for good. The fixed the bluetooth while for hardware I dont care.
I have solved the banking app issues by changing the bank and getting cheap old pixel just for banking app. It doesnt even have SIM, only wifi and used Automatize to turn on airplane mode on lock screen and turning it off for unlock.
I dont care about NFC payment or any other android junk, for photos I have EOS and phone just doesnt cut it, while camera is good enough for taking shots at everyday things like shopping list.
I really hope I wont need to see android ever again.
Bluetooth now works with Waydroid? Seamlessly or you have to "disconnect" from host and "connect" it to Waydroid?
AFAIK, Camera (V4L) is also broken on main repo, to anyone else wondering.
Android basically ran a long bait and switch game. It came out as open source, achieved wide adoption, important online services like banking and government-related moved to it.
Now they are locking it all down.
AOSP isn't being locked down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189675
AOSP isn't Android.
embrace, extend, extinguish ...
Seems to be Google's playbook unfortunately
In "Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System" by Chet Haase (a book you shouldn't waste time on), it is very clear that making Android open source (i.e. AOSP) was almost by accident. Google was pretty confident that Android could be just as successful if it were a more closed ecosystem.
And it seems to be that Google is increasingly regretting that decision and closing things down bit by bit, from Play store policy, all the Play services BS, to how they ship security patches, and now all the developer verification. Google discovers that it's easier to make money if they just control everything.
Folks around here that repeatedly mix Android with Linux, should also be happy that for whatever internal political reasons, they ended up not rebooting it with Fuchsia, or simply replacing the Linux kernel with Zircon.
As everything else, especially anything with a GPL license, has been removed already, with exception of the Linux kernel.
People mix Android with Linux cause it is. Linux is only a kernel.
So it is an OS or a kernel?
It's a kernel per se, and any OS built on it is considered a Linux OS. "The Linux kernel is the core of any Linux operating system." - kernel readme
Linux.com refers to the kernel itself as an OS though, I think to relate to people who have only heard of OSes like Windows. And calls Android a platform based on the Linux OS :S
Pity that Android doesn't run any Linux userspace application, unless one makes use of workarounds, like termux having to fit within the constrains of Android sandbox and NDK limitations.
This read like a lot of pain and suffering. I've tried this for kicks myself. There's a lot of sacrifices to be made. But I'm rooting for anything Linux on smartphones.
I've been daily driving a Linux phone for three years. The suffering was real. It's mostly gone now, I love it and will definitely never go back.
That sounds very interesting to hear about!
What diminished the day-to-day difficulty for you? Is it because the ecosystem became more mature, or did you "crack the code" for how to interface with everything you needed from your phone? Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user?
It's really cool to hear that someone is successfully daily driving it and making this ecosystem work for them!
> What diminished the day-to-day difficulty for you? Is it because the ecosystem became more mature, or did you "crack the code" for how to interface with everything you needed from your phone?
Neither! I just got accustomed to doing without stuff. That’s an effect I wildly underestimated.
Many things are still difficult (looking at you, CloudFlare [0] and DataDome [1]!) but I think I’ll manage.
> Is your use-case for a phone wildly different from that of a typical user?
Not really, I guess.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816826
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921224
I've been daily driving Linux phones for the last 18 years and I would never switch away. Sure, at the beginning it required you to make it your hobby, but you were being rewarded for it. Sometimes when I'm looking at Android/iOS devices being used over someone's shoulder I'm quite horrified at what I see and what people consider normal these days and so glad that my phone works for me rather than anyone else.
What you can do with that phone that’s useful?
Everything I do online when I'm not in front of a PC I do on that phone. Web browsing, RSS, instant messaging, e-mail, social media, banking, navigation, public transport routing, TOTP auth, music playing, photo taking, weather checking, "smart" home stuff, conference agendas, occasionally some games or even software development (but not a lot these days - I used to program on my phone a lot when I was a teenager though). I even ran Jamulus on it to jam online during covid because it achieved better audio latency than my laptop, long before it got its Android port. Oh, and phone calling sometimes too, even though I've never been a big fan of that. Anything I need to, really.
And how is that any different compared to Android/iOS?
No tracking.
Everything happens on my terms. The phone never tries to grab my attention unless I explicitly make it so. All the things I use are FLOSS. I can patch anything I want down to the kernel and bootloader, often on the phone itself (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49191008). The OS is managed the exact same way the OS on my PC is and all my skills and knowledge directly transfer over, so I can script it or write applications the exact same way I did on PCs for decades. No "side-loading" shenanigans whatsoever. I can use any browser I want with any extensions I want. I've even used it at a game jam once - plugged a screen, keyboard and mouse in and made a game with the same tools I would have used on a PC (QtCreator, Allegro, GIMP, Inkscape, Audacity, LMMS) and cross-compiled it to Windows and macOS right from the phone using the exact same tools and workflow as usual.
I could probably go on and on. It feels like my little personal pocket computer rather than an appliance that someone lets me play with on their terms.
BTW. Funny how it can go from "it can't possibly replace Android/iOS" to "how is that different from Android/iOS?" :)
What do you use? both in terms of hardware and software. I love the idea of a linux phone but I'm very skeptical.
I'm currently using a Librem 5 with PureOS 11 and Phosh. PureOS is a bit behind on software releases compared to other available distros, but I find it to be the most polished and stable experience.
In the past I have used a Neo Freerunner (with Om2007.2 and later SHR) and then a Nokia N900 (with Maemo 5). The former demanded plenty of your attention but could be made to work well enough, while the latter was a really nice yet exceptionally hackable consumer device. Before I switched to a Librem 5 I had carried a second phone with Android for about 3 years as the N900 was already too old for comfortable web browsing and there was nothing else on the market that I'd consider worth switching to for a while - but that was the only such exception.
Was hoping someone mentioned the N900. The best keyboard i have ever used on a phone was the N900 physical slide-out. Maemo 5 also included word prediction and autocorrect features that just worked, perhaps its nostalgia but I always recall using that keyboard as a great tactile experience and great example of nokia build quality. Still have that phone with me.
Do you take photos or use Bluetooth? What's the experience like for multimedia SMS (assuming no RCS), Whatsapp, banking or other apps normal people expect you to use, or file transfer? Are there any devices that can do NFC?
Taking photos is one of the things I got accustomed to not having. The picture quality on my Librem 5 is just too disappointing [0].
In the past I used Bluetooth for keyboard and mouse when I connected the phone to a monitor. (I no longer do because the USB port on my L5 has broken down so badly that it can no longer maintain a DisplayPort Alt mode connection.)
I’ve never used Bluetooth for music or similar, it keeps stuttering horribly on my L5. No idea why it does that!
I’ve never used multimedia SMS either. Almost no one uses SMS or MMS in Germany. Signal barely works via the Electron app (and signal-cli), so that’s what I use for messaging. WhatsApp doesn’t work because I have no iOS or Android to tether it to.
I can’t use public transport apps, which is a shame because I live in a city center where I depend on public transport. I download my public transport ticket from a private API once a month via curl.
For file transfer, I mostly use rsync, Git, or Unison.
Banking only works thanks to a dedicated bank card reader. [1]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45321901
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33418431
> Taking photos is one of the things I got accustomed to not having. The picture quality on my Librem 5 is just too disappointing [0].
The quality of taken photos is fine (as long as you keep the lens clean :)), it's the quality of raw data to JPEG pipeline that's underwhelming. The default pipeline has been significantly improved recently, but it's still very basic, which really shows in low light. There's a huge room for software improvement there. You can always open the DNG file in something like Darktable or RawTherapee and develop it better, with proper denoising etc.
I've been shooting lots of photos and videos on my L5: https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
> I’ve never used Bluetooth for music or similar, it keeps stuttering horribly
I've experienced that when using 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi together with Bluetooth, but never when connected to a 5 GHz AP.
Smartphones(android, iphone) is just smart OTP now. Bootloader unlock unavailable(i hope this is just security concern for AI era), attestation is now a thing(regulations?). Most application(incl ChatGPT, X) says Android-available, but in fact it's Google-Android only.
As daily driving Linux desktop/laptops, I mostly find that android(at least samsung galaxy-flavored) is next gen of Microsoft Windows, in bad ways. At least you can "hack" the Windows to customize something by your own, android does not. Performance also questionable nowadays, not for gaming but browsing purpose for me, may drain more battery than expected. Also MS acknowledges the issues and made statements to fix while I haven't seen samsung's.
Anyway, My opinion is, If you are nerd like me, I would buy one phone that 1) can unlock the bootloader 2) can root 3) at least kernel source available, some companies do not disclose until legal? actions 4) optional, linux port-able (via community) 5) optional, officially supporting linux(not aosp)
and then buy second phone, that has great security support, e.g Apple iPhone or Google Pixel, and use it like a wallet(banking/cam/gps/... I would not like to support other vendors, what if they abandon security patches, and then phone being vulnerable). I believe more android application will be more restrictive than before in the future.
For linux, you own the hardware. Because it's open source, you can audit and harden the every aspects, e.g You might able to use proprietary bluetooth codecs, which vendor disables in android ROM. When AI era, you may able to investigate and mod stuffs which you don't fully understand. This take risks, and we have right to take the risks instead banning it.
I need a phone I can root and still have their shit attestations. Rooting alone is not even that important anymore, you can’t install almost any app that’s useful or use payments. So can’t be your main daily phone. Then what’s useful for? You could potentially browse internet with a custom app, and run some tooling kind of apps that can’t be installed on regular android? besides that nothing useful.
Rooting is important so I can mock provide fake data for: location, other sensor data, contacts, files, etc that’s what’s a a truly owned device. He does what I say.
Not what the app wants. If apps says you can work only in location X my phone takes the app side instead of mine. That’s not mine.
I can’t copy this text or take screenshot because restrictions: fucking stupid. I’ll just take a photo with my second device (or output to usbc device that can record screen) and parse the text. My phone just made me waste my time. I still can do what I want, just extra hops. Because, again, is not truly my phone. Is an adversary to my daily use.
Anyway it’s a lost cause. The only hope is for ai to bypass their security and allow owners to truly own a device.
Preventing you from faking data is exactly what attestation is designed to do. You want something different from what the folks requiring attestation want. That's fine, but just don't expect to be allowed to use those apps.
FWIW, While I do not suggest to use, Somewhere in the community has been spoofing the attestation(google), IIRC it worked for me few months ago. Might your needs.
I've tried a few times over the years to make Ubuntu Touch work. God how bad I wanted it to work here in the US. The lack of apps and VoLTE support really soured me on it ever working here.
If you're outside of the US, the availability of useable mobile OS's outside of Android and iOS is pretty abundant compared to the situation here in the US.
Ukraine. Diia (open-source govt services app) likely won't work. monobank either. on banks there is also Oshchad, Privat, Pumb, and none of them will work on Linux. GPay is a staple, I don't even have a plastic card (mono customer) because it's so good to just not fuck with keeping plastic around. plus there is a strong Quick Share culture, which I don't see working on Linux particularly well
Just curious... are you unable to get a physical card or just don't want to?
just don't want to. it would be nonsensical to get it since all functionality that was provided by ATMs in pre-mobile age mono provides only via an app. ATMs log in through app and only exist to accept cash, so I can't use it as a "secondary authentication method" in ATMs or check my balance outside the app.
Everyone's situation is different I suppose. But I do tire when people choose the convenience over the freedom.
Not saying that's what you're doing, but I hear it often enough.
well, me being in Ukraine also means readiness to move out of my house whenever the need (or opportunity to escape abroad! I hate this war and kidnap-conscription) may arise. it's as much convenience as it is preparedness
Do you not also keep your ID on you at all times?
That's why I don't mind carrying around plastic cards, they just go in my wallet with my ID and a small amount of cash anyway.
Even if I was willing to use GPay, I don't like the possibility of my phone dying locking me out of my apartment and preventing me from paying for things.
Diia and plastic are treated equally valid within Ukraine, but losing my ID is going to deal more damage than losing my phone. so no, I don't carry ID with myself at all times - why when I can just scan the QR code and keep the "real stuff" locked at home?
I do not keep ID on me at all times. I dont even own a wallet any more.
Moving to GrapheneOS and not having virtual cards for contactless payment has been struggle, not going go lie.
well fix that? start carrying your bank card everywhere you carry your phone? There are even phone cases with card pockets in them if you want to look like you're swiping your phone at the terminal.
Which part of having all your money locked behind six technological barriers requiring pervasive infrastructure to be working is preparedness? Preparedness is having several thousand euros in cash.
everyday transactions and subscriptions still go through banks and apps. also,
> Preparedness is having several thousand euros in cash.
totally agree. not that I, much like any average Ukrainian, have more than €400 behind my name, but I agree, and by that definition only the wealthiest ~10% are truly prepared
What do you suggest using this freedom for?
In this context? Being able to put your foot down and say fuck Google, I will no longer put up with the anti-user direction of their platform, and switch to something outside the duopoly
Not being surveilled, sold-to and manipulated by _my_ hardware.
I wonder if thinking in a binary way (convenience over freedom) is a good description.
I bought mobile devices that I could root over the ones that I couldn't. I favor companies that are less shitty. I preferred Linux over Windows as main OS even when Linux was harder to use (now I think in fact might be easier). But life is made of trade-offs and I did not see particularly good arguments of why Android is "that bad". You can root some devices and one can even avoid lots of services if you don't like Google (maps, mail, etc.) - which I also do.
So for me Android manages to stay in a unstable equilibrium : good for what I need, trustful enough for some stuff (money), not more spying that others (GSM towers), some levels of customization if you really want. Could it go "evil"? Sure, but considering what happens in the world, I am more worried my neighbors would have idiotic ideas than the fact that Google will be so evil.
We chose that when we stopped using cash.
> stopped using cash
You stopped using cash? It is one of the most insane things I ever heard.
You transactions are tracked, I assume? The rule in the eu (PSD2) is that a dozen private/public/hybrid/other databases, of unclear substantial identity, will record your transactions.
And what if you had a an infrastructural shortage? No transactions then?
How can people think of "cashless society" as something outside a dystopia?
We agree. I meant in the aggregate. Cash is very rare here in NL at least.
Yeah especially in Ukraine. An active war zone. Russia bombs the power plant again and you can't buy groceries?
Because cash sucks. Haven't used cash in 10 years. I agree it is problematic. I guess a high trust society enables it NL and SE are such places.
A great deal of shops in the Netherlands don't take cash.
Some didn't before 2020, but during 2020 the trend accelerated, and many shops stopped taking cash. Aside from hygiene, it's also easier to deal with safety for the store (i.e.: nobody can steal the cash register).
The supermarket in my neighbourhood has ~30 self-checkout machines. Only one of them takes cash. The human-checkout also takes cash, but is usually closed.
> just don't want to.
then it's all your own fault, isn't it?
I've just switched over to Ubuntu Touch again recently. We'll see if I stick with it, but... at least on my device (Fairphone 5), VoLTE works now!
This is great to know, thank you for the update!
Is there such thing as a palm-sized mobile PC that can just run a desktop Linux distribution (or Windows for that matter) that supports mobile features (calling, SMS, and data)? Even if it has rough edges or compromises?
What's wrong with just Android?
Google!
There's a powerlessness to using Android.
It's difficult to just do things. Even windows feels more "free." Phone OSes are built like prisons.
Ideally Android would let you drop into a real shell, without having to deal with android sandboxing.
Regardless, I use termux and tasker to get my automations done.
Probably because carriers don't want a bunch of poorly secured devices on their networks.
They don't seem to put much effort in proactively blocking residential VPNs though?
Counter-evidence: the Google Play Store, which is a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
And also malware.
Counter-evidence: Repos such as AUR
That blast radius coupled with (non-Android) Linux's atrocious security is a far worse option
>Repos such as AUR
AUR isn't a traditional repository but more functions like a paste bin for package build scripts you have to go out of your way to enable and use at your own risk. It is not how actual Linux repositories work which are way more safe than google or even apple app store.
> way more safe than google or even apple app store.
Probably because of how people submit directly to the commercial app stores and the app store staff are expected to accept them as long as no malware or other problems are detected. Such problems are generally explicitly listed on Terms of Service and app submitters may be able to dispute rejections. Meaning problems generally need to be concrete and justifiable. Also, because of the sheer number, problems are likely scanned for, rather than each app being personally considered by a developer.
FOSS distro package repo maintainers generally don't have any such pressures. They get their absolute pick of what to include from the wild, only taking as much as they're able to handle.
Also, distro repo maintainers handle the building from the source code themselves, while app store apps are closed source to the app stores. Their ability to inspect apps is very limited.
Can't you get USB modems and cram a SIM inside? Are carrier networks really more scary than the internet at large?
If that was the reason then Windows laptops with WWAN wouldn't exist.
You can root it if you really want (and if the bootloader is unlocked)
What are the main things you can do in a real shell versus termux for instance?
It's a pretty big sandbox in my experience.
If something bothers me with my phone's UI or if I want to change the behavior of some system service, I can do e.g. "apt source phosh", patch it and then "apt build-dep .", "dpkg-buildpackage -b" and "apt install" it right on the phone. I can even send the patch for upstreaming from there.
How easy it is to do an equivalent thing on Android?
UI-wise, termux can run Xorg and you can modify the interface you use there. You're right about services. Can't run systemd, but they can just run the service programs in the background (e.g. they can call sshd directly). Regarding modifying programs, maybe not that convenient directly on termux, but if it's rooted, you may be able to run docker and modify them in a debian environment.
The neat thing about non-Android phones with respect to what you mention is that you can do those things just like how you would on any other computer, without having to worry about Android workarounds that may one day stop working via an update.
"interface you use there" - yes, with a strong accent on "there". Sure, you can even run a x86 emulator in a browser and run anything you want there as long as it's performant enough, but that's a very different thing to actually controlling the OS you run - and even if you do happen to be in some control, modifying anything in Android without reflashing the entire thing is still a massive PITA. And of course you're not gonna pass the attestations once you assert the control anymore, so why not just ditch Android completely at that point?
How do you install kde?
With Termux: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/1DUmyqTYKJ
I don't have control over my own device.
people shouldn't have to buy a mac mini to run openclaw, they already have an always-on computer, they just can't install anything computationally useful with it
People are still running openclaw?
that's just an example, codex app-server/claude remote-control or whatever
doesn't support btrfs snapshots.
Currently Google is planning to lock down the Android platform to only Google Play store software repository. See https://keepandroidopen.org/ for more info.
Librem 5 or one of the other recommended mobile Linux devices: https://linuxstans.com/linux-phone/
Wow, $150 vs $2000 for ~ the same thing ~
Made in China vs Made in USA.
PinePhone specs on table are old. They're currently 3GB RAM and 32GB eMMC at 200 USD for package including hub.
For starters, the Librem 5 costs $799. The Liberty Phone is a version manufactured in the USA, which is not something everyone will care about.
Also, PinePhone is so much slower than Librem 5, which in practice feels closer to the (now discontinued) PinePhone Pro. Their specs only seem similar on paper, and only if you don't dig into the details. Though of course, Librem 5 being a 2019 design isn't a speed demon these days either - but I'm still using one and it's manageable.
> PinePhone is so much slower than Librem 5
They're the same specs. Pinephone Pro has more cores, ram, and storage.
> Their specs only seem similar on paper, and only if you don't dig into the details.
What do you mean?
They're very much not. I have both of them on my desk right now. All the things that make the PinePhone so painfully slow (GPU performance, RAM bandwidth, eMMC speed, small caches) are significantly higher spec'd on the Librem 5. It also takes much longer to thermal throttle. Performance isn't defined by CPU cores and RAM size alone.
Original Pinephone is good enough for smartphone apps. It can run a typical smartphone UI smoothly on a single core fully throttled to 648 MHz with a lot of room to spare, probably much better and more responsively than your typical similar class bloated Android phone. Also have it sitting on my table, doing just that. :D
https://xff.cz/dl/tmp/photo-20260806-013112002.mkv (I guess I try hard enough, perfectly servicable with a single core at 648 MHz, barely scratching it at 10-20% CPU time used)
It would be a bit ridiculous if it was not, given what UIs/games people run on 50MHz 486 if like 40-80x faster phone could not move some pixels around smoothly at 60fps.
Well, even the Neo Freerunner worked smoothly if you tried hard enough :)
https://thehammer.io/ right now texting device, runs linux :)
PinePhone (Pro) or Librem 5
> run a desktop Linux distribution (or Windows for that matter) that supports mobile features (calling, SMS, and data)?
The above use ARM SoCs. Palm-sized x86 with cell modem? Doubt it.
Thank you for the recommendation, but I have a Pinephone Pro and I find it to be so utterly useless because of how slow it is and how buggy the software is. Maybe what I want is just something that doesn’t exist.
I get it. Got one. Compromises are many. Speed-wise, it clears the bar for me of being able to watch Youtube on Firefox and use the controls, but yeah it's got bugs and other issues.
I may be able to tolerate the speed because of how I used my netbook many years ago. Windows XP was completely useless because of how laggy the GUI was. Archlinux with i3 and a focus on using the shell (e.g. hardly ever touched a file manager) with a very light terminal (urxvt; others like gnome-terminal were too heavy) and other very light apps made it very responsive. I've kept that habit of a core set of light programs even on desktop computers. On the PPP, SXMO with sway WM/composer, foot terminal, and wvkbd as a keyboard is very responsive, too. The only gripe I have speed-wise is that makepkg (an archlinux script) is weirdly slow to start up.
Maybe GUIs that have animations are too laggy to be useful; I haven't tried. The eMMC is likely faster than your microSD if the disk is the problem, though I'm on a microSD without issue.
Pinephone Pro had a very small developer community and thus quite undeveloped software. It was discontinued for this reason. Librem 5 is being developed by both a community and a company, so it's much more usable.
Pine really fucked up with the PPP. That, and a few other issues around that time really soured me on Pine as a company.
Agreed. Despite endless assertions from someone that Pine and Purism are where we should place our hope for better mobile devices, I can't put my trust in either company. Their track records are too hard to overlook.
I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves. They've just been the only ones to ship Linux phones that don't depend on anything Android nor significant closed source code at all. I for one just want to see the same distro diversity with the same amount of open-source OS control over HW on phones and other devices that I do see on desktops/laptops. Linux phones in general are kind of a miracle to exist, given how long we went without them. However, given the low demand for this specifically (a lot are satisfied with termux or hybris-based OSes), they're kind of a miracle within a miracle.
They deliver beyond that too, with support for Alt-DP over USB-C for instance, open schematics, parts obtainable from independent distributors of electronic components, available detailed datasheets, and external batteries that can be hot-swappable (at least on PPP, haven't checked the others).
> I don't think the feelings are so much towards the companies themselves.
I respectfully disagree. Pine's MO was basically "create hardware and hope people create software for it". A bit tongue in cheek, but that's it. Which is fine as long as they're up front about it, which they are.
But in order for this to work, a community needs to form around the device. Pine doesn't have to be the ones to manage it, and some would say it's better if they don't, but they're surely a big part of it if for no other reason than they're the makers of the hardware. The infant PP community was doing quite fine until they announced the PPP and confused the hell out of everything. Couple that with some seriously brain dead choices (IMHO) around booting and charging, led to them not only torpedoing the pro but sinking the original PP as well. Probably in no small part because they split what little community had formed.
The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
By my statement, I meant that it isn't blind fanaticism towards the brands. Yeah, they fucked up by what I read and I haven't interacted with them directly, maybe they're unpleasant (Customer support definitely wasn't. They're very nice.), but both Pine and Purism have delivered more than anyone on this puny market. They net positive.
The strategy, "create hardware and hope people create software for it," is valid too.
I think both sides maybe overestimate the other. People state the above like a complaint that they don't make themselves responsible for the code, but maybe that's their limit of what they can do. People tend to think of companies like things that can do anything with unlimited resources, but just like people they can have limits. In general, the posture, "I don't like this company for X reason, so I'll find another," is valid and good, but when you only have 2 suppliers... maybe a little more tolerance is needed to get your goal, the product.
They may have overestimated the abilities of the market too. It's tiny and part of the appeal is being able to treat your phone the same as your computer. A good part of the market is likely going to be people whose programming experience may be limited to computers with a BIOS, native compiles, etc. I for one took a bit to just understand the boot process in detail (how it differs from a computer). Crucial details are spread across websites and blogs. There are unique challenges too like needing a virtual keyboard in initramfs. Needing to cross-compile can be new and surprisingly complicated, depending on a lot of things (e.g. language). On and off, I was/is looking at the battery driver to add hot-swapping support. That also involves learning a lot of things on multiple levels. You want to pull people that can quickly write camera drivers from this. Also not many people have all that much free time outside of work. A lot of patience is needed here, too.
Megous was talking about there being no lack of hand-holding. I'm sure everyone appreciates it (I appreciate it), but the gap can be very wide.
A lot of momentum was being lost before LLMs even came into the picture, improved and gained momentum for coding agents, etc. If the PPP had been released e.g. this year, things would likely be different.
> The pro was obviously rushed. I personally think they saw an easy way to grab some quick cash and took it.
Yeah, I've noticed details on the PPP. In their defense, it's supposed to be the explorer edition, not the final product. Also, as I understand, the PP and PPP are subsidized by Pine64, so I wouldn't see it as greediness, but rather desperation.
> open schematics
The Librem 5 even goes way beyond that - ECAD and MCAD designs are available on a free license as well: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/l5-schematic & https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/hw/3D_designs
> Purism
I haven't heard much bad about Purism. I was always more on the Pine side.
A quick search online didn't find anything. Can you give me a quick breakdown or link?
> I haven't heard much bad about Purism.
That's surprising. They burned through a ton of goodwill by holding many people's money for many years, while being non-responsive to depositors, refusing refunds if they did respond, and so on. A lot of ink and footage has been spilled over it. Their laptop effort seems to have evolved into something almost reasonably non-scummy, but the Librem 5 put a lot of people off.
Current complaints, from what is (by all appearances) a tiny user base, about the state of the device and its lack of usefulness are also common enough, e.g.:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/1foblyu/daily_drivi...?
https://forums.puri.sm/t/im-giving-up-on-the-librem-5/18399/...
The more-viable alternatives are not without their own tradeoffs, but they are at least actually viable for normal people. I can't see putting family members on a Librem 5 or a PinePhone (much less a PinePhone Pro) without it being an absolute train wreck of a time for anyone but the most extremely basic and patient user.
Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages, given how anemic the SoC is. As others have pointed out it would have been a midrange Android chipset well over a decade ago. How exactly that works when one needs to use a site requiring JS to function has me feeling like I'm daily driving Nokia N-series tablets in the late 2000s again, except Nokia tablets were somehow a more polished experience two decades ago than one gets today out of either the Librem 5 of PinePhone due to the lack of real manufacturer and community support.
We need a viable Linux slab with a radio, and I want one to exist. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs and was reasonably power efficient, but that's currently a fantasy completely out of touch with the state of available radios. I would carry my Linux ThinkPad with a built-in cellular radio or an external hotspot everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a basline level of utility value.
For someone who wants to check simple IMAP email, send and receive SMS messages and load basic websites, and are satisfied with poor camera performance, size, weight, battery life, and durability, while feeling good about the hardware they run (even if its hardware and software security is poor), then they may be quite happy with it.
> We need a viable Linux slab with a radio. It'd be nice if it was fully free of proprietary device blobs but that's currently a fantasy totally out of touch with the state of available radios. I would genuinely carry my Linux ThinkPad with a cellular radio everywhere before it would make sense for me to try to pretend the PinePhone or Librem 5 meet even a baseline of utility value.
The PinePhone (Pro) is there. They work as a laptop replacement. Their problem is more on working as a phone. There's even a repo out there to turn the touchscreen into a touchpad. With a bluetooth keyboard, it's basically a laptop.
> Even their most prolific and downright stubborn true believer of a booster on HN admits he has to disable JS to load a number of web pages
YouTube works on the PPP. If YouTube works, likely any JS works. Google Maps on Firefox also works.
Except Motorola shipped an Android phone with an x86 CPU -- RAZR i (2GHz Atom) in 2012.
Looks like some of GPD Pocket systems can have sim cards. But don't know how good the linux compatibility is.
If only they were like half the size.
M.2 modems generally can't do calls nor SMS, though. It's just data, AFAIK.
Purely an akchally, but there is the Fujitsu F-07C. Topologically it was a Windows 7 stick PC duct taped to a 3G flip phone that acts like a KVM console and a modem.
Yeah, that's basically exactly what I'm looking for, except modern enough.
GPD Pocket / GPD microPC seem to be the only "small PC" products nowadays. But they do not support calling and SMS (they have 4G modem option for data, but it's not seemingly not very good).
At that point I think I might get one of those and use them as an everyday computing device (with Waydroid for Android apps) plus a small light Android phone for calling, tethering and locked down apps that do not work otherwise.
Google Play Services ruins dream of this. I've noticed that automotive digital keys don't work with Graphine OS due to how Google Wallet works.
What about real keys?
a technology of bygone times. we shall preserve it
I thought I would miss google wallet but after 2 years of using graphene I came to the conclusion that it is easy to live without it.
A non problem imho.
Or most banks, government apps, and so on. Which all require an app to login, rather than support any open and actually secure standard.
Governments that require any particular device, OS, or 3rd-party platform have sold your citizenship to private interests.
But what's your choice as a citizen then - emigrate from your country due to apps?
Show up to the government office. Say you don't have a compatible phone. Wait until they find a solution for you.
I guarantee the government is not forcing 95-year-old Betsy in bumfuck nowhere with no cell coverage to learn how to use a phone. They have some solution, they're just not making it obvious.
My government's solution to this, is a physical office, where they will file the paperwork for you. You may have an average wait time of four hours to be seen, and so must devote an entire working day to the effort, but can submit without a phone.
I'm in the process of buying a house, and getting some support from my Dad. AML checks required by app for both of us, he hated it.
I just called the solicitor, said "my Dad hates the app", they immediately presented an alternative.
And generally, 99% of stuff exists in browser. My phone is for messaging, photos, and reading, very little else.
I think a Linux phone probably appeals to the same kind of person who prefers real keys over digital ones.
I'm that kind of person, but my opposition to the "digital key" things like this is mainly about them being out of my control and not having the ability to opt out of user-hostile activity. With a digital key, I expect things like the parent said: being forced to use proprietary corporate apps, facing random limitations like maybe the key stops working if you lose internet connection (or when Cloudflare decides to block you, or anything like this), useless error messages that don't let me know if I can resolve something easily myself, and such things. I do use and like the "digital key" things sometimes, when they are as free and reliable as the "physical key".
More like those that make copies of their physical keys at home, after having analysed dozens of key cutting machines for that exact purpose.
If I had a car with that feature and no clear way to permanently disable it, I would take it back.
Can't you use an open-source wallet app? F-Droid seems to have a bunch of them.
FWIW I think tesla app works fine on Graphine/Lineage OS as a digital key where the BMW system (and maybe other MFGs) use something with Google Wallet which requires something with Google Play Services to work.
Not to mention that your android/ios device is still shipping a bunch of bluetooth tokens for "track and trace" system. Cryptographically signed to you.
https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing
> Cryptographically signed to you.
That's a bit of an oversimplification that makes this sound more concerning than it is. Not that it's 100% un-concerning, but I suggest that anyone concerned about this read the linked docs. It really was designed to be quite privacy preserving, though it's obviously a difficult challenge in this context.
Isn’t this GPS data to see where Covid has spread? Even if your name is anonymous, a GPS point that every day goes to your work and then your home is surely you?
Most probably, yes. But how would you know who I am and where I live? And if you do know both of those things, are there other ways of figuring out my routines? Yes, there are.
Keeping the name out of that data does a lot for privacy. With a name in there, you could use the data to find my name and figure out my address. Without the name in there, you don't know which point I even am without knowing some of my locations from another source.
Correlating data with another source is half of what data brokers do, so I wouldn't really say that is any level of privacy protection.
Where are you getting GPS from? Grandparent commenter talked about bluetooth beacons and parent suggested reading the docs.
The contact tracing APIs very deliberately avoided GPS for exactly the reason you mention.
> Not that it's 100% un-concerning
The face alone that if you spend 10 minutes within someone's proximity will get flagged is 100% concerning. Of course they keys will only be handed to government health officials, but we all know what that means.
Exposure Notifications is no longer available in Android as of like 2023. https://developers.google.com/android/exposure-notifications
It is encrypted ciphertext rotated every 10m in lockstep with your Bluetooth identifier.
You will need to turn off your Bluetooth if you want to stop advertising a rotating random number.
The only difference with the contact tracing is that a key, on the device, can correlate the ciphertext. I have it off because the utility was never demonstrated.
I've been using Linux as my daily driver on my main personal computers for years. You could say that I love Linux and it has treated me very well.
That being said, I consciously chose an iPhone b/c I want my phone to "just work". I had a Blackberry Storm for a year and it was buggy, had to be restarted everyday just for it operate etc etc.
The iPhone has always been great. It just does what I need it to do b/c clearly someone cared about making sure the end user experience was phenomenal. While Linux has gotten better over the years, it just doesn't feel the same.
In addition, I recently started using a MacBook and the fact that the phone sync WITH THE LAPTOP makes the iPhone an even bigger plus. For example, if I set keyboard shortcuts on my phone they also work on the laptop. Photo sharing is a breeze and even integrated iMessage "just works".
Now, I don't fault people for wanting Linux phones. It's just not right for me.`
Windows Phone was a great idea and worked so well. But it was killed by the fact that people didn't want to maintain apps for 3 platforms. Nowadays when most of the things runs on web/electron anyway, isn't this the time to rediscover that idea?
Make something novel? RTOS like response like blackberry, secure, fully opensource and such? With the era of LLM accelerated developement (don't crucify me), this wouldn't be such unreachable goal.
We would have to sacrifice bank apps but imho still worth it.
We should be eagerly sacrificing bank apps anyway. If your bank treats you with hostility, time to get a new bank.
With that thinking you are debanked. No bank is not hostile.
Unfortunately banks act on regulations. I'd much rather suggest avoiding banks altogether but that's discussion for later.
Is there a regulation preventing them from doing 2FA other ways in some countries? Chase bank in the US supports passkeys and SMS, you don't need the app. My wife doesn't even have a compatible phone.
Thanksfully it is not all web. Though indeed there is no lack of native multiplaform solutions.
But app is not the hardest challenge compared to supporting all the hardware, camera, screens and the many core protocols
These are problems the PC solved but we lost with mobile. Standard processors, BIOS, interfaces and general API's for use so it made systems kind of generic. Looks like those who made these things didn't want to repeat that mistake again.
Unfortunately, I suspect things like RiscV are just going to accelerate this as it means anyone can make any spec they want so long as the application code compiles to it.
Smartphones are much tighter and more specialized. It's not like they decided against standardization for lock-in reasons, cause even within a single manufacturer there will be so many differences.
If the push is large enough, manufacturers will develop their own drivers. If not, the implementation should be much easier nowadays.
Web is the only serious open standard we've got for apps
Surface Duo 2 tried to rediscover it.
Next one will probably take a while, but be a relative hit.
I've been using Sailfish OS since the first Jolla phone came out in EU and Canada both. It has some hurdles but if you pay for the android subsystem it works fine. There are a lot of great native apps and you get the full linux experience.
The Jolla 2 is said to be "sold out".
Apparently, they produce the phones in batches, not sure when the next one is due?
Just received mine. Sure, the interface is far, far slicker than what is available on the Librem 5, but there are already hints of "you are not really the owner of the device" (for instance default "safety" contacts in the contact app that you cannot delete, the inability to easily use "reverse tethering" (getting Internet by USB through a computer) and so on) that will make me keep the Librem 5, with all its own issues, as my daily driver for the foreseeable future.
(And the Jolla's "hardware privacy switch" feels like a bad joke: yes, the switch is hardware. What it does (if anything) is fully handled in software.)
I switched to Sailfish OS. A lot of rough edges, but it can can be workable—tho largely due to Sailfish having an Android layer to run those apps. It’s getting better OS-wise, but the Sony devices that you can get access to internationally are much lower priority on their list. On top, if you try to pay, the lock you to Western countries… & I have no idea why.
Speaking of Linux on mobile, I have about 300 of these things for sale with some associated hardware and software if anyone is interested (in Australia but can ship obviously) https://www.openstick.de/
It’d be cool to see pictures of the device!
Here you go https://hackaday.com/2022/08/03/hackable-20-modem-combines-l...
Worthy of a top level post be the OP you need to be!
This is an LLM-generated webslop.
What is, that website? It’s pretty thorough. It’s not my website but the information is all accurate.
Have you verified all of the website contents?
Well I have spent a LOT of time working with these devices, and I took a look through the website, and I didn’t see anything that looked wrong.
But not exhaustively no, because why would I? it’s just the first google result for ”openstick”.
It’s a pretty cool project with a cult following. If you’re interested you could spend years working with the same devices and then verify the information yourself.
I have thought about buying one of the Pinephone things, because I want to actually own the computer in my pocket, but I have always hesitated because the hardware is always kind of ancient for these things. The Pinephone doesn’t even have 5G, so I am not even sure that my phone service will let me activate it now.
What I would like is to take my existing iPhone 13 Pro and install a real Linux on it so I could guarantee decent hardware. You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.
> You know, like we could do with pretty much any computer before smartphones.
I don't remember all the details but I had a Mac G3 around the same time I started using Linux: I don't remember the story about installing Linux no Mac hardware as being a particularly easy one.
Now I'm not saying that years after the fact, Linux wouldn't run fine on Intel Macs. But if I recall correctly it always has been a bit of a bumpy road.
I didn't have a Mac in that era, but I did have a Macbook Air from 2014 and I ran Ubuntu and NixOS on it just fine, even at the time. I had to use rEFInd but it wasn't terribly hard.
On modern Macs, it's pretty easy to install Linux with Avahi.
To be clear, I don't necessarily need it to be easy to put another OS on there. I just want it to be possible. As far as I'm aware, there's no way (officially or unofficially) to install another OS on any recent iPhones. Someone might eventually figure out how to break the bootloader on the iPhone 13, but I personally think it should be something that the owner of the phone is allowed to opt into.
5G is probably not a requirement for your phone service (although I can’t say for sure). The critical bit on networks in the U.S. and many other countries without 2G or 3G is VoLTE for phone calls and texts, which it does support. Some carriers have device whitelists that are only loosely related to technical features, though.
Even still, it's 2026, I don't really think "has 5G" is considered a luxury feature on a smartphone.
I'm sure that the Pine folks have very good reasons for not having 5G support, but those reasons don't really matter to the end user.
Librem 5 has an experimental support of a 5G modem: https://forums.puri.sm/t/librem5-5g-is-here-modem-sim8202g-t...
I really want to leave the Google and Apple Ecosystems, but I still need "these" Banking Apps. Some Banks don't even offer a Web based experience anymore.
Why doesn't the EU force these banks to support all platforms including web?
I mean, if they can force Microsoft to support other browsers than IE6, then why can't they force banks?
Not sure why this is getting downvoted (or why IE6 is being brought up in 2026). But yes, banks are super-highly regulated and for good reason. They’re subject to all sorts of accessibility laws, there’s loads of precedent here.
I expect everyone who can conceive of something other than Android or iOS* on a phone is on HN, and not a bureaucrat in Brussels.
*(or BB, webOS, Windows Phone 7 Phone OS Phone Microsoft, Symbian, etc. if old enough)
PalmOS and webOS were the best.
Why not have US Federal Government enforce this instead? It's way more impactful for most HN users.
Why wait for Brussels beaurocrats we all have this much and not have the most important tech country in the world make this law?
..sure? I don't personally care what either enforces, since I'm in neither jurisdiction. I wouldn't have thought the US is any more (or even as) likely to personally, but sure. I said Brussels because comment I replied to said EU.
So everyone needs to carry a tracking device.
EU botched even API requirements on banks. We could have had open API to every EU bank, but nope, it must have been some bullshit for big companies to slurp data en-masse, instead of API for end users to use their data privately and comfortably from whatever app they wanted, incl. their own.
Open/individually accessible APIs would have to have be a movement, like the one with open formats for interacting with eGov.
We even had open APIs for every bank in Germany, in the form of HBCI and FinTS. With fancy things like optional RSA smartcard auth. The EU killed it all in the name of "omg, security!" (a total bullshit argument if you've ever looked at the specs), now with the new PSD2 the only ones getting proper API access are lots of shady payment providers, credit databases, data brokers and the like...
If you're an EU citizen, contact your MEP and ask for it.
While Sparkasse and Volksbank in Germany aren't the most ideal banks cost- and interest-wise, they do still offer transaction authentication via debit card, without the need for any smartphone.
Get a new bank, make sure your old one knows why you left. Try a local credit union.
Although I’m 100% in favor of credit unions over megabanks, I would not count on most having remotely decent web or app experiences.
I tried repeatedly with several credit unions, with poor results. The final straw was the patelco hack that made the entire bank unavailable for over a week. In the aftermath they implanted crazy security measures where talking to a rep required 6 layers of increasingly invasive authentication. But... The hack was of the bank infrastructure. It had nothing to do with individualized fraud, all accounts were affected --it was just security theater. I went back to a major bank after that.
FWIW I use USAA, it’s a quasi-credit-union, and they’ve been great. But they’re also an outlier.
But do you need "these" banking apps with you 24/7?
An old smartphone or tablet can do that job and stay in a drawer at home 99% of the time.
Yes. I need to pay someone. Get notified when my credit card is used. If any important banking communication happened. What do I do with a phone without: banking, uber, messenger like app, ? Same as holding a piece of a rock. Useless.
How did we do it before phones? Instant online payment is nice but rarely a requirement. Most times we split a bill with friends in a restaurant we agree on paying someone but although we technically could we don't all grab our phone at the exact moment, preferring enjoying the real social conversations we have. We tend to pay them later, and that later is more often than not at home and when I do a swift transfer to someone I'd rather have my complete laptop screen anyway to verify the banking data.
As for Uber and messaging, you are moving the goalpost.
uber still worked from the webpage last time I checked.
There are messaging apps available on linux.
I would love to do this. It's shocking how little Android offers for the hardware it uses. Recently I was thinking if I could install Windows 98 on my phone, even that would be better. At least I could have more than one app open without it burning all my work just because I dared to check info on a web page while filling a form.
Oh yes, the endless joy of "We have sent a one time code to your email." Yes, but if I switch to my email then I will lose my browser session and thus the code is useless. So you have to get out a laptop to open your email just so that you have 2FA on your phone.
Yea, that is so annoying, ._.
Tap the dots menu, and select “Open in Chromium” once the WebView loads.
And "please confirm this payment in your bank app". That one's even worse because the payment goes through while the site forgot what you were paying for. If you're lucky it gets refunded.
I used to have this problem before I upgraded to a phone with more RAM so more apps can be open at the same time.
My LineageOS setup used to do that; until I found that someone found a script that would adjust the memory allocation and OOM killer to more sensible values. I just have that run on boot. No side effects.
Unfortunately, that's not an option for most people, the only choice is to complain - but not like there's any other option on the market that behaves better. Or there's some other drawback, or different UI to learn...
Can you share a link to said script please?
Sure; it was one of many posts in xda for a cheapo mid-level Chinese device. I haven't gone through it too deeply to understand and optimize further, works fine as-is to me.
https://xdaforums.com/t/rom-16-official-lineageos-23-for-mi-...
The writing's been in the wall since the renamed the Android Market to Google Play Store. Frog's been boiling all this time, and every update my croaks grow weaker.
> If I have an issue or something I want to tinker with I can just ssh over from my PC either wirelessly or via USB.
FWIW one can also do that on stock Android or its GrapheneOS variant pretty conveniently, including storage access, am, boot background processes, etc. It is not as complete as being root on Linux proper but still.
This is often said but if you want to "diagnose" something then the terribly limited Android shell is about the last place you want to be, and a sandboxed one on top of it is worse ....
Why debug your daily driven phone? You can use Cuttlefish or anything else.
I think you forgot what the "H" in "HN" means.
I'm all for using a Linux phone. The caveats thereof are mentioned in this thread.
I've a wish list of one, though: make the Web the primary GUI front end. Essentially, apps are a specialised browser window. That way, I can program (both the front- and back-end) in plain text, just using regular Linux tools and a text editor -- no bloatware and gargantuan IDEs mandated.
Switching from Android style Linux HAL to FreeDesktop style Linux HAL… I honestly think we need more Linux HAL options than just those two, when one is threatening to self-destruct and the other is arguably the single worst interface design ever conceived, by all measurements.
Can you expand on this? I did follow the “Moblin/Maemo/MeeGo” forks back in the day and it struck me as odd Android pulled off the HAL layer but “Linux” was unable to.
Every [Linux based] OS usually needs some sort of HAL to wrap [ioctl] driver calls into APIs that can be consumed by more than one process at a time. Nokia/Moblin/Sailfish use Freedesktop style HALs, i.e. stuff like Wayland, Pipewire, anything accessible over DBus (which also implies extremely slow IPC by any standards; mach ipc on apple's darwins is probably faster [sobs]).
Basically I'm suggesting that we might need a whole new OS on top of the Linux kernel.
I guess we just need the DBUS developers to get their heads out of their asses, that's all: https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/6/23/657
Nah, DBus itself is plain bad interface design. Perhaps they could just piggyback off Binder if DBus itself weren't beyond saving. Also, despite a common sentiment online, it's not at all a complex process to implement a Binder userspace (given you have a sensible IDL in the first place, that is…)
Wrt/ torvie's narcissistic snarks linked above, the most important task for a kernel is still to facilitate fast IPC. The only viable forms of IPC in Linux are UDS and Binder. The former is slow and clunky. The latter is not a valid choice for DBus. So DBus devs have to manage slow, clunky, ill-suited legacy IPC. When a kernel can't be bothered to accommodate one of the most important operating systems built upon it, that seems really bad.
Since AOSP is open source, is it possible to reuse the Android HAL?
That's what the Halium project does, but it would be better to have an equivalent, independent alternative.
I introduced myself to this space a couple of weeks ago with a PineTab2. I bought it for reading but some tinkering. I am running Plasma Mobile on it. It's rough, but OK (and can't expect much from the hardware.) I don't know what the user experience out-of-the-box though. While I can run some 'important' apps in Waydroid (e.g. bank app in Norway), smartphones are not that interesting. I never wanted one, but it's increasingly something you have to have anyway and I usually don't realize it became so integrated in life (funny this comes up - I had a dream forgetting my phone and not knowing what to do next)
Shoutout to Purism... if you got the loot.
https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/
Most distributors are based in the US with the exception of large integrated circuits that are made in a variety of countries where those companies do fabrication (US, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan); an example is the NXP CPU we use from their fabrication in South Korea.
Boards:
M.2 Modem Module China, inquire for USA/EU options
M.2 WiFi/BT Module India, inquire for more options
It's not going to win the market, but I applaud anyone providing more choices.
Anyone looking at this should recognize that the hardware itself is nearly a decade old (and has performance of a mid-range Android from 11 or 12 years ago), the software is buggy and not fully baked (the version of Debian they JUST moved to has lost normal Debian Security team updates and maintenance has moved to the Debian LTS team) and the company has a history of extreme delays in shipping and customer service.
People can spend their money however they choose, but I wouldn’t spend $1800 on a phone like that if you want to actually use it as a phone. And before buying it as underpowered “portable” Linux computer (the battery life is not good even though I hear suspend mostly works now), this is still outrageously overpriced even by current hardware pricing.
All valid points to consider. I'd like to add that I'm for one don't need the latest and greatest apps, don't run games so email, SMS, messaging, YouTube or Netflix are all that are needed in terms of compute.
I'm surprised even those things work for you considering how unbearably slow Phosh and Linux apps are on the Furiphone with much more modern everything.
The slowness of Phosh is purely a consequence of the current, unoptimized software state. When I run Waydroid on PureOS on my Librem 5, it feels much smoother, despite being another layer on top of the OS.
I bet the vast majority of that slowness people complain about comes purely from GTK renderers. A motivated contributor could do wonders there.
I find it interesting to track the reality of using these free-er devices well after launch. Sadly it always seems incredibly painful and hinted at post-launch improvements tend to be small if they come at all.
https://forums.puri.sm/t/each-update-makes-my-librem5-worse/...
I wish these devices were ready to be viable alternatives for anyone not possessing a religious extremist's level of zeal for it, but they's still so far from ready. It's a shame, since we need something like this to be viable.
The promise of, 'it's FOSS and these issues will be addressed,' sure didn't pan out with the PinePhone Pro, and it isn't panning out for the Librem 5. And that's setting aside hardware specs that would have been challenging over a decade ago.
It turns out that when the basic user experience is terrible, adoption rates are almost non-existent, and therefore nobody develops for it. The companies themselves have also done a seriously insufficient job of supporting their devices.
I'm getting tired of all this exaggeration. I don't think there's any significant component in the Librem 5 that has even existed a decade ago already. Perhaps the audio codec. Sure, it can be underwhelming today when it comes to performance, but it's still usable and was absolutely nowhere near "challenging" back when it was fresh - also, the software got significantly more usable and performant over time. I have recently booted an image from around 2020, the progress was stunning.
I'd love to do this, but sadly I don't see it happening unless my lifestyle significantly changed to the point where I wasn't frequently traveling to new countries.
There are just too many very useful services that only work with Android/iOS. Take taxi apps for example. I've used over a dozen in the past few years, many of them local to a specific country or region that made getting around much much easier.
I‘m lucky that my part of the world doesn’t yet require apps for taxis & they accept cash. App users often end up paying more if they don’t know even basic negotiations.
In Thailand? I guess it depends where you are. I've been in 20+ provinces and speak some Thai, but it's still so much easier using grab/bolt/lineman/muvmi and not having to explain the directions.
I'm not completely switching yet, but I'm also exploring SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch to see how far they will allow me to go. We really need at least a third viable option; it is clear that only having Google's Android and Apple's iOS is not benefiting the individual user.
May as well just get an old school Nokia and skip the smartphone technology all together. Get yourself a nice flip phone and go back to the early 2000's. If you need to do something online, just bring your laptop with you - some are so small that they're easy to carry around in a backpack or side bag.
Or a Commodore phone. They're pretty snazzy.
https://commodore.net/callback/
You cannot get an old school nokia because 3g networks are gone, so they won't work.
I think they meant old school style rather than literally a Nokia from 20+ years ago. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_2660_Flip
I haven't used it myself but every now and then, I'm tempted to try a Furiphone. Just from what I've read, it looks like the easiest out-of-the-box Linux experience on a phone. Does anyone here have direct experience with it?
Yes. I have been daily driving one for almost 2 years. No it's not as polished as an iPhone of Samsung, but it also doesn't have the backing and history those phones have. In the time I've had it, the improvements have been huge. Some say it's a bit laggy - I don't think it is, I think this is down to not having animations to tide you over between this view and that view. It works. It can run banking apps in Android. It doesn't have to run android. It's a 6 core CPU. The later models have 8GB ram (mine has 6GB and it's fine). I have tried Pinephone and found that to be horrifically slow. I like that I can write my own apps and also use a mouse with it if I want - then you have the dock to use a monitor. Out of the phones mentioned in this article, it sounds like the Furi phone would out perform most of them.
I figure supporting this effort is my little way to make a change in the world and help bring freedom back to our devices, which I now have :)
Thanks for the mini review. That does sound rather encouraging.
the right answer is to deliver a usable SECOND device which happens to be linux based, and which has serves a purpose. Then over time, apps get ported.
realistically, this device would need to tiny to justify the extra weight, device-to-keep-charged, etc.
one idea: make it wifi-only and tether from your primary mobile device. This skips all the carrier nonsense, to focus entirely on the core use case(s).
I already have a second usable device and I don't mind the extra weight that much most of the time. It's called a laptop computer.
As soon as we get to a point that Linux on the phone works at all, I'm happy to switch completely.
Here, "it works" literally just means it works. Not "GPS doesn't work," "camera only half works," "interop with Android/iOS apps that you're forced to use doesn't work." That doesn't mean "it works." And of course "only works for 2-3 years and then the device gets abandoned" doesn't mean "it works" either.
We are hooked to Google/Apple platforms by our banks and some government services.
Although I'm supportive of your cause I find it ultimately futile. Developing and maintaining a mobile operating system is a hugely expensive endeavor. Only a wildly profitable company like Google could do so and give it away for free.
Linux simply isn't up to the task despite there being some touch-enabled user interfaces available for it. There's so much more people expect from their mobile these days.
The best option would be to use /e/OS or GrapheneOS to limit your exposure to Google's incessant spying and tracking.
> Developing and maintaining a mobile operating system is a hugely expensive endeavor.
I agree, it feels like trying to write a new browser from scratch.
> The best option would be to use /e/OS or GrapheneOS
I would highly recommend GrapheneOS (disclaimer: I used both for years).
There are actually some people using a GNU/Linux phone as a daily driver for years. I'm one of them.
Maybe you should write a blog about it. I'm interested.
I'm afraid there will be too many corners cut. The most important being the lack of available software. I'm of the notion that a computer without software is nothing more than a box of wires.
PureOS runs on Librem and is decent.
My bank forces me to have an iOS/Android phone for online payments. So at best I'd have a cheap Android phone in a drawer in my house in case I need to make online payments.
I'm surprised WhatsApp works on his non-Android OS?!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189632
If they ever figure out how to get Linux onto a phone with a good camera, I'd pounce on it. I would be willing to put up with app issues and weird bugs and all the jankiness that comes with early adoption, but I simply can't give up being able to take really good photos with my phone.
Is this a good enough camera for you? https://social.librem.one/@dos/tagged/shotonlibrem5
No, it's not even close to good enough. Beyond the photos, the video he posted would have been disappointing in 2003.
The (hardware) camera quality is about what you'd expect from a phone from 2019. Software processing to get JPEGs out of raw data is worse (with a huge room for improvement), but you get the raw DNGs and can employ any processing you want afterwards. Video recording, however, is the real Achilles' heel of the Librem 5, at it lacks both hardware ISP and video encoder (there are only hardware decoders). This means that any real-time processing has to happen on the GPU (replacing the ISP) and CPU (replacing the encoder). I can record indefinitely at 526x390 30 FPS and I expect 1052x780 to be achievable at a reasonable framerate with more work (currently it's at about 15 FPS IIRC), but I don't expect it to ever go significantly better that that. Of course, short clips (that fit into the RAM) and low FPS "timelapses" are possible to record at much higher quality, but these are fairly specific use cases.
That said, what's there already is enough for me to have plenty of fun with the camera anyway.
Those are probably the best I've seen from a Linux phone, but still far too much of a downgrade for my uses. Even some of the photos taken in decently well-lit locations are noticeably grainy, so I can only imagine how poorly it'd fair in worse lighting. Tons of props to this photographer -- I have great respect for the art of getting good shots out of low-end equipment, but it's not what I want for my daily carry device.
I'm not exactly a photographer, these are just random point-and-shoot photos I took with my phone. I am, however, a programmer who has spent a bit of effort on making the photos taken on this phone look reasonably good, which is all it took to get to "the best you've seen from a Linux phone" state. Imagine what someone who actually knows what they're doing could achieve there ;)
The reason some of them are grainy is that there's no denoising applied to them at all. The current GPU-based pipeline only does debayering, lens shading correction, highlight clipping, color matrix application, tone mapping and barrel distortion correction so far. You get the raws though, so you can apply whatever you want post-factum. Patches are welcome too.
Beyond the forgiving lighting, note the huge amount of post-hoc post-processing being done.
Now that making apps is easy, and it's the apps and eco system etc that makes an OS take off and adopt, starting a new OS for phone like devices shouldn't be as big of a problem as it used to be.
Given fair phone exists, it should now be able to get all kind of apps anyone wants.
The problem isn't missing app functionality that anyone can build. It's access to proprietary third party services that are too useful to go without. And they're not going to let you build your app to access their services.
Ever tried using Linux on real mobile hardware? Phosh and updates via Flatpak are unbearably slow. I have yet to see a way to try Plasma Mobile, etc or have much of a way to customize the filesystem and lower level services to make things better.
I have Furiphone and F(x)tec devices. They ought to work well as mobile Linux devices, but they very much do not. They are unbearably slow, which I attribute to poor storage I/O optimization and Phosh being an obese sloth.
Both Furiphone and F(x)tec phones are Halium devices. They rely on Android layers underneath the GNU-like userspace. They don't really work as actual "mobile Linux" phones at all, so they're not a particularly good representation.
I somehow doubt Halium explains the level of performance I've seen from them.
Something has to, Phosh runs well on much less powerful devices and several components need to be patched to work on top of Halium, so you're not really running the mainline Phosh environment there anyway.
I had a pinephone and switched from phosh to plasma-mobile. The hardware was very limited but with plasma it was much much better at least.
I have a F(x)tec device. It had the issue were it no longer boots when the battery is fully depleted. It also came with Android vs Linux. It is now e-waste. To my knowledge the company died off.
I have a PinePhone. That was just a toy gadget and nothing of value as a daily driver. Another e-waste device.
I have a FuriLabs FLX1S. It is a complete pack that is mostly plug and play. The latest update improves a lot. Wayland layer works great for when you need to run an application that has no Linux equivalent, such as Kore. It still rough around the edges.
1) Chatty, SMS application, needs more features to better incorporate modern SMS communication protocols.
2) The phone dialer takes too long to start up.
3) The microSD path is hard-code so it does not play nice when being encrypted drive were /run path is used.
4) Gnome Files works better the the Index file manager but there is no proper tie-in for password management. This means you must enter your encrypted microSD password every time after a reboot.
5) Convergence station cannot handle an ultra-wide, 3440x1440, screen monitor.
6) Firefox has a buggy user experience were there is no way to hide the tabs listing or options popup from with-in the application. One must swipe out of the application into the desktop and go back to Firefox.
7) Some of the UI time out settings are too short. Such as watching a video in full screen mode. Press to show the controls and by the time you start engaging with them the controls auto-hide again.
8) Don't know of a way to export SMS history from Android and import to Linux.
Once it is a little more polished the FLXS1 will become my daily driver. It has become my Bluetooth music player. I also use it more than my actual phone daily.
This is the future I want. I will keep fighting for it. But my braveheart pinephone is showing it's age. And I need it to be dependable for pagerduty etc, or else have some other alerts proxy capable of waking me up in the dead of night.
It would be fun to plop Claude Code down on a phone and play with the baseband processor.
"It looks like you're trying to bypass authorized firmware. I'm sorry, but I won't help you."
Note that “I’m switching” here means “I’m now carrying two phones because I have to use Android.”
FTA:
> The no waydroid means that I can't access some apps that I need be it for online verification for logging onto bank and government services in Norway
So EU "digital sovereignty" still means hitching most critical functionality to Google?
will try the new jolla phone, it allows you to toggle app support for android apps.
Tell your government that selling your citizenship to foreign businesses is not OK.
Complete non-starter for me until banking apps support it (even rooted android would be a start).
So you are stuck in the walled garden. Alternatively, you could find a bank not forcing the duopoly on you. Worked for me.
I don't particularly care for the messing around. I'm of an age now where I've done that and prefer to spend my time not working around self-imposed tech issues.
Also, good luck finding a bank in the UK that can support that (without messing around with desktop web instead on mobile instead of the app).
Monzo in UK is fine with rooted and no Google Play. No idea how it would fare inside Waydroid though.
It it's fine with rooted and no Google Play, that would usually mean it will be fine with Waydroid too.
I have said it before: the only practical solution is two phones. Use a budget one for boring banking and government stuff. Use Linux phone for all that stuff that ad companies are actually interested in and totally cut them off from that data by virtue of actually having control. They can shove their security theatre up their ass.
Doesn't Android already use the Linux kernel?
The top of the article addresses this a bit: yes, Android in theory is AOSP [Android Open Source Project] which is still Linux based. (For now, lots of rumors every Android release that a kernel switch is coming.) But AOSP has lost a lot of power as Android moved so many things to Google Play Services [closed source], which leaves room for Linux-based phone OSes that disown/disavow AOSP entirely because what's the point of playing ball with a half-closed ecosystem anyway? (The article discusses the Ubuntu Touch fork still seeing some maintenance despite Canonical giving up and decides on Sailfish OS.)
You can build various, vastly different operating systems around the same kernel. When people refer to "Linux phones", they usually mean the family of systems often referred to as GNU/Linux distributions, which Android very clearly doesn't belong to.
One of the issues is the network effect self reinforcing by the organistions you'd normally trust to be above this sort of thing. Like government bodies requiring that you use one of two american phone OS. No webpage and no other options for you...
Example, across the whole of my 2.8 million people city, parking is app-to-pay. No meter, no ticket box - just a sign announcing to pay by app and a QR code.
QR code points at a webpage announcing which very limited selection of apps you have for iOS and android and the backup option to ring a number.
Ringing that number means you talk to a person, make an account for only one of the apps over the phone, then use the phone menu system each time you need to park.
If you have a dumb phone(can't scan a QR code) or no phone... you're fucked. No way to pay for parking. Expect your fine and go through the bullshit processes.
The world should NOT think it is great to be so dependant on two US companies, but here we are.
There are too few apps on Linux phones, otherwise I would have migrated there
> too few apps
Temporary. The age of LLM aided development is current.
But which apps exactly are you missing?
Seems you need to buy a phone from them to use it? Couldn't find list of hardware supported, how to install etc.
What's a good phone for use without Google's Play Store? F-Droid only. No Google account.
Ironically, Google Pixel phones are the best phones for leaving Google behind.
The have an unlocked bootloader and are the only phones supported by GrapheneOS [1].
If you don't want to go to GrapheneOS, any Android phone should be able to use F-Droid.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
After September, will you still be able to install F-Droid on phones with Google accounts?
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/..., it's tied to the Google account so afterwards any device owned by the user can install F-Droid and any APK made by "unverified" devs.
Sorry, without Google accounts. I don't want a Google account on my phone. I've never had one.
Pixels with GrapheneOS are your best and safest bet.
In my specific case, I couldn't use Pixels because the terrible PWM on the screen was painful to me. Bought a cheap Motorola G Power 2024 with an IPS screen. Never logged into Google. Used Obtanium and FDroid for most things. Used Aurora for the one Play-only app that I needed. Running Netguard (a non-root firewall) with a whitelist so almost nothing phones home. Deleted or disabled almost all the non-essential built-in apps.
I like the Moto but wouldn't recommend it due to the lack of OS updates. But this setup could be easily duplicated on almost any Android without needing root or roms.
I'm happy with my Fairphone FP4 with LineageOS, but that just one datapoint.
Mobian is where my hope is...
i read on mister RMS's website that he refuses to use phones except for the most basic things, preferring a laptop for aught else, mostly because phones are computers and 'software on computers should be free'
ngl, that is the most charming darn thing to hear in 2026-- and it lowers the bar considerably here. like if all you need to have is a computer, sky's the limit on how you want to run this.
sooo with a little help from Claude I have a xmpp server running from home base+jmp for calling / sms, a portable router and a cute construction grade wp836 grandstream phone (annoyingly I can't seem to route SMS to it yet, but they route fine through xmpp on a terminal).
if you're voiping, you really don't need a voip phone though.
i have zero compunction so my computer of choice is a macbook neo... which acts as a dumb terminal for aforementioned xmpp server / wasteful videogame computer / claude butler (open the floodgates ladies and gentlemen); if i wanted cred sometimes i carry the old thinkpad around instead.
i can't say that it's any more secure than Android (using claude == i don't know what I'm doing), but it's fun? expensive fun though. JMP is a subscription, proton (for MFA and everything else) is a subscription, you need a domain for your xmpp server, ...this 'homelabbing' thing is expensive, using a map is awful (so wife is navigator...with her phone). There are many failure points, me included. but god, so fun!
i usually leave the actual cell phone at home. i do still have one. that's a hard thing to drop... but not impossible! the only holdover is learning how to use a proper camera and setting up the media server.
Been daily driving ubports for about 4 years now (OP5T, Noble). The system has its quirks, it sometimes reboots without reason (though its rare, I experience something like that once a month), the videos in web browser sometimes glitch in a weird way and sometimes don't play at all, the camera stops working and needs a reboot. The lack of banking apps and maps with live traffic is irritating (although unav is great, shoutouts to the guy who made it), a problem that could be solved using waydroid but I don't want to use it out of principle. Otherwise it covers all my needs, has working phone, SMS and MMS (I'm from Europe), web browser, matrix and mail clients, TOTP manager (necessary for work), and is totally linux which allows me to do cool things like using pulseaudio sinks to connect my laptop to phone that is connected to speakers and use it as wireless aux (works janky, but it works :) ). It obviously hasn't got many apps compared to the competition, but new ones are continuously being developed by the community. I tried developing an app myself but haven't got the time, fortunately it's much easier now with AI because I remember that one attempt at creating a simple app for enabling some daemon a few years ago was cut short by not-quite clear documentation of the clickable app development system. It needs to be said that I'm certainly not the greatest programmer in the world though :)
If you're a technical guy and you feel like the android and ios are both pretty much destroyed by corporate overlords, then I sincerely invite you to try UBports or SailfishOS (from my research I find these two the most beginner friendly). The experience most certainly will hurt (at the beginning), but the sooner more people start using it, the sooner more people will start contributing to linux on phone and make our systems better. I was nervous that I would not survive without android and its entire app catalog and maps, or that a moment would come at work or in some critical situation that I would need android for some dumb reason and wouldn't be able to do something and spaghetti would fall out of my pockets, but for the last 4 years nothing like that happened. The most painful thing for me are probably the maps, but when I need long distance GPS with live traffic, I'll most certainly be driving with someone, so I just ask the passenger to navigate :) for less important voyages the unav is completely fine, there's also puremaps which I haven't tested.
>I've become more and more dissatisfied with the path Google has taken with the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Be it the dependency and insane tracking of Google Play Services
AOSP does not include nor depend on Play Services.
>locking down of device trees to hinder custom ROM development
Most manufacturers do not distribute these either. The user doesn't even have a pixel so it is not relevant.
>all the AI stuff being put into the system
The AI stuff is not part of AOSP.
>or most recently (and perhaps worst), removing the ability of installing apps per your own wishing - it's become sort of like a "death by a thousand papercuts" situation.
Again that is not a feature of AOSP, but one bolted in on top of it.
I think the author would benefit much more by using a different distribution of AOSP.
Aosp without Google play services is dead. You need it more and more to run apps.
This is only true of ye olde apps from shitty banks and the like.
Strange, I've been using it for about 15 years on many different devices and it works just fine. Maybe that is related to the fact that I tend to shun closed-source applications whenever possible? The few closed-source apps I do use - Swedish BankID, Deutsche Bahn 'Navigator', Dutch DigiD - also work as intended even though some of them - mostly the Swedish BankID - claim they 'need Google Services to work'. Click away the popup and it works just fine without it so that is clearly not true. On some devices I installed microG to see whether it does what they claim but while this seems to be the case I don't think it is needed for those keeping their devices mostly free from proprietary applications. This is not a hardship, far from it. Nearly all the types of applications I want to use are available as free software which also tends to make them ad-free, spyware-free and generally less of a nuisance than proprietary alternatives.
>You need it more and more to run apps.
Realistically nobody is developing apps for linux phones, so the options are android or no apps at all.
I have run graphene OS on my phone for 3+ years and I don't use Google Play or Google Play Services. You use F-Droid to install Aurora Store and anonymously download real apps. I can use my bank apps and it's quite functional. My wife even doesn't complain about it. Camera is decent, not as good due to the software being non-proprietary, but decent.
Many banks don't run with Google play services, and even with them on grapheneos some still won't run because of play integrity.
Don't tell me about grapheneos, I have a pixel phone and did run it for a few months with/without play services.
At the end, you're always going to absolutely need that one app that won't run without Gplay.
>At the end, you're always going to absolutely need that one app that won't run without Gplay.
Then you can install GMS into its own user profile with that GMS-dependent app, and when not using it you can log out of that user and put it fully at rest.
Yes, Google is trying their best to make sideloading apps harder and harder. They also are giving the ability to some apps to only allow to be run if it's verified by Google through their Google Play Store. At the same time, Google keeps losing lawsuits forcing them to open up and allow third party app stores. GrapheneOS also sandboxes Google Play and Google Play Services so you can turn it on and off difference access at your pleasure to prevent God mode and super spy mode, so this mitigates issues even if you use Google stuff. It's a losing battle, but the phone is the battle to fight over
Well AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth (not even the emulator) so you also have to take into account the reality of what Android is on the ground.
AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a proper call manager nowadays
But lineageos, grapheneos etc. are based on AOSP and do run on actual phones.
They had to put so much work to make it run on actual phones that each project is kind of it's own thing.
I wish nokia would have ultimately opted for their own android fork. That would have eventually lead to a more open linux kind of OS, like we saw with maemo.
Flop-Elon was the worst guy at the worst time in the worst position. It was 110% obvious windows mobile would flop. Everyone knew it, it was just a panic decision.
I still dream about that dockable Ubuntu phone.
Why? The phone I've been using for the last 6 years, Librem 5, can just be docked to a screen, keyboard and mouse and used this way, running a Debian system. It's not even the only one available with such capability. Your dream has been there for a while now.
Blackberry 10
Has anyone done Android as a I'm on a Linus phone?
"I'm switching my phone from <free software> to <proprietary software>"
Why not just use an Android AOSP distribution? SailfishOS is proprietary. It will be a lot more "locked down" than LineageOS/GrapheneOS.
Sailfish has some proprietary stuff to deal with the Android & Sony as well as Qt being Qt. Much of their software is open source—& collaborative with translations & forums for feedback. Out of the box, you on Sailfish you get root support which lets you actually be the device owner. You are allowed to install whatever software from wherever you want… things Android no longer is. It’s not a flawless platform, but Android in practice gives you so, so little control over your actual device.
you can have Android without google play services and AI and it will be still less painful experience than trying to use Linux phone as your daily driver
spinof topic: android is still that java thingy? Or is it finally a set of modular binary specifications which are computer language agnostic?
Google is becoming more and more Evil by the day.
Some things are still funny to me, though. As Google transitions towards full Evilness, people less frequently advertise a "I was employed at Google, what a wonderful place". Google totally changed things here, to the worse - that's fascinating. Meanwhile the google graveyard is growing almost daily:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
I wish we'd see some progress on this from the phone makers. It's so disappointing what a stranglehold Android somehow has. Nokia was so on the eve of greatness before they threw it all away and burned their good platform.
FairPhone 4 is a pretty ancient cpu. I guess it's benching a bit above the OnePlus 6/6t that has been a go-to for a good fraction of a decade now. https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/84602 https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/5200
Motorola at least seems to be moving to unlock bootloaders. ARM gpus have some ok drivers now (thanks collabora & many others), which, a decade ago seemed like way way way more than the universe was ever going to allow.
I still think Samsung, with their new mountains of market cap, should try to do better. Exynos is right there, with an RDNA GPU just begging for the world's best drivers to take advantage of the hardware you already ship. You could make a stunner! Why not try?
This perfectly captures the "death by a thousand papercuts" reality of modern Android. Google honors the open-source letter of the law with AOSP while systematically destroying its spirit by moving vital APIs into closed-source Google Mobile Services (GMS).We are seeing the exact same playbook play out on our wrists right now with Wear OS. Google recently mandated the Watch Face Format (WFF) via Watch Face Studio (WFS). Under the guise of battery optimization, they stripped developers of the ability to run executable native code for watch faces. It is now just a declarative XML format rendered by the OS.Whether it is the core OS framework or a simple smartwatch complication, Google’s strategy remains identical: hollow out the open ecosystem, deprecate local developer execution, and force everyone into their centralized, closed garden.
Google needs to be forced to divest Android and Chrome. It's the only solution to this problem.
There's a name for that strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
1. Android already runs on the linux kernel.
2. For every phone people in this thread switch from Android to "Linux", I'm going to switch 3 from "Linux" to Android. I have a budget of $14, $11 is earmarked for Chipotle. I should have plenty left.
Did you consider postmarketOS? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_4_(fairphone-fp...
The author mentions this in the second paragraph...
I'm sure he did. It is mentioned in TFA.
He did:
"The mobile linux space isn't exactly looking good right now, but it holds some promise. Ubuntu Touch managed to survive being abandoned by Canonical, and postmarket is still seeing good development even if not having great hardware adapation at the moment."
Thank you, I missed it.
Number of devices fully supported: 0
Oh, you linked to Fairphone 4, let's see:
- battery: partial
- audio: partial
- camera: partial
- fingerprint: broken
postmarketOS device support is a joke, they couldn't even get ONE vendor to support the OS..
Purism Librem 5 is fully supported: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Purism_Librem5_(purism-li...
I'd say the OnePlus 6 is fully supported so it's one device at least (the stuff that isn't on it is minor).
Mainlining is very hard though so the results are expected
I can confirm this holding OP6 (enchilada) in my hands — it's a flagship postmarketOS device. It also has other nerd options available — Sailfish and Windows (Renegade Project) — but obviously with poor hardware support.
I highly recommend keeping an eye on postmarketOS blog. [1] It's a fun reading, and development's been really rapid lately.
What stopped me from full migration to pmOS the last time I tried it about a year ago was poor support of Magisk and Xposed in Waydroid, two things I can't imagine using Android apps without.
But! With some tricks you can get pmOS dualboot on OP6. [2] Haven't tried it, but looks amazing.
I think with the current direction and velocity, pmOS is going to get really close to Android in usability on supported hardware in the next couple of years. Except for power saving parity that never gonna happen.
[1] https://postmarketos.org/blog/
[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchil...
You misunderstood my comment.. this level of "support" is based on hacks = volunteer work, where the community working together (for free) is able to support one device "almost" completely after only 8 years, relying on hacks/reverse engineering etc..
But it's not like OnePlus or Qualcomm officially supports that, right? They didn't have any deal with any OEM where there would be someone employed to support the OS.. (even though they receive donations)
Like, all this is.. not serious.. the closest alternative to Android/iOS is GrapheneOS, because there are full-time employees AND they have a partnership with Motorola, so they won't have to rely on any hacks.. well obviously that's unaffordable but it's a different story.
> You misunderstood my comment.. this level of "support" is based on hacks = volunteer work, where the community working together (for free) is able to support one device "almost" completely after only 8 years, relying on hacks/reverse engineering etc..
I guess you have not seen any of actual Qualcomm code yet to say that, Qualcomm code is really what you would define as a pile hacks. Made by hardware engineers with no regards for code quality, maintainability or mainlinability.
OnePlus 6 comparatively is almost mainlined properly from start to finish, with a level of quality that you have nowhere in the mobile world.
Sure this smartphone a bit older but remember the Nokia N900 is still supported and it went out in 2009.
Mainlining mobile devices is very hard, but that's not hacks, that's how it's supposed to be done.
Yes, I get your point.
I'd say the waterline of mobile Linux "seriousness" is whether a device has a bootable mainline kernel build. Once SoC support lands in the kernel, it becomes a problem for a lot of people on high salaries (including some at Qualcomm). And hardware support doesn't get dropped from the kernel overnight. For everything above, in userspace, you don't need a deal with OEMs or their blessing to make things work. It's a pretty generic stack: Alpine, systemd, familiar WMs/DEs.
But yeah, I hope to see more deals like the recent Motorola-GrapheneOS announcement in the future.
True. I have installed PMOS on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 and it is has great support for the hardware.
Amazed to see Linux booting natively on a palm sized device with full hardware support and computer capabilities was out of the world!
Given the fact that the device is more than a decade old, it still runs the mainline 6.x Linux kernel and the UI is good! (desktop manager which I've installed it is based on POSH Shell).
Looks cool and since calls, SMS, Wi-Fi and data works fine to a good extent, the only gripe was that camera is unusable in it's current form. Have not tried the android subsystem yet I don't think it'll work due to device limitations.
Have installed Tailscale and primarily using it for remote SSH administration of all my devices through Tailscale. The device build is still solid (which I don't see in the newer devices! due to planned obsolescence) and browser based netbanking access works fine.
Caveats of a small device, keyboard and user experience matters though I'm not complaining because I can pretty much see what happens on the device and I'm not feeding any unwanted signals to anyone.
Constantly on the lookout for pure Linux based devices. Unfortunately, yet to my hands on Librem based device or on a Fairphone!
I hope the world moves towards a Linux based device (being a Linux user for close to 3+ decades (since the early Sco Unix times with core systems programming, I always dream of it! BTW, being a hardcore C programmer who has worked across almost all OSes and CPU architectures!) and such wish and dream will fully be fulfilled only on Linux or on *nix with firm belief!
Hope someone takes a serious move...