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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 ....
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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!
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?
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.
Librem 5 or one of the other recommended mobile Linux devices: https://linuxstans.com/linux-phone/
Wow, $150 vs $2000 for ~ the same thing ~
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 :)
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.
What's wrong with just Android?
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.
Can't you get USB modems and cram a SIM inside? Are carrier networks really more scary than the internet at large?
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.
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?
You can root it if you really want (and if the bootloader is unlocked)
I don't have control over my own device.
Google!
How do you install kde?
With Termux: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/1DUmyqTYKJ
doesn't support btrfs snapshots.
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
https://thehammer.io/ right now texting device, runs linux :)
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.
If I had a car with that feature and no clear way to permanently disable it, I would take it back.
I think a Linux phone probably appeals to the same kind of person who prefers real keys over digital ones.
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.
What about real keys?
a technology of bygone times. we shall preserve it
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Exposure Notifications is no longer available in Android as of like 2023. https://developers.google.com/android/exposure-notifications
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Since AOSP is open source, is it possible to reuse the Android HAL?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So everyone needs to carry a tracking device.
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.
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/
> 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.
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.
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/
Worthy of a top level post be the OP you need to be!
It’d be cool to see pictures of the device!
Seems you need to buy a phone from them to use it? Couldn't find list of hardware supported, how to install etc.
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.
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.
What's a good phone for use without Google's Play Store? F-Droid only. No Google account.
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.
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
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.
Shoutout to Purism... if you got the loot.
https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/
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.
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.
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.
Mobian is where my hope is...
Blackberry 10
"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.
Has anyone done Android as a I'm on a Linus phone?
spinof topic: android is still that java thingy? Or is it finally a set of modular binary specifications which are computer language agnostic?
>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.
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.
Aosp without Google play services is dead. You need it more and more to run apps.
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.
This is only true of ye olde apps from shitty banks and the like.
>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.
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 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.
There's a name for that strategy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Google needs to be forced to divest Android and Chrome. It's the only solution to this problem.
Did you consider postmarketOS? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_4_(fairphone-fp...
I'm sure he did. It is mentioned in TFA.
The author mentions this in the second paragraph...
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."
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.