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My Android phone prevents me from taking screenshots if an app author doesn't want me to.
My Android phone prevents me from recording phone calls at the request of my carrier, even though it's totally legal for me to do so in my jurisdiction.
I'm not loving where this is all going.
> prevents me from taking screenshots if an app author doesn't want me to
The most frustrating part about this "feature" is that you don't know it's enabled until the screenshot is taken and you're left with a picture of nothing.
That and some app authors thinking they're protecting you with this (referring to banking apps in particular)
I want to send my new IBAN to my company, I can, no screenshot allowed on the screen with banking information. So I need to log on their website to do it. At least my new bank allows such screenshot and to copy account information directly from the app.
Now consider the fact that an arbitrary other app can take a screenshot clandestinely, via API. Would you like it to happen when you're looking at the summary of your accounts? your list of credit card numbers?
The problem is that certain actions should only be acceptable if initiated by the user, physically. Think of the way Ctrl+Alt+Del works in Windows. This, of course, is not possible if you don't have enough fingers for the action, or something; here comes the loophole of assistive technologies, widely (ab)used for that on most platforms.
Pretty sure Twitch on iOS does this now. Screen recording still works though.
It's not just phones. Try asking ChatGPT/Gemini anything the hive mind in SV doesn't want you to ask. Try asking it anything the hive mind as decided has only one possible answer. It's only going to get worse
My government (Denmark) refusing to let me use their digital identity app because I don't want to accept Google's or Apple's TOS, and Google helping them enforce that via remote attestation services.
Luckily there are alternatives in the form of code displays and NFC chips. However, next year I won't be able to watch porn unless I verify my age using a smartphone, no alternatives are planned. Or rather, I have the "free choice" to choose between a privacy preserving ZKP solution operating in the kingdom of Google or uploading my face to a porn site.
Dark times.
During covid I was not allowed to leave house. Permits were only issued to local SIMs, which I did not had!
If I respected the rules, I would starve to death!
The issue is bigger than that.
Why not two people share a device, and when passed from one person to another, delete applications and install all apps and profiles from scratch using verified checksums saved on a blockchain. An OS which could do that is something like Nix. When passed to the previous person same thing, delete and install everything from scratch.
Using smartphones in a smart way, not a dumb way, like timesharing mainframes of the past. Same procedure could be applied to cars and other devices.
This assumes that these two persons will never need to use a smartphone at the same moment, which is a bit of a logistical puzzle.
Installing apps is the trivial part; isolating, or removing / reinstalling user data is much harder. Especially a few gigabytes of it. An SD card could work maybe.
This all goes against the grain of the smarthpone UX, the idea of a highly personal device that you can use for anything, and might need (or benefit from) at an arbitrary moment.
If the point is reducing e-waste, the solution would rather be opening up the hardware enough to provide long-term software support, LineageOS-style.
< recording phone calls
FWIW the default phone app on GrapheneOS supports recording phone calls.
Did a nation state ask GrapheneOS to add that feature?
Why is it always "nation state" when this is brought up, do states and nations that aren't congruous not represent a perceived threat?
"nation state" has a particular meaning and it's not just "a smart-sounding way to say country" but it tends to get used that way.
Only your carrier is supposed to record the calls.
Edit: apparently the /s is obligatory on this one
Absolute lies, where I live it is one party consent. I can still record with another device on speakerphone.
I think the person you were replying to might have intended sarcasm.
Yes this was sarcastic, I should have put a /s
I also live in a one party consent state.
I think this might be a longstanding "bug", but I have also not had any luck on my android using the screen recorder to record device audio from a browser (either chromium or firefox). It used to partially work using the mic to record the speakers, but currently it sounds like it does processing to subtract away the original signal; I hear mostly silence with occasional garbled artifacts resembling the original audio.
As someone willing to put up with all manner of nonsense (overpriced/underpowered hardware, clunky UI, endless troubleshooting), battery life on mobile Linux devices alone prevents me from using them in the real world.
Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use? Librem/Pinephone/Juno can't. My uConsole can't. Different category, but my MNT mini laptop lasts like 4 hours and can't be left in standby for too long or it drains to zero.
Meanwhile, it's been 10+ years since I've worried about daily battery life on mainstream mobile devices, even my 3-5 year old ones. I can fall asleep with Youtube playing and it's still playing when I wake up. I'm certainly not here to dunk on Linux phones. I want one! But if someone willing to put forth above average effort to use these devices can't realistically daily drive them, who can?
>Is there a single Linux phone/tablet that can last an 8 hour day of actual use?
What's "actual use"? Furi FLX1 has the best battery life I've seen on a Linux phone. Idling, it last 3+ days. I'm sure it could survive 1 whole day of "actual use". I also think almost any (official) SailfishOS device would last a day of actual use.
I've been considering this as my Android exit plan (as part of a slow rolling de-googling effort, even before the recent "sideloading" news). Are you using it as a daily driver? I'm sort of surprised it doesn't get brought up more.
Yes, I used SailfishOS as a daily driver since ~2014 until last year when I moved to the Furi FLX1. The FLX1 has been my daily driver since. SailfishOS is much more polished, but it's not fully FOSS, and it follows upstream much less closely. FLX1 is basically in-sync with Debian testing, with the exception of kernel.
SailfishOS is quite efficient. On Sony devices, I experienced maybe 15% extra battery life compared to stock Android, which is quite good given that Sony ROMs are excellent. Sony is known for their Sony Open Devices Program.
I genuinely think if Sony offered a Linux phone and didn't lock it down too bad, they could serve as the catalyst for the whole market. I don't think I would trust any other company at this point to execute the platonic "Linux phone" we need. The uncompromising vision on building a fantastic product for the technically minded make them an obvious choice.
Sony tries out so many different types of products too across their entire lineup. They have made some memorable handhelds over the years, even their eink readers were special.
(Warning: Am only a software/product engineer, playing dilettante here, not an actual marketing/business expert.)
Awhile back, I was thinking that one pragmatic way to get this viable Linux smartphone moving might be for hobbyists to focus on getting one easily available, affordable device working fully with pure Debian or PostmarketOS (no closed drivers or other modules, and preferably no blobs) and with Purism's Phosh.
Then that would boost contributions to, and demand for, Purism's open source platform/components for Librem 5 (and whatever the successor hardware would be).
If the cheap hardware is something like PinePhone, I'm just going to handwave that maybe this device won't cannibalize much sales of Purism's premium devices, but instead the community investment into the platform will effectively generate much higher net demand for Purism's premium products. With higher volume, Purism could maybe also hit more accessible price points.
If the Purism hardware demand happens, then there may be competing hardware entrants. And they will have to compete partly on being trustworthy and aligned with the interests of the kinds of customer who want to run a non-Apple, non-Google device. Where Purism should have a head start in credibility and goodwill. The new entrants will have to contribute engineer time (possibly: pay community contractors) to getting their device to work well with this platform, and be expected to upstream all of it as open source to the platform mainline, if they want to be attractive to these customers.
(I'm not saying the cheap device has to be PinePhone; that just seemed the most likely one at the time. It could even be something like an older popular Pixel model, with many unlockable-bootloader units available cheap on eBay, for which people are able to assemble/develop open source drivers. Or maybe GrapheneOS will get their own device built, and it can also be used for this non-Android-based open Linux platform.)
> to focus on getting one easily available, affordable device working fully with pure Debian or PostmarketOS (no closed drivers or other modules, and preferably no blobs) and with Purism's Phosh.
I'm not sure how viable this is. Linux phones already opt for hardware that's as open as possible, i.e. they use parts with the most open documentation and drives, but the trade-off to that is that those parts are functionally already end-of-life when they're in the phone, either because it's an old design that's been opened up to squeeze a bit more money out of an old design, or the design was third-rate to begin with. Not to mention that the baseband side of things is closed no matter what, so the phone that's completely true to the FOSS ideals seems impossible to make no matter what. And who would buy a phone with a third-rate chip and battery life? And since very few people buy them, prices aren't able to drop any significant amount.
I understand why people aren't willing to make a devils bargain in order to make a decent phone first, and then put Linux on it second, but I can't see any other way for this to happen, other than the phone market magically becoming more open somehow. If you could install Linux on any phone, since all the drivers are already out there, then we wouldn't be in this pickle, but every single Android phone out there has a different set of drivers and very few of them are open and possible to implement without an enormous amount of work, unlike the PC world, were at this point, only the really weird stuff (and Wifi from certain vendors) doesn't have some form of Linux driver.
IIUC, there have been some efforts to compartmentalize/isolate closed baseband, when you can work on the hardware.
Separate from baseband, the (sub)device closed firmware blobs are non-ideal, and eventually you'd want open source even for those, but maybe don't have to be a high priority. Mainlined open source for corresponding drivers are much higher priority. Even Debian now tolerates such blobs.)
Why is the baseband closed? That is the question we need to have answered.
It doesn't have to be, the PinePhone's modem runs a proprietary Linux distro, which you can replace with an open source Linux distro. That is only the ARM processor of it though, the Hexagon one is all proprietary.
A bajillion reasons, including that carriers basically white list basebands they're willing to interact with, and the patent situation means you only have a handful of baseband OEMs and they view their whole business model as building as big of a moat around their IP as possible.
I would honestly just prefer that they use some semi-crap Chinese phone that is running on well-documented stuff a generation or four behind. If you could get Linux on a $50 phone, whoever was shipping them would sell 100K units. People would buy them just out of curiosity.
I'm behind though: aren't the UIs for mobile Linux still bad? I still can't get the experience I got out of my N900 that had only 256M of RAM, right? Every project I remember to bring the Maemo experience to Linux seemed to wither because there was ho hardware.
In one of my Linux handheld attempts, I looked to evaluate Maemo for the vintage Nokia N810 and N900 as a starting point, but much of open source artifacts (code, docs, forums) had mostly disappeared, even from where there seemed an effort to preserve/migrate.
(But someone's copy of some of it might have resurfaced now; I haven't looked recently.)
Usually things like this disappear because whoever was paying for hosting for them (company, accounting unit within a company, or some random techie's basement) gets shut down. And maybe no one who had the interest and ability was able to preserve it in time, and archive.org hadn't picked it up. But occasionally, things get deleted with intention to suppress them.
Apologies if the idea is absurd, but wouldn't a Linux handheld without a cell modem be easier to build and distribute? Think something of an analogue to iPod Touches, which were iPhones sans the the phone part.
This would skip a lot of the regulatory red tape, bring down costs, and make the devices more accessible so they’re in more developers’ hands. They’d have to tether from your primary phone which isn’t ideal, but workable.
I use a Nokia/HMD KaiOS phone as a 4G/Wifi router for the communications part of your idea.
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What about all these raspberry pi hats with cell modems? Are they missing anything like usable IMEI numbers or proprietary stuff? What's stopping an RPi compute module 3G/4G/5G DIY linux phone?
Battery life is probably awful, mainly.
The battery life would suck? It's not about whether you can build a phone, it's about whether you can build a decent phone.
Maybe carrying a hotspot modem with a sim card is enough?
I agree, I don't really need cell service when there is so much wifi. Even would just carry a basic phone for making calls/txts even when needed.
Linux phones are useless for common people until they can run government and bank apps.
Those apps usually require Google's version of Android (or Apple iOS), and block alternative Android builds using attestation:
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
In giant font at the top of the linked post:
> apparently it needs to be said that I am not suggesting you switch to Linux on your phone today; just that development needs to accelerate. Please don’t be one of the 34 people that replied to tell me Linux is not ready.
Linux is ready, what is not ready is the ecosystem.
SailfishOS is quite polished, and there's an Android emulation API. Lots of common applications, including many banking ones, run without a problem.
It's a chicken-egg issue. The last 10% of polish won't be done till a critical mass of users adopt the platform, and vice versa.
>SailfishOS is quite polished, and there's an Android emulation API. Lots of common applications, including many banking ones, run without a problem.
Remote Attestation and the Play Integrity API will soon make that stop.
Exactly. The kernel more or less doesn't matter, it's "the stuff on top."
Unfortunately tech people don't understand this.
Common people don't care about the OS, they care about apps.
Some tech people don't care what common people want, they just want a cool phone for themselves.
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I absolutely hate that government and bank apps are only available on the Play Store. You are legally required to have a Google account and accept their ToS to use them. I am aware of Aurora, but some banking apps check their origin and refuse to run if not downloaded from the Play Store.
I had to deal with this for government apps specifically related to immigration. I don't mind banks requiring it, I don't have to use that bank. I do mind governments requiring it if my only recourse is having to leave the country entirely.
> I don't mind banks requiring it, I don't have to use that bank.
What if all banks require it?
Banks aren't required. Its ridiculously inconvenient today to not have a bank account, but you aren't required to have one.
You should still be upset about it.
What does being upset about it solve?
Companies can choose what product to offer and what customers to serve. I can choose what products I'm willing to spend my money and time on.
My problem is when I am compelled to use something despite my opposition to it, such as the immigration app I mentioned being force to use under threat of being kicked out of the country.
Do they not have websites to login with?
Some force 2fa with their app only.
I've heard this argument before and yet I've never understood it.
What government apps do people run? Why do you need to access your bank account on your phone? Is this some payments model that's just not common in my country where we still use physical credit cards for everything?
My bank doesn't yet require the mobile app (quite), but all interactions are significantly more annoying without the app. My 2FA options all require a phone, either for the insecure method of texting me the code, or else an app-only option (they don't allow generic 2FA apps, but instead require a specific app, that almost definitely won't exist for a linux phone). Even verifying my identity on the phone is better with the app (the app generates a code that they just accept, it can be done without but it's slower and more inconvenient).
So no, my everyday interactions don't require the phone app. But any interaction that is novel enough to require direct communication with the bank has been rendered annoying without the phone app.
I'm someone for whom I'd probably be willing to deal with all these inconveniences to make my statement about ownership over my hardware and software, but I doubt that very many average consumers would.
> Why do you need to access your bank account on your phone?
Many banks require you use their app to do anything, e.g., make transfers, approve debit card transactions, register your biometrics to unfreeze your account, etc.
And no, choosing a bank without these requirements isn't possible in some countries.
I do most of my banking and investments on my phone. I don’t think I’m in the minority here.
> What government apps do people run?
Public transport ticket app, government ID app, drivers licence app.
I do believe all of these specific examples run fine on rooted Android without too much hassle (unsure about the second one), so they should be emulatable or whatever on a Linux phone, but that assumes that experience holds up decently well, which I would be surprised if it did for apps like this.
> Why do you need to access your bank account on your phone?
Because the app is a whole lot better than the web interfaces my previous banks had. Plus the added convenience. I'd prefer that the web interface was just as good as the app, but I'd still use the app even if that existed, just due to the convenience.
The driver's license apps will start requiring a non-rooted phone if they don't already.
I had to use government apps as part of their immigration process, the apps were only available in the official app stores. If I remember right they had am all for immigration services, though I know for sure they had a digital ID app that was absolutely required.
The major banks in that country also required apps from official app stores, though I don't think I was technically required to have a bank account. I was in the country under a program based on owning my own consulting business. I did have to prove financials to the government as part of that, but maybe there was a way I could have technically done that without a bank account which required a mobile app.
I work for a bank. There is a strategic focus on the mobile banking app over the web app. Younger generations are doing everything through their phones. Including applying for home loans. Many banks are moving towards being digital only as contactless payments means people are using cash a lot less to the point that physical bank branches don't make sense anymore.
People in non-US countries apparently have a litany of government and banking apps which are mandatory at all times.
They're rarely completely mandatory (Grandma still needs to be able to access her bank too), but the alternative is usually a whole lot more inconvenient (sometimes for bad reasons, sometimes just because that's how life is).
> What government apps do people run?
There are a bunch of them here in Australia, and there were several in the UK.
Here there's a secure ID app for government services which is used as 2FA on the web interface, and various apps to access state and national government services directly. There's a tax one that allows you to scan receipts to collect them up for your annual tax return. In the UK I had an NHS app, can't remember what else.
They aren't mandatory, you can live without them, but they are often convenient.
> Why do you need to access your bank account on your phone?
Because it's many people's primary computing device? Why would you not want to access your bank accounts on your phone?
And because if you want to log on to some banks websites you need to have a 2FA security code which can either be generated by a dedicated security device, which has become less common now, or by an app on the phone which is then usually biometrically protected. There is sometimes a second code-generation method for higher value transfers.
So it is convenient to be able to send payments in the bank app, though less common than using my phone instead of the physical card through apple/google pay (those don't require the bank app to be installed).
> Why do you need to access your bank account on your phone?
My bank requires me to authenticate all online transactions via the phone app. Without it, it's not possible to make online payments.
Linux can emulate android. Most banks have websites, and the only real blocker for banking apps I've seen is the photo verification due to hardware issues connecting to the emulated android system.
the app for one of my banks which i need for 2FA won't run on my /e/OS phone.
> Linux can emulate android.
It can't emulate hardware attestation though, which most bank apps now require, so good luck with that.
You can do pass through attestation with access to kernelspace. There are a few things that don't pass (play protect/wildvine, but that's by design, not a limitation of linux)
And do you think that will matter in the near future? Because every app developer will just set their apps to use the highest attestation requirement by default and every normal android phone will pass that test. The few percent of people that use something else can just fuck off.
I think the only viable solution is going to be to have 2 devices: one for government and financial services and one for everything else, where you still have some hope of privacy.
My bank's mobile app no longer supports my 2017 Android phone. I thought it would be a big deal but honestly I forgot about it until you mentioned this, it's been 6-12 months.
I don't agree. They're useless until they can call, text, and do video / camera reliably. With enough adoption, the rest will come, but they won't ever get adoption without nailing those basics.
Adoption will come only and only with essential apps people use every day.
What's an example of a government app
In Australia: Centrelink, Service Victoria, Medicare, myID (formerly MyGovID), ATO (tax) — for a start.
There's no great reason for these to be Android/Apple specific. I'm just offering examples as requested.
And much appreciated - was not aware of these (other than covid vaccine apps really not seen them so far). Have a good day
Portuguese government app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=id.gov.pt
Allows you to have a digital copy of your ID and sign in to government sites/services (there are alternative methods).
Oh João vai-te deitar pah. LMAO
Identity apps as well as apps to access government and social programs.
Not to mention why specifically government apps? Would those not be covered by general compatibility with web standards?
Wouldn’t well designed mobile web-apps suffice for that use case? I have several web-app site shortcuts linked on my Home Screen which behave just like the native apps. In most cases I don’t see why that would not be sufficient, including most “government apps” use cases
The BC Service Card app
> until they can run government and bank apps
That will never happen. Governments are invested in people depending on surveillance technology. Black mirrors are a tool for controlling the masses.
I've had the same (US) bank for 20 years, it's a small one, they have a nice web interface (and I can deposit checks through it on my laptop) but I've never run into a situation where I needed to have some smartphone app to do my banking. (I also don't have a smartphone.) Is this common with major banks? Do they not have web interfaces anymore?
Outside US lots of banks use apps to generate a token and authenticate website transactions.
custom apps, that allow no alternative.
They do, but some seem to be gradually removing functionality (like check deposit via scan + upload) in favor of using their amazingly convenient (/s) app.
A lot of major banks worldwide have apps, and they usually require un-rooted phones.
People here seem to think this is some sort of Orwellian attempt to control them, but the reasons are more mundane and technical - many of them (mine included, from two countries) use security facilities on the phone to secure your accounts.
For example, my HSBC UK app has replaced the little calculator thing they used to ship, and uses iOS face recognition to secure the generation of log-on codes which you need in order to use the web interface, as well as for secure access to the banking app directly.
With a rooted phone they don't have the guarantees that these aren't being exfiltrated, or the app being subverted in novel ways, so they don't want to support it.
You may not consider this a good enough reason, and I have heard it said on HN that 'the banks shouldn't get to control what I do on my computing device!', and that attitude is absolutely fine, but then you'll most likely end up with either less secure banking (meaning more fraud, higher fees etc) or going back to having to have a dedicated security device.
> I can deposit checks through it on my laptop
American-like banking detected... who uses checks in 2025?! :)
> American-like banking detected... who uses checks in 2025?! :)
Yeah, fair. :-) I live in a small town, the only check I write is my rent check, which I literally walk across the street to deposit. But I still on rare occasions receive checks as well.
Ha. Fair enough. That sort of thing is almost exclusively done using bank transfers here in Aus.
I did receive one check this year, a refund from a company who had screwed up billing on a medical scan. For some reason they couldn't just refund it to my debit card. It was really annoying to have to get to a bank during opening hours to deposit it, but my bank here doesn't offer mobile check scanning. Some do, my old UK bank did ... oh well.
> going back to having to have a dedicated security device.
... and ...?
There are ways to implement security without tying it to one of two app stores. Companies might even get creative and figure out hardware standards for secure verification that are portable, open, and give the user control. They figured out sim cards, and are worried about GAI they created taking over the entire world, they could figure this out.
> ... and ...?
Personally I prefer the device convergence rather than having to have another thing to keep track of. Plus the added factor of biometrics over pure hardware 2FA.
But you do you, as they say, the point is there are tradeoffs.
> There are ways to implement security without tying it to one of two app stores.
It's not just about the app store - people want to be able to run these on rooted devices, which is an end run around the security guarantees these apps currently rely on.
> Companies might even get creative and figure out hardware standards for secure verification that are portable, open, and give the user control.
I wish you the best of luck in this endeavour.
I hope that they already aren't relying on client-side security any more than they have to. I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the APIs around biometrics to know if there's a useful way a server can use the onboard devices to verify a user's identity without relying on client-side security in one way or another though.
It's true on desktop we have stuff like FIDO2 authentication using hardware tokens, which are supported on open systems like firefox on linux. I'm sure it's not insurmountable or unthinkable to do similar on phones. At the least there would need to be a system of remote attestation for the biometric hardware, and a way for it to provide a verifiable response to a remote server. Far from insurmountable. Goes against FOSS still though if there are processors in the system which can't be user-controlled (see the recent discussions on how passkeys are fundamentally OSS-hostile)
Why not just use the browser?
In the case of my bank:
I had to enable secure auth to access some features. This works only with the mobile app, even when logging on the web I need the mobile app.
Some functions are available only in the app as well. Now I’m stuck with the app because I need those and needed secure auth to access those functions.
It’s evil but I has no choice (no choice of other banks either for reasons I won’t go into here, just accept it and don’t tell me to change banks. Other banks are no better anyway. )
Curiously the linked discussion begins:
apparently it needs to be said that I am not suggesting you switch to Linux on your phone today; just that development needs to accelerate.
Please don’t be one of the 34 people that replied to tell me Linux is not ready.Thankfully neither of those are required in the US.
Not yet.
Is this the highest upvoted fediverse link on HN?
Are there any efforts being made around this? Any projects we could look at. I wonder if the pine phone was ahead of its time.
I didn't know syncthing-android had been discontinued. I use that app heavily.
(Linked from the post: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...)
The fork by Catfriend01 available through F-Droid works great...for now. I too use it heavily and worry about it's future on android.
Use syncthing fork on fdroid
There's a maintained fork.
The mobile app ecosystem has outgrown it's original purpose to run software in a constrained env. Phones today are more powerful than my engineering laptop in university 15 years ago. The app ecosystem appeal today is reach, platform lock-in, and great APIs.
For example. I _want_ to run Linux phones even without all the apps & convenience, except Signal messenger. I am unable to use Signal without first registering through a mobile app. I suspect the desktop version will run fine-ish (proton after all). But at the end of the day, adoption will increase if mobile apps had a compatible desktop version on a Linux phone.
I deeply want the equivalent of Debian on a phone.
Rock solid. Every few year feature updates, only security fixes otherwise.
You can install debian on a pinephone https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/PINE64/PinePhone
But for a "normal" linux environment on a phone I recommend postmarketOS. They make an effort to support a variety of user interfaces, init systems, devices.
Still, it is important to consider that the hardware and driver support is the limiting factor here. The camera is very bad on the pinephone because it doesn't have the image processing capability to record video in realtime. It also has no OpenGLES3 or Vulkan. Very poor lima GPU.
Plasma Mobile[0] on Mobian[1] is getting pretty decent.
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What is the advantage of a Linux phone over something like LineageOS?
If things keep going in the direction they are, there might not be a LineageOS at some point, and developing a useful alternative before that (Linux based) would be great.
so we fork and continue to work on lineageOS. why start from scratch? (i mean, it's nice to have alternatives, but there is no reason not to continue developing an android fork.
Working on LineageOS doesn't help you if you can't even install it. Fewer and fewer phones come with unlockable bootloaders these days. The grip is tightening.
Yes, but if you are building your own phone hardware to run Linux on it, there is a huge advantage in that Linux flavor being an AOSP fork, since it is already mature.
While that's a viable option as something some people can do, it will be for the few in general, not the many.
You can run normal linux desktop and server programs with no limitations. The development and driver support is not guided by google.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but what would be the advantage of running straight Linux versus an AOSP-based mobile OS? Like, why not just keep the great apps that do run on there and ignore the Play Integrity ones that don't. Does it have to do mainly with just the governance of AOSP (i.e. Google)?
I also strongly felt this when support for sideloading apps got dropped, and from my personal experience of dealing with rooting and working around play integrity. It shouldn't have to be like this.
Side-loading was the original loading before app stores. App stores were the option.
The only thing that keeps me on Pixel is Google's astrophotography mode. Put the same quality camera (app and hardware), and I'm there. I'll get there faster if there is an Ektachrome and Tri-X film emulation setting. I miss the colors of film, but do not miss the chemistry or expense.
I'm sure I sound like and ass, but if astrophotography is the only thing tying you to your phone, why not gear for that?
Nah, not an ass. Just not up to speed yet.
Using traditional cameras (repurposed DLSRs or fancy webcams like ZWO). There is a significant hurdle, of expense, learning how to use them, and setting them up. A Pixel makes sky-wide astrophotography trivially easy with almost no setup required. Depending on how stable the camera mount is, the pixel will allow me to start over on the novice side of the scale. I've been able to take handheld pictures of the Aurora and other large sky images, such as lightning in twilight thunderstorms. If I can rest the camera somewhere stable, I can take longer exposures and even create a time-lapse of the night sky.
There's a lot to be said for pulling your phone out of your pocket and taking pictures of the sky.
Throw in Velvia emulation for an even three wishes
Pardon my potentially naive question, but would Samsung ever develop their own OS? I imagine they're not necessarily happy about some of the latest changes to android.
Bada and Tizen. They've been trying for 15 years. Tizen in particular is as Linux as it gets. Long story short: it's not something the market wants.
> it's not something the market wants.
If it was just "the market" guiding things, there would be no need to lock things down against consumers, or pulling bait-and-switches with slowly closing down the previously open-source Android, would there?
Please learn to recognize when you are under attack.
Interesting!
> Long story short: it's not something the market wants.
Who knows. Maybe this could change?
The market doesn't care what it's coded in, its just about end user convenience and usability.
Android is Linux based, and so is iOS. They focused on the UX and what it took.
It leaves it possible for linux to do it again.
Yeah, they could call it Tizen or something.
Please spare me the sarcasm...
They'd almost certainly just fork android like the various Chinese companies and Amazon have done.
I have made people mad by saying it, but it remains true: Every developer hour wasted on an Android ROM is an hour not invested in a platform free of Google's control.
Google likes Android ROMs because they pacify the developer community from working on real competitors, while not presenting any meaningful threat to their control of the majority of Android devices. The MADA that prevented OEMs from shipping AOSP is probably dead but what hardware manufacturer is going to risk Google's ire by shipping something.
> Every developer hour wasted on an Android ROM is an hour not invested in a platform free of Google's control.
As it stands, and the way things are devoloping, accurate. But as the relevant systems are an integration of hard- and software, significant work needs to be done on the former as well. And I've yet to come across a Linux phone (or phone-like pocket computer) that ticks most of the neccessary boxes.
Agreed, the Linux phone landscape is far from daily driver ready even for a lot of tech enthusiasts. But that's also why it's so important people spend development time trying to solve that instead of screwing with ROMs. Short of a strong profit motive, Linux mobile needs a lot of volunteer effort.
Total agreement with the article's conclusions. I'm an Android developer who once had about six apps listed in the Play Store. But as time passed, maintenance became more and more baroque, and a simple Android version change required me to rewrite all my apps or lose my listings. Like many developers, I gave up.
Then Google announced a decision to disallow sideloading (not clear when this will take effect) and many tablet/cellphone manufacturers intend to disallow bootloader unlocking. If all this happens, it basically closes the Android platform to anything but "official" software releases.
Consider this from my perspective. My first computer was an Apple II in the late 1970s. I could do anything I wanted with it, and I did. But over the decades I've watched the world of software development -- with the exception of personally owned Linux machines -- gradually turn into a walled garden.
What can I say -- it sucks the joy out of programming.
Makes me think about mobile first web apps that just run out of the browser.
Maybe Palm Pre's had it right all along with the html/js based OS in WebOS at that time. Just a little ahead of their time for OS, and missed challenging the iPhone by a bit.
Mao said "Let a thousand flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend". Then he killed off all those naive ones who stepped out.
This is more or less the capitalist/liberalist/colonial/MAGA model from time immemorial: preach "freedom" to put yourself in a indispensable place. Then impose fascism with long-suspected hierarchies.
Yes, the steam deck has ignited the usecase for the portable linux machine for the normal user. Now we just need great linux on arm support and then I can run a version claude code on a portable arm device and have it control my whole device for me all day. I hope this happens sometime soon!!!
>Banking requiring an Android or iOS Device for 2fa
>My local postal service requiring an Android or iOS Device to unlock those postal delivery boxes
>My local public transport requiring a Android or iOS Wallet app for my ticket to be used
>My Health Insurance Provider requiring an Android or iOS App to see my own insurance data
This is my daily struggle. All of these companies refuse to engage with you on this topic, you get a canned response from support that's it. How do we even win this fight? As far as I can tell we've already lost.
I was hoping the US becoming more hostile towards Europe would wake them up and allow the relevant legislators to discover that the entire industry is at the behest of two American companies. The same goes for cloud services in Europe, just with different companies, and OSes for that matter.
Alas, this is a rather large set of elephants nobody in power cares to acknowledge.
>It works on my phone, whats your problem?
t. Every politician ever.
This won't be solved until politicians and the unthinking masses feel the pain of this stupidity directly. And Google and Apple will make sure that they calibrate the pain for the average Person just high enough that they will accept it.
Android doesn't even let you access your files. It has famously blocked acess to the subfolders of /Android/data/ - every app has a subfolder there where it stores files. And you can not visit these subfolders since Android 11.
A buggy app accumulates gigabytes (literaly, i am not exagregating) of temp files there, but i cant visit the folder to delete them.
Google explains that "it's for you safety".
I have to call it with the strong word "idiotic".
There are apps now where storing files in a shared, accessible folder is a payed option.
Not only that is outrageous, I belive that violates the existing "right of access" laws like GDPR. I am condidering even submitting Subject Access Request to Google about my /Android/data/ subdirectories.
> A buggy app accumulates gigabytes (literaly, i am not exagregating) of temp files there, but i cant visit the folder to delete them.
Settings > Apps > select the app > Storage and cache > Clear storage.
No, I dont want to clear storage - there is data I downloaded into the app and work with that I dont want to lose. But the app also accumulates some temp files there.
Here is an idea I thought long and hard about for the last 3 seconds....
Say one, rather than making the entire phone modular, adds just one cartridge slot. Have it span the bottom half of the back of the phone and be a few mm deep. Cartridges can have 4 form factors. 1) flush with the back of the phone. 2) stick out from the back. 3) increase thickness of the entire phone. Or 4) like 3 but comes with the same slot as the phone so that one can stack cartridges.
The first base phone should be functional by it self but have really low specs. A slow cpu, little memory, little storage, small battery. It may even run on android and have a ton of preloaded apps no one wants. Ideally the most expensive component should be the cartridge connector.
And then, here it comes, you've already guessed it! The entire linux computer goes on the cartridge.
Have a similar dock that turns the cartridge into a desktop computer and a dock that connects it to your PC.
Software development would be glorious.
In the initial demo it should run Windows! This will send a strong signal to other otherwise uninterested parties that this is a real computer... finally...
While official builds should probably exist let other vendors go wild building their own proprietary closed source cartridges.
There should be infinite possibilities. People will make things we cant imagine. Stuff we will never see on flagship phones because 99% doesn't need it.
Some might simply but badly want usb ports.
Stupid example: I have a digital camera, I have to plug it into a computer and do all kinds of things before they may appear on my server, like booting the machine, opening apps and figuring out where the hell folders are. The pictures are great but not that much better than my phone which can conveniently send them places. But what I really need is to just plug in the camera and have the technology figure out which are the new images and upload them. It should require zero screen time.
The next guy might want an ethernet port, hdmi, serial, scan barcodes by pressing a real button that also unlocks and opens the correct app. You might even have a bulky cartridge that prints receipts. A large antenna and/or a week worth of battery. I'm not at all sure if people want it but a cassette player would be possible. A boom box with atx drive bays. etc etc
Then when you buy the next generation or are bored playing with it, the screen is cracked and the battery is worn out you turn it into a security camera that works when the power is cut and can send [picture] sms, make phone calls and play threatening messages to intruders.
I fully think an amazing consumer-targetting device could take over like a storm if done well, if ambitiously done, with an aggressive software stack.
But. I think what we should ask for now should be simpler. Let this be an alpha geek toy, let folks fiddle with some basic devices boards that can do the thing. The work on PinePhone, Mobian, others is good pioneering work, alas largely held back by there just being so few decent devices for folks to play with. The driver situation keeps making hope here impossible.
It's not a high hope, but Qualcomm has a QCM6490 chip is maybe a rare hope. A chip that is somewhat buyable by regular makers, an extended life version of the Snapdragon 778G. It's pretty modern, and comes with very featureful connectivity hardware. We're seeing variants like non-cellular Radxa Dragon Q6A in the field. Particle has a new Tachyon board you can buy with it. https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/07/31/tachyon-business-car...
It's just stunningly rare alas that folks can make systems with vaguely modern cellular chips. The cores are just not available generally. Sure it's be great to have a well produced Linux phone that is super consumer acceptable with a great OS build out, a new or revived Maemo or a Jolla Sailfish: folks who can go sign the NDAs and make a consumer device but have it be Linux. But I think for this dream to really take hold, humanity needs to be afforded some possibility to have an honest shake, some chance to be a little closer to the machine than typical cellphone bargain. The lack of cellular chip availability has been so so damning to this quest. And here is one counter-example, a crack in the wall, where I see flowers and hope grow.
There was some real nice moments where it seemed like maybe some Snapdragon cellphones in general we're getting Linux support to some level, in mainline, just for the base stuff. No cellular. Unclear to me but it seems like maybe those were just the very barest of beginnings; whether any peripherals at all work or whether there was even a screen is unclear. The trickle of releases also seems to have died off. FWIW though, I will note the previous Fairphone 5 does use the above QCM6490. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.1-Arm-Hardware
PostmarketOS seems to have decent support for the Fairphone 5: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...
Only issue is it’s so hard to use a Linux phone as a daily driver. I have a librem 5, but I admit it’s just too raw of an experience for me to use as a daily driver.
I had a Neo Freerunner.
It was a terrible experience. I bought it with the impression that it had calls, texts etc working fine, and they were looking for developers to come along and add apps, games, whatever to round out the experience.
I couldn't have been more wrong. They had about four different distros. There was the 'old' one, the 'new' one which was already scheduled for deprecation because of the new-new one in the pipeline and there was also a debian distro. Each one used an entirely different UI framework (gtk/efl/qt), and the developers seemed focused on these endless interface rewrites when the unit couldn't reliably receive a call or a text under any of them.
After that I had a Nokia N900, which was a great experience. They'd nailed down the basics perfectly (as you'd expect from a much larger company) and the unit was a capable smartphone with linux under the hood and easily accessible. It's just a shame the app ecosystem never took off, and nokia flushed itself down the toilet shortly thereafter. I guess Sailfish is the successor in this space, though I liked that Maemo was debian-ish rather than rpm-ish :)
I guess what I'm saying is that a linux phone doesn't have to be raw, but for god's sake make it able to take calls and send a few messages...
>Android as we know it is dead. And/or will be dead very soon. We need an open replacement.
AOSP is open and is a much better starting place than anything else.
Arguably the OS is the least important aspect.
The greatest issues facing mobile computing are:
1. The lack of any open firmware
2. Locked bootloaders
3. Obnoxious security "features"
a. Security attestation that is out of the owners control.
b. One time burn out resistors when you do unlock a device.right
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Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to do better than this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am pretty certain it's a bot though. Look at their comment history. It's like chatGPT responses
The history does, never the less - an email is better than a comment:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Where are the open source planes, trains, and automobiles? Medical equipment? Nuclear reactors? Open source cannot afford the quantity control/verification need for these domains. It’s the same for phones. At best you’re going to get an insecure mess.
(not a plane) https://www.youtube.com/@Ground-Effect/videos
Trains - not so hard, it's getting legit real track time that's the issue - and you can always 'cheat' with a Hi Rail Pickup Truck modification.
Automobiles - .. you are kidding, right? You've never built (or met a builder of) a road certified car, truck, or other vehicle?
> Linux phones are more important now than ever
Agreed. So get to it and design/built some worthwile ones.
EDIT: That was obviously not an order to the the parent, but more a lamentation about and call to the industry. Sorry kids; I sometimes forget that the binars are allergic to ambiguities. :)
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code