AOSP is open and is a much better starting place than anything else.
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.There's no great reason for these to be Android/Apple specific. I'm just offering examples as requested.
Allows you to have a digital copy of your ID and sign in to government sites/services (there are alternative methods).
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
It can't emulate hardware attestation though, which most bank apps now require, so good luck with that.
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?! :)
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.
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.
> 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.
Common people don't care about the OS, they care about apps.
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.
Remote Attestation and the Play Integrity API will soon make that stop.
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.What if all banks require 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 requires me to authenticate all online transactions via the phone app. Without it, it's not possible to make online payments.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
FWIW the default phone app on GrapheneOS supports recording phone calls.
Edit: apparently the /s is obligatory on this one
I also live in a one party consent state.
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)
(Linked from the post: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...)
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. :)
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.
Rock solid. Every few year feature updates, only security fixes otherwise.
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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
>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.
Alas, this is a rather large set of elephants nobody in power cares to acknowledge.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
its-kostya•1h ago
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.