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 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.
> 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)
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?
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.
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?
(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.)
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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. :)
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
Common people don't care about the OS, they care about apps.
That will never happen. Governments are invested in people depending on surveillance technology. Black mirrors are a tool for controlling the masses.
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?
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.
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).
My bank requires me to authenticate all online transactions via the phone app. Without it, it's not possible to make online payments.
What if all banks require it?
It can't emulate hardware attestation though, which most bank apps now require, so good luck with that.
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
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.
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.
> Long story short: it's not something the market wants.
Who knows. Maybe this could change?
(Linked from the post: https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...)
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
>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.
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.
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
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...
(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?
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"