Ask HN: Why are there no “modern” phones running open source operating systems? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are there no “modern” phones running open source operating systems?

17 pointsmmathias12 comments

Now that Ubuntu Touch development has been halted, I was searching for alternatives. Plasma Mobile only supports the Nexus 5X. Any ideas?

View on HN

You have Sailfish OS [0], which is ported to rather modern (albeit somewhat low spec) phones (e.g. Fairphone 2, Jolla C [1]). Sailfish also has an Android compatability layer (think Wine for Linux) so it can run most Android apps.

[0] - https://sailfishos.org/ [1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS#Hardware_overvie...

A few months ago, I was in the same boat as OP - bored of Android and iOS stuff. Thanks to the ex-Nokia and ex-Meego employees, we have Sailfish OS.

Bought immediately. Since then, I'm using less of Google's ecosystem. Phone is great and almost have every feature that you desire, sometimes better.

https://sailfishos.org/about/

I will always be disappointed that WebOS never had a proper leg to stand on. The Palm Pre was my absolute favorite phone, but the hardware was just too far behind. Whenever I heard WebOS was made open-source I was hoping someone would take it and make a great phone OS, but I haven't seen anyone try. Instead it's used to power new TVs and printers.

Follow the money: vast majority of people don't care and don't want one.

Part of the problem is that the "open source" community have never been able to produce well design and user-freindly user interfaces.

Android is open source.

Yes, but all Android Phones come with a pre-compiled binary distribution. And as long as it's pre-compiled, it's kind of hard to know what is going on under the hood. Compiling and installing your own Android almost always is a pain..

Counting out Android building a mobile OS is a huge investment with very little returns.

Because of Qualcomm

None of their modem code is open source. It's baked into a proprietary modem image that runs on a different subsystem then the application processor.

You could run a your own OS on the application processor, but millions of lines of code that are actually doing the "phone" part of the device is going to remain closed.

I doubt you could run your own trust zone image either, so you are effectively running an open source guest OS where all the interesting stuff is controlled by propriatery code.

Thank you, that's a good explanation. Of course, open source hardware would be nice too :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com