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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

As a tech community, we should really rally around a libre/free mobile OS and soon. Being beholden to corporations for our operating systems is antithetical to freedom.

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It's so much harder to do on mobile, for multiple reasons:

- Hardware is not very modular (mainly because of size constraints), meaning you have to purpose-build libre hardware if you can't/don't want to run on tech-giant devices (you can right now if you're forking Android; you probably won't be able to once it's replaced with Fuschia).

- Developers' needs have always been a bastion for keeping desktop OSes flexible and open. No matter how closed-down software gets, someone somewhere has to be able to muck with it so as to build and improve it in the first place. This doesn't apply to mobile OSes; people don't use them for development.

Not that it's impossible for these things to be overcome, but it's a much steeper uphill battle.

Also, perhaps even more importantly, you'd be starting from scratch in terms of app ecosystem, which is even more important today (and especially on mobile) than it used to be in the PC era. You could get some mileage out of the web- but first you'd have to build or port a browser. Chromium certainly won't target your open OS, and with its 75% market share, it now strongarms the direction that web standards take. And many app makers don't even have mobile web apps these days (or their web apps are crippled versions of their "real apps"). Good luck getting Slack and Favor, or your bank, to build apps for your new OS. Or even Dropbox and Evernote. Forget about Netflix and YouTube.

Maybe you're okay with going back to the iPhone 1.0 days where a smartphone was just for phone calls, texting, email, a calendar, listening to music, looking up directions, and searching the web. But while you might get an mp3 player app, many people no longer own copies of their music and you won't get Pandora or Spotify. You certainly won't have a decent maps app - maps are one of the most heavily monopolized core features of today's phones, mainly because of the sheer size of the task of mapping the world. OpenStreetMap exists, but it's honestly not very good.

You start to see the problem.

I used an Android fork for about a year without any Google services before I gave up. I was able to grab a few crucial apps from APKMirror, but not many. I tried using OsmAnd for maps; it was awful. I once bought a pair of headphones I literally couldn't use without the app - available only on the App Store and Play Store. I used web apps to fill in some of the gaps; they were spotty and many were ugly and/or slow and/or didn't hook into APIs like push notifications. At least I had a fully up-to-date Chrome fork to use as my browser.

Maybe after the death of Android there would be greater momentum behind building and sustaining this kind of ecosystem. That would help bolster not only app development, but possibly even the value of the open web, and maybe even the contributions to (and therefore quality of) things like OpenStreetMap. It's hard to say.

So your complaints are that you couldn't use your preferred commercial services on an open platform. But if you zoom out to Smartphone Global Scale, the vast majority of people don't use those services anyhow. Netflix has 155 million total subscribers globally, which means it doesn't have about 3,745 million other Internet users.

Smartphones are far, far more about communication and collaboration than passive content consumption. 'Functioning' in our digital society isn't about everyone individually watching the same movies on a 5" screen on the bus. Most people use their phones as a glossier smartphone with navigation capability and that's just fine.

"the vast majority of people don't use those services anyhow."

You use Netflix as a stand-in for all "commercial services". The majority of smartphone users in the world may not have Netflix on their phones, but the majority of Americans - the largest market by value - do. And more importantly, I guarantee you that the vast majority of smartphone users worldwide regularly use Facebook and/or WhatsApp. Those are commercial services. I personally have trouble staying in the loop at work without Slack on my phone. That's a commercial service. Plenty of mobile, commercial services are truly essential to modern life. Singling out Netflix is a straw-man.

> The majority of smartphone users in the world may not have Netflix on their phones, but the majority of Americans - the largest market by value - do.

Maybe Americans are the largest market by value. Are they larger than the sum of all other markets, though? Will they be in 5 years? What about 10?

Regarding WhatsApp and Facebook, let's just remind ourselves they did not exist ~10 years ago. Any argument based on their size should only serve to remind us that such a dramatic change is possible over a period of 10 years.

For those curious, what I ended up doing was switching to an iPhone. I decided that my boycott of Google was mainly about privacy, not openness, and I resigned to the fact that I'd rather be able to fully function within our digital society than have openness in my phone (I still use Linux on my desktop). I've been happy with my decision; but for what it's worth I'd still try out a mature, truly open mobile OS if one ever surfaced.

> Also, perhaps even more importantly, you'd be starting from scratch in terms of app ecosystem

The "app ecosystem" on a free mobile OS would be shared with the "ecosystem" of free PC apps. Chromium does target, e.g. Debian GNU/Linux, as do quite a few proprietary apps relying on Flatpack. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to piggiback on this work for the mobile platform. Yes, UI is different, but not that different. Modern Linux apps already come with a touch-friendly UI, for example.

Assuming the free mobile OS was Linux-based. And if it's going to be, I don't see why one wouldn't just start with an Android OSP fork. Even if Google stopped maintaining the latter, it's a huge head start compared to the alternative.

That said, because of the way Google APIs have extended their tentacles into non-Google Android apps, many of them cease to function without Google Services installed. So you'd still have most of the app ecosystem problem.

AOSP is way too fragmented. An "app" dating back to, e.g. Android 2.3 (not that long ago), or even as late as Android 4.0 will not even build in a form suitable for a present-day version of AOSP - you have to go and rewrite the code yourself, there is no backward compatibility that reaches that far. Linux platforms are truly mature and can easily run code dating back to the 1980s. Add to that the pointless overhead caused by Dalvik/ART (especially wrt. RAM use - quite critical on a system with no swap space whatsoever!), and the gratuitous differences with widespread Linux kernel and userspace standards. Starting from scratch on a better base is short-term pain for long-term gain.

Though you can just do both. Support both Android apps as well as New Better Thing and then all new apps use the new thing but the existing apps let you hit the ground running.

Almost all hardware is NDA. Even the Raspberry Pi has a lot of it's mobile-oriented chips like the VC GPU under a lot of NDA restrictions and binary blobs. There's basically Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei as the only companies making cellular modems and basebands, nearly all of which is closed source.

> Being beholden to corporations for our operating systems is antithetical to freedom.

This may be an unpopular statement here but where do you think Linux comes from?

Corporations.

It's Open Source but the vast vast vast majority of funding comes from IBM, Google, etc.

Linux was started by a student and brought into the limelight by volunteers. While the current development is largely paid for by corporations the essence of the thing is still the same, Linux-the-kernel is free software and can be forked by anyone who so pleases. If those corporations all were to loose interest, go bankrupt or suddenly decide they want to change Linux into a DRM-infested monster which only listens to its corporate master it would be a simple thing to fork the thing and ditch the corporate version. What would be less simple is the answer to the question who would pay for future development and how drivers would be written if and when hardware manufacturers started acting up but it would not be impossible to go that way. OpenBSD is a good example of a system which is developed without too much corporate funding, the concept has been tried and tested and is known to work.

This theoretical situation is precisely the one Android is in. The only difference is that Google is the only corporate stakeholder, so as they lose interest in various open-source Android components, those components simply die. Maybe the answer is to get more corporations invested in AOSP.

A big difference is that development of Android is done behind closed doors, whereas for Linux you can observe what is happening in public (discussions on the mailing lists for example). This means that it's essentially impossible to follow or contribute to Android development in a meaningful way. This is also reflected in the fact that there are open issues in Android with almost no reaction from any developer for years.

"it would be a simple thing to fork the thing and ditch the corporate version"

^ This is what I was speaking to. This holds for Android.

A large portion of the components needed to boot (not to mention use) android have always been closed. This is absolutely not the case for Linux. You can boot a totally free kernel on most PCs and don't really even need much userspace (busybox and whatever app you want to run (provided it doesn't need X11) is usually enough)

Furthermore, android really wasn't built to be easy for individuals to work on. Compare compiling and modifying Linux to compiling and modifying android. I've done the first but I don't think I've ever even finished downloading the source (tens to hundreds of gigabytes) to even start with the second.

Those components are presumably hardware drivers, right? In which case they're kept closed-source by the OEMs, and in which case you'd face the same problem whether you're putting Android on top of them or not. The solution in either case is to develop open source drivers. This is true regardless of whether you start with Android or go back to the Linux kernel and start over.

On modern Linux the drivers are part of the kernel which puts them under the GPL, legally obligating the release of their source code. On android the graphics drivers are part of userspace which lets the authors get around this.

Okay, but all that means is there aren't currently open source drivers for Android because we haven't needed them. Presumably the Linux kernel doesn't already have drivers for Android hardware (and if it did, presumably they could be ported to Android proper), so they'd have to be written either way. The point is moot.

> there aren't currently open source drivers for Android because we haven't needed them.

People don’t need anything, most of them just suck it up and deal with it. On Android this means throwing out phones and getting new ones every few years.

There is https://postmarketos.org/

PostmarketOS is the closest I've seen to the right idea for sustainability and openness: mainline Linux kernel, no closed drivers, and a userland that lets various current and future environments be layered (and can run the existing wealth of GNU/Linux software immediately, modulo the small touchscreens).

A word of warning is that still developer-only, not ready for real use. (Even my Replicant devices are much more functional than my PostmarketOS ones, at the moment, but PostmarketOS is a much better idea.)

Firefox OS tried.

https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-story-of-firefox-os-cb5bf79... https://www.cnet.com/news/why-the-death-of-the-firefox-phone...

What do you guys think about Purism's smartphone built with PureOS https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ ?

While I get this desire I have a hard time imagining ever using a free/open OS of any kind, mobile or otherwise. Mobile OSs and platforms tend to prioritize things that are unimportant for most users’ day to day use and thus suffer accordingly. They make good thought experiments or are great for the areas they’re optimized for (see *nix), but not for day to day use.

And we can have the handsets run on biodiesel and little windmills.

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