Librem 5 App Design Tutorial
puri.sm
puri.sm
The only reason I'm on android is because of f-droid -- the android experience still degrades every few months (we can process all your SMS through our website! slower animations!). So tired of carrying G's hot garbage around in my pocket.
[0]: https://lineageos.org/.
But I am with op for being able to taste my desire :)
i.e. Android is completely open; if Google were to try to put something nefarious in it, anyone who'd checked out the Android source would be able to see that nefarious thing and remove it; if Google kept putting it back in, nerds would be able to fork Android to take it away from Google.
This has become much less true over the years than it used to be, of course, as much of what makes Android Android has migrated out of the core OS into less open intermediate layers like apps and services. This transition helps Google push updates out to users more quickly, since cell network operators proved to be pretty slow about pushing out updates to Android proper, but from Google's perspective it also has the side benefit of making "open Android" (e.g. AOSP) pretty incomplete unless you pair it with Google's proprietary services.
Relevant thread: https://twitter.com/CopperheadOS/status/772592323112869888
If you read the thread I linked, you'll see that Google doesn't really bother to ensure open source Android builds actually work at all: They post them but are only concerned with proprietary flavors being functional. Which means a lot of work has to be done to make open source Android even build in the first place.
Then, most apps are built on proprietary Google APIs, not open source Android APIs. So you either have to use something like micro-g to let you use Google services without the proprietary on-device code, or create your own replacement APIs that just claim to be Google, but aren't, which Amazon does and Microsoft experimented with when they made Android apps installable on some test builds of Windows Mobile. Or you have to substantially rewrite the apps not to use proprietary Google APIs.
So you have to do a lot to make open source Android anything actually work and do what people expect it to.
Ah, the favorite "a million eyes fallacy".
The truth is: there are very few (if any) people capable to do a full audit on the Android source code to see if something nefarious is happening. The source code for Android is over 20 GB. Good luck that "anyone" who can check it out an be able to see ... well ... anything.
When significant flaws were discovered in OpenSSL, it turned out there were only a handful people in the world who could potentially do a full analysis of the code base. And the resulting audit ended up costing millions, took several years and resulted in the re-implementation/forking of the code base.
I know that OpenSSL isn’t a part of Android, but it shows the difficulty of auditing a large complex project.
Believing that anyone can checkout Android code and easily discover if Google (or anyone) has done something nefarious is a delusion of the highest order. The code base would need to be continuously audited by a team of experts in various domains.
I think price is a pretty freaking good justification. I don't need to pay a 500 dollar mark-up to move out of "mid-range" when it does EVERYTHING I need my phone to do just fine.
200 euros less than a 3 year old phone, and while still too expensive for some developing countries, it feels being less wastefull of our society resources.
It is still one year younger, and for the remaining of your statement it doesn't justify paying the extra 200 euros, not everyone swims in money you know?
When the phone finally dies or gets stolen, those saved 200 euros are more than enough to get a new one.
IMO there are no good choices in this regard. Either get an expensive Apple device (And get locked into their bullshit), get an Android powered device and have your data harvested by google and the oem, or have nothing. There are no low-end offerings that even attempt to address privacy.
An iPhone would not be a step up but a jump down.
Cellular modems with open firmware are prohibited in 140 countries, including US and Europe.
For US: https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/kdb/forms/FTSSearchResultPage.cfm...
I have a Galaxy Tab S5e on the way that runs Android + Samsung DeX Linux. I'm hoping to use the Linux aspect heavily, so less of my info flows to Google. But I'll need to dig into it a bit to understand how they keep the data separate (if they do).
For software support I can generally recommend the Pocophone F1 by Xiaomi. The process of unlocking the bootloader is an insult, but after killing of Xiaomi software the user experience is quite good, with pretty good hardware for quite little money.
As soon as you have a compatible OS ("ROM") running, you will generally not have to worry about hardware, but making one is a considerable amount of work, so if you're intending to install a custom OS you should better choose a phone with good developer support.
I have been thinking about starting a database of good phone choices for modding/free software, but am not sure how much interest there is.
"Jailbreaking" on Android is as easy as flipping a toggle in the security settings. It allows for easy sideloading in general, and the use of alternative app sources in particular. IOS's developer sideloading capabilities have so many restrictions and limitations that it barely counts as sideloading.
Apple HATES the GPLv3, and specifically designed their app store agreement to forbid GPLv3 software. Good luck finding anything GPLv3 that's not dual-licensed on their app store. This effectively bans any GPLv3 software that's not exclusively developed by a single company (or is a community project that mandates copyright reassignment) from the app store. (Fun fact: Apple's hatred of the GPLv3 is the same reason that they ship MacOS with a 12-year-old version of Bash, v3.2, the last version under GPLv2.) I won't support a company so hostile to the very concept of free software. Google is the embodiment of the phrase "privacy nightmare", but even they obey the spirit of the GPL and other free software/open source licenses in their projects.
No iPhone has ever had a microSD slot. I'm not going to spend a multi-hundred-dollar premium for the equivalent storage space of a $20 microSD card.
I prefer Linux at home. Historically iPhones have required iTunes for basic functionality such as copying music to the phone, and therefore required Windows or MacOS. It's not as painful nowadays to use an iPhone without iTunes day-to-day, but it's still nowhere near as simple as Android, and certain operations still require iTunes.
Mobile Firefox on Android supports regular desktop Firefox extensions. I wouldn't be able to install Ublock Origin, Decentraleyes, UMatrix, or any other extension on Firefox on IOS, because Apple mandates that all third-party browsers on IOS can only be wrappers around mobile Safari. I can easily install standard extensions on Firefox for Android, because it's really Firefox under the hood.
I greatly hope for the success of the Librem 5. I would drop Android in a heartbeat for a genuinely Google-free phone with all the traditional openness (sideloading, adding cheap storage, easy wired file transfers without Windows/OSX, etc) of Android. GApps-less LineageOS is better than standard Google-laden Android but it's still not ideal. All I'm waiting for before ordering a Librem 5 is final confirmation that the supported frequencies match my carrier.
I find Apple's stance slightly odd since I don't think the GPLv3 apps would infect Apple, but then I also haven't taken the trouble to thoroughly understand GPLv3. I started to research it some years ago and my quick conclusion was "avoid".
I don't really have too much complaint about GPLv2. It does impose some limits but I feel like I understand them and can work with them.
Definitely with you on the $20 microSD card. The markup for storage is absurd.
Update: want to add this question. Anyone know why Apple would bar a GPLv3 app from the app store (bash is unfortunate but I think I understand that one)?
I think it's simply a company-wide policy made at the recommendation of overly-cautious legal counsel.
On the matter of GPLv3, I think this is going to be an "agree to disagree" type of thing. I actually quite like the changes over v2. But then I'm not a professional developer. I'm just a bookkeeper who dabbles in coding for fun and for a bit of ad-hoc automation on the job. My perspective is certainly quite different from someone who makes a living programming.
Working as a contractor writing closed source software and allowing my clients to mostly own what I create allows me to work around 30 hours a week and spend time doing volunteer work. If there was a path to do that with Free Software I might go for it.
It's ironic because apple is actually violating gplv2 with bash (it should distribute rootless.h)
Do iPhones even collect less data? You'll still probably use Google, Facebook, and other data-collecting services on their platform. Not to mention the tracking carriers themselves do.
Even most Linux users aren't that concerned with privacy, at the end of the day most still use Chrome and Google services. It's more about choice, freedom and control over your device.
Banking is the most obvious case for doing over the web. It is silly to limit yourself to platforms which your specific bank happens to support, given the incredible multitude of banks, and the likelihood that most banks' apps probably suck anyhow.
This may not sound like a huge advantage, but remember that bank website authentication usually requires the use of a security token device. And this device is something you probably don't want to carry around all the time.
HSBC recently allowed (and encourage) moving that token to the mobile app but they do NOT support using your phone number.
Santander uses your phone number to send OTP by text for such purposes, and Monzo, the "modern bank" doesn't have a website, everything is done by app.
Out of those Banks, Monzo is the only one that will allow you to run their app on a rooted phone.
I'm not aware of any bank websites allowing you to do this? Sure it's easy to add but A) They're banks B) It's more akward, and less convient then the device that's in my pocket 24/7
I think at this point we have enough examples of mobile phone numbers being insecure and mobile app stores being full of malware to categorically state your smartphone is not a secure enough device for accessing substantial sums of money.
No, some banks allow only small payments after accessing the app without hardware token.
It certainly would be less secure, but it's limited to smaller amounts of money. It depends on the banking app. For example, I'd rather have a 4 digit pin code to check my current balance then my 24char password. Also I have touchID so the security pin thing is a non-issue on my mobile device.
We're working on getting Alpine Linux running on devices, particularly older Android phones. The best-supported devices right now are the Nexus 5 and the N900, but others are catching up.
We've also got people working with the Librem 5 devkits, so the Librem 5 will be fully-supported once it comes out.
I have been seriously considering just getting a Nokia 3310 and a Garmin and calling it a day and being done with all this smartphone nonsense.
Also the PinePhone is an interesting project to watch.
I used mine through repeat broken screens until they stopped updating marshmallow
32-bit android M on old hardware performed so much better than what I have now
I would be comfortable with that philosophy as long as it's coupled with something along the lines of the Windows Registry, where it is common to find many preferences and configuration options that were simply not exposed in an application's user interface. But reducing the ability of users to adapt software to their needs without some countermeasure is chilling my interest a bit.
I am generally pretty fond of having a lot of settings, but I think you have to sort out why you have them. Is it for personal preference (dark mode/light mode) or is it something you should be able to detect and automate and not ask for?
Then they should go get an iphone!
100% of the appeal for this phone is that you'll be able to run GNU/X11 on it. (there's privacy stuff too but that's a result of the openness)
I already have conf files for most of the apps and use them on handhelds too.
For open to succeed, open has to still be appealing to the masses. The more people who embrace a true Linux platform, the more options you will have to buy phones running true Linux platforms. Aka, it is in your best interest to recognize you are an extremely uncommon user and that you benefit if more common users can use the product.
Even as a fairly technical user who likes to have a lot of settings and options, I do not ever want to have to pop open a text editor on my phone to fix an app. I'm fine with it being possible to do so, but I had better never have to do it.
Arguably, since the hardware should support you running whatever flavor of hackery you want, you should support the phone having apps designed with the average user in mind, knowing full well you are capable of customizing it to your liking anyways.
That's 100% of the appeal to you, and there aren't enough of you to make Librem sustainable. I say this as someone who was a big fan of what the Nokia N900 and Moko Phone were trying to achieve.
Me, I'm looking for a phone that lets me live outside the Google/Apple ecosystem without reducing my choices to 720p screens and 1GB RAM. I installed Ubuntu on my laptop a few years ago out of curiosity and it was absurd how much configuration everything needed. Needing to open up a package manager to get something as simple as an MP3 Player app is not the UX you want your customers to have.
> Needing to open up a package manager to get something as simple as an MP3 Player app is not the UX you want your customers to have.
This doesn't sound like a config issue though, that's more that the choices of preloaded packages could be better. A package manager isn't much different from an app store (assuming you meant one of the GUIs.)
Just curious because it's been a while, what were some things you had to configure? And were you configuring to get it feeling more like OS X/Windows, or to have software that's usable at all?
I just got rid of X11 from all my desktop PCs, no way in hell I'm using that pile of shit on a phone.
Also, it appeals to be because it's a phone that will support mainline Linux, NXP has been willing to support their products for longer terms than Qualcomm, puts the user firmly in the drivers' seat, and is being designed for eventual mainstream appeal.
I don't want or care about some special phone OS (especially if the UI is built with the same philosophy that built gnome.) I care that the hardware has drivers but that's it.
You could use it for ten years without having to know that the terminal is even there, but it is, along with /etc and OpenSSH and everything else Unix-like systems have had for decades.
Because you don't need brutish uniformity. Some people like to download things with Firefox and some people like to download things with curl and there is no reason they can't both exist on the same system.
I really hope that they bake enough into the price to be sustainable on low volume. I don't see this phone being anything more than niche in the near and intermediate future, and if priced right, maybe it can survive on that.
Maybe it should suggest developing for the desktop and tablet first, and then adapting the successful project to the phone afterward. Or, just adapting an existing project.