Show HN: A Mashup to find LineageOS supported phones that are repairable | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Mashup to find LineageOS supported phones that are repairable

sustaphones.com

109 pointsonli48 comments

There's good intent and I see a lot of positive feedback. I'll try to provide useful criticism instead.

There's many issues with this.

The primary one is that if I select battery replacement "easy", I also want to see "very easy". I consider it easy+. This is the expectation.

Having said that, I need to be able to filter by screen size range, by screen time (e.g. oled) and by presence of headphone jack.

If they can't do this much, the filters are of very limited usefulness.

Excuse me for hijacking your comment, but I would add filter by year of release. Older phones are very rare to find in mint conditions.

That should already be there. Is the "Release" filter not appearing?

Oh, sorry, I didn't explore that button! I thought it was a LineageOS release filter (16, 17, etc).

I really like and appreciate your site!

Thanks! I changed the label name from "Release" to "Release Year", that should make it easier to discover.

"Introduction"?

Looks nicer, but I'm not sure I would get that :)

Thank you for this!

I have been trying to decide on which Android device that I need to buy that supports official versions of Lineage and it would be nice if it could be easily repaired as well.

My favorite phone so far has been a six year old Motorola.

The battery lasts for several days without a charge and doesn’t send any data out that isn’t necessary according to tcpdump and my PiHole.

(Which is probably why the battery lasts so long)

Google Android is an absolute dumpster fire and cheap devices often come with preinstalled malware and rootkits abd even expensive Samsung devices are loaded with too much bloat.

But my old Moto is not on the approved list so I have to compile a new OS which was fun but gets old real quick.

Coincidentally, yesterday my father handed me his old Moto X 2014 with a shattered screen, asking me if I wanted to do anything with it before he trashed it. I wiped it and installed lineageOS, which is what I'm using to write this comment; its definitely a less fluid experience than my full-dystopia-mode pixel 4A, but its a refreshing experience nonetheless and I could imagine it's great for people who want to treat their phone as a tool and not a perpetual distraction device (I would guess that even with further tinkering I would be hard pressed to get all my apps integrated sufficiently seamlessly so as to enable such levels of distraction).

I watched a teardown video for the phone on YouTube and it appears the battery is replaceable, just not easily, whereas its given an "x" on this list (is this true of all phones?). Fortunately I don't seem to be suffering any battery-related problems at the moment, but I will be attempting to replace the screen, which does not seem to be easy on this dwvice.

> it appears the battery is replaceable, just not easily, whereas its given an "x" on this list (is this true of all phones?)

So, the listing for the Moto X 2014 is saying exactly that. A swappable battery means that you can just take off the cover and change the battery, without needing any tool. That's not the case here (at least it's not marked as having that feature). Instead an iFixit guide is linked with 'moderate' difficulty (unlike others that are very difficult, then I wouldn't even try). Maybe that definition of a swappable battery is not universal and should be explained on the page?

It probably should be explained. Their classification makes sense, but I think some may be misled. The demographic of people getting older phones and running LineageOS would probably be comfortable with managing a few obnoxiously tiny screws to replace a battery, and just want to be able to replace them when they start crapping out, whereas the older phones I've had which advertised a replaceable battery (consistent with this list) made it easy enough for grandma.

> my full-dystopia-mode pixel 4A

What do you mean? I keep Pixel 4A on my buy-list, if/when my old trusty Nexus5X with zero Google services breaks down.

I just meant that I haven't made any efforts to keep google from snooping on me through that phone. So I get all the convenience of e.g. google screening my calls and waiting on hold for me, with all the associated privacy concerns, as opposed to the LineageOS device which I don't think has any google apps/services at all.

I do enjoy the 4a very much however, it's a great device.

Heck yeah, still using a Galaxy S4 myself. I need to look into VoLTE hacks though, because I've been getting nastygrams from my provider suggesting that it may be relegated to voiceless tablet duty soon unless that can be addressed.

I'm not aware of a good source for "supports VoLTE natively / with hacks / not at all" data, though.

On android you can just use data for voice anyway via eg signalwire.

I still haven't found a good VOIP client for desktop linux/pinephone.

>On android you can just use data for voice anyway via eg signalwire

You can't call to and receive calls from normal numbers through it, can you?

Yup. You can. For free too. Mostly.

Which service? Does it work with linux?

Who is your provider?

Ting.

This VoLTE situation is a serious problem, it appears. Is the open source Android community basically screwed as soon as 3G is turned off? There are a lot of 4G phones that seem to support VoLTE only when flashed with their OEM firmware.

VoLTE configuration on phones requires a carrier configuration profile which specifies the right setting for that specific carrier - this is technical configuration based on the carrier's voice network. This can either be shipped as part of the firmware, part of the OS, or delivered as an OTA update.

IDK at least in Germany they don't have plans yet to drop 2G, even though there are plans to turn off 3G. German source: https://www.pcwelt.de/news/2G-GSM-Abschaltung-Das-sagen-Tele...

Also, it seems that my phone supports VoLTE even though I use Lineage OS without gapps. At least it shows LTE being set up for voice too in the settings app as well when I dial that 4636 number.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/24/how-to-find-out-if-...

This site I made because I was searching for something like it. When my last phone stopped getting updates while being perfectly usable, apart from at Linux phones I searched for a repairable phone that was supported by Lineage, and found it very hard to see what is available. There are other (some very nice) Lineage device finders, but nothing I saw linked that data to iFixit guides.

Repairable for now means "battery swappable or easy to change". Lineage is only one of two Roms listed, MoKee is the other one.

Lineage support is not really the full story though. For example, on the LG V20, Lineage does not support any of the specific hardware features of the phone (second screen, manual camera, etc...) so you are severely downgrading the user experience of the phone.

I'm using a lg v20 atm.

It does support the second screen as an extension of the main one. The IR glitches, and voLTE does not work like in many lineageos models.

The biggest issue is battery and camera. Which the custom ROMs on XDA will solve.

Also you can buy on aliexpress a 4100mah, or even 10000mah with an extended case.

It supports usb to hdmi. You can install the gcam app.

It lg v20/g5 are still very good phones but you do need to invest some time on them.

This is awesome, thank you so much.

So far i used geizhals (https://geizhals.eu/?cat=umtsover&xf=162_LineageOS+Support%7...), but this is so much better since you implemented filters for version and release date.

Good job, i'll stop raving now, promise.

(edit: formatting)

The tester at my side pushed for having the filters before showing the site, so thanks, she is smiling now :)

Interesting, but note that some phones listed here as battery not swappable & no guide actually have batteries that you can replace easily following a video tutorial. Further, it appears that only official LineageOS versions are taken into account, but for some phones much newer TWRP & LineageOS versions are available (such as the 2017 mido that has well maintained ROMs with Android 11 and recent kernels). And even a screen replacement is only 20$ & maybe 20 more if you want to have a repair technician do it for you (it does involve heat gun and glue admittedly).

Hey, the site only lists iFixit guides. Are some of those missing?

> Further, it appears that only official LineageOS versions are taken into account

That's correct. There are of course many more roms available on xda, unofficial lineage roms and other projects, but for one I do not know a structured way to list them, and second I think that if one decides on a device it should be based on official support by a bigger project.

If there are more of those bigger projects that should be listed (and that have a list of devices they support published somewhere) I'm happy to add them to the list. It does not have to be only MoKee and LineageOS.

The official LineageOS builds are not somehow better. It only means the maintainer went through extra hoops to have their build listed there.

When fixing things it doesn't matter where you find the guide so I'm saying that if there are other videos available they should be linked. Obviously using iFixit only is easier to implement, but maybe there can be a way for the users to upvote arbitrary links?

I would expect the build being official at least raises the chances of the maintainer being catched if he slips some nefarious code into the ROM?

> but maybe there can be a way for the users to upvote arbitrary links?

Maybe if the foundation would be a bit different :) But this is a completely static site. One ruby script per data source creates a central .yml file, another custom ruby script creates the HTML based on that data and some .erb files, netlify is then serving those HTML files (pulls them directly from a gitlab repo). And after the holidays my time will be too limited to change that, especially for a noncommercial project. But if there is serious interest to create a fork with more features and data I would open source this.

Edit: As someone on Reddit was asking for a repo and this comment planted the idea to open source it anyway, here is the repo: https://gitlab.com/onli/sustaphones

Would this work better as a table? Example columns:

    Make      (example "Samsung")
    ModelNum  (example "i9300")
    ModelName (example "Galaxy S III (International)")
    Year
    Codename

    LineageOS (example "17.1", link to site)
    MoKee ROM (example "7.1",  link to site)

    Battery   (example "Easy", link to iFixit)

That is cool. So far I use phones with removable batteries already. Never really understood how to put LineageOS on them. Maybe a link to an easy tutorial per phone would be nice.

Another good resource to find phones with removable battery is this chart:

https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/sets/3

Thanks. To link specific instruction is a good idea. For lineage there is always the wiki page, so you can go to https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ and then click on the phone you have and there will be an installation manual. Not always 100% you need to know, but a good start. I should link those, the url scheme is regular, that should be an easy change.

Edit: The Lineage link now goes to the device wiki entry, where the installation instructions are also linked.

For the removable battery, the idea here really is to go one step further. When almost all modern phones have no removable battery the next best thing is having a battery that is easy to replace, even if it is not directly swappable.

Unfortunately installing Lineage is going to vary wildly by device (rooting device, installing custom recovery, installing lineage then gapps). Depending on the device there might not be support for all of the device features (bluetooth not working, for example).

I have found the best way to see what lineage options looks like for a particular device (and root, recovery, install requirements) is to check the XDA device forums for specific devices before phone purchase.

Thank you, this comes in handy and was really missing! It's sad that the newest phone supporting lineage 17.1 and a swappable battery is from 2015. Another nice feature would be to list the phones that unofficial lineage images exist for - like my moto G5 which works very well.

When I was picking out a phone, I pulled down the LineageOS wiki git repo and did some pattern matching on the YAML files that they store device information in. Worked fairly well for me at the time, but was a terrible user exexperience for the average Lineage OS user.

The lineage wiki device data is used to gather a lot of the information displayed here :)

That's great! Too bad the ifixit data is noncommercial ;).

There are some devices (e.g. Mi A1) where the link to the "easy" iFixit guide 404s. Not sure whether that's an issue with the iFixit API or the way you're using it.

It would be nice to be able to link to specific queries and individual results.

Yeah, not sure how to handle that. It seems like the guide has been deleted. But the rating is correct, I researched the Mi A1 specifically, the battery is easy to swap out. So the information still seemed useful to me.

With other devices it could be that the parser needs improvements. The guides can have flags and there are maybe some that need to be respected or displayed. You did stumble over another example?

This is brilliant, I'll use this when I buy my next phone, thank you

My gripe with LineageOS support is that it does not support device encryption and/or SELinux, making it less secure than fully supported models.

How easy is it to find spare batteries?

ebay or dhgate

For me it's usually the volume buttons that die first, not the battery.

I use software controls as much as possible now. Even for locking the phone. This elongates the hard switch life.

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