Why will someone use it? It looks like first android phones. I mean usability and security.
- its camera is not good
- its battery life is not good
- its call quality is not good
- SMSes are not completely reliable
- receiving MMSes works, but you need to use a custom command line tool that you might have written yourself for that
- sending MMSes, I have not even tried. Probably possible, but impractical
- it's barely usable for GPS navigation
- it's a bit slow
- Web browsing is a bit clunky but is largely usable
- its overall usability is not very good
It's a prototype.
But it is a bet for the future. A future in which there are usable phones running OSes whose roadmap do not depend on corporations that close everything in a walled garden or who depend on massively tracking people. A future in which every single line of code running on the phone can be studied, improved and shared. A future in which updates are not at the mercy of the manufacturer.
Actually, you can already have one foot in this future thanks to this phone, and many things are being fixed at a remarkable pace. I hope we will see higher-end hardware for the OSes running on the PinePhone soon.
According to discussions on the Pine64 boards, it will probably take 4-5 years before we see an upgrade to the underpowered and obsolete A64 chip inside the PinePhone, and when that happens, even that new chip may already seem antiquated.
In the meantime though, I would be happy with an outdated SoC but a decent camera and good call quality for people you call. 5 GHz Wi-Fi would be wonderful. 3G of RAM is already comfortable. A better screen would be fantastic but the one on the PinePhone is more than usable.
Better battery life would be nice too, but it is coming to the PinePhone with a custom case that will also provide a keyboard, and you can always carry a power tank or a spare battery since the one in the PinePhone is removable!
The same is also true of map apps. There just isn't enough developer manpower to make vanilla-Linux mapping apps as featureful as OSMAnd or Maps.me's open-source fork, and therefore the best thing to do would be to emulate them using Anbox, but the Pinephone's hardware is just too underpowered to comfortably do this.
Anbox being slow is not a big surprise though: it literally runs a complete Android system on top of your OS.
We need native, lightweight apps for the phone and that requires a big amount of work for sure.
There's an Android port for the PinePhone that I want to try one of these days. Back to an OS whose roadmap depends on Google, but at least without the proprietary blobs. But I don't plan to settle on it. As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it's less and less hackable, and I hope that GNU/Linux-based OSes work out.
Either you haven't heard of or used Gnome Maps (which is wonderful, highly recommend), or it doesn't fit your criteria. Assuming the latter, what do you consider missing?
OSMAnd is able to show all kinds of details about roads (such as the road surface – important for cyclists interested in asphalt/unpaved riding).
Gnome Maps also uses GraphHopper for routing. OSMAnd, on the other hand, allows you to extend its routing with plugins, so long-distance cyclists can install the Brouter routing engine that is superior for this kind of travel.
I don't expect it to be a great phone. I do think it's fairly incredibly that it exists at all, and I want to support both the manufacturers putting it out, as well as pick up some slack and add some of my spare time as development hours towards making the experience better.
This is one of the very, very few mobile devices on the market right now that places the user in the driver's seat, instead of treating them merely like a wallet to suck money from in any way possible.
- No heavy SDK. Just use whatever you want to build software for it, it's not complicated.
- on $distro, you access any package provided by $distro. And when $distro is Mobian, you have everything Debian has.
- You can script anything with a regular shell script.
- There's Avahi, so you can discover things on your network and your computers can access services running on the phone.
- You can display the SMS app on your computer screen through ssh -Y, and this is amazing.
- Since the sound is managed by PulseAudio, you can use its networking features. Play sound from your phone on your computer or vice versa.
The dock is pretty cool too, and allows running things like on a regular computer, though the phone is a bit slow.
edit: apparently this already exists: https://replicant.us
After a few years (3 if you are lucky), your phone will stop getting updates. I have a Nexus 5 with the last "official" update over 4 years ago. I have a Nexus 5x that stopped getting updates 2 years ago.
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705
To compare, I have a laptop from 2008 (A Thinkpad x200) that runs mainline Debian no problems, and bit the thing will die before it stops getting mainline support. I want a phone where I can like that too.
In all but a select, very few devices, Android is not fully open source, nor will it ever be.
On a Pixel 3a, if you follow the offical compiling guide, there is a HUGE (~400 MB) vendor.img file you are forced to install, and you have to integrate several other proprietary libraries to get the Pixel 3a to even boot.
On top of that, pure AOSP cripples the phone (and by that mean SMS breaks with LTE, you lose voLTE, Wi-Fi calling, etc.) A lot of Android ROMS have to scrape official images to get the binary bits (and it is nor a fun needle in a haystack excerise) to get basically phone functionality in Android.
Running Android without Play Services cripples your phone in a number of ways.
And there are aspects of newer Android versions that are less than ideal. For instance, one can see how Termux is struggling to keep working: it is not possible to run binaries that are not part of an Android package (APK) anymore. This is a security feature, but it's not always relevant depending on how you use and manage your OS.
Plus, developing for Android is a pain. You need to download, setup and use a bloated SDK with a non-free license. There's Android Rebuilds [1], but it's not complete.
I trust GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, Manjaro to evolve in a direction I like. postmarketOS probably too, but I'm not familiar with it as well.
Developing for the Pinephone has been nice! I have been using Mobian for it over SSH, and I am pretty happy with how well it has been going.
Kernel support is there waiting to compiled for user namespace isolated containers. It would just require an official way to launch them as a normal user.
You will always be under control of others if you don't take your independence and open-source means little when it is in practice controlled by only one entity.
If you build an OS on top of Android like /e/, replicant & Lineage & etc. , you are doomed to be living in Google' shadow . They'll shut you down anytime you do something they don't like. And even if it is open-source, if you disagree, you'll never have the financial means to maintain an up to date Android fork. Once/if they abandon Android for Fushia, it's going to be hard maintaining all abandoned Android legacy code alone.
Then, there are also technical reasons. We could ask "why create a new UI lib from scratch when we have QT ?". Yes for the end-user it's mostly the same (a bunch of text and buttons), yet people are developing custom UI lib (eg. Blender/Godot), Flutter, React, Svelte, Druid, Moxie, Makepad, etc. This is needed for innovation and/or to fit your own needs.
Real Linux has lots of potential : it can run Blender, Krita, Godot, VsCode, Steam games, any language, FreeCad, KiCad, Matlab, etc. (None of them have mobile UIs, but still are an asset for tablets & convergence). It is not governed by Google or Apple and it has already quite some drivers for several devices (I could just install Bitwig on a Linux tablet, plug a MIDI keyboard and make music).
So there are definitely reasons to take this path and personally I find this far more exciting than Lineage (although I use Lineage daily & I'm super grateful to that it exists)
Pinephone is only interesting because it is getting a progressively better mainline Linux support every day, can run normal Linux distros, has fairly open hardware and a manufacturer that accepts feedback, and works on interesting stuff, like a kinda unique planned external keyboard+battery shell for it.
It's a real pocket computer with HW that I can control without restrictions, SW that I can trust, and don't have to run everything in a sandbox, just like on my workstation.
The absence of proprietary blobs running on the main CPU alone is already a great deal. This also means that the phone isn't stuck on an old version of Android because of some nasty blob.
This. The formulated goal is short, self-contained, not overreaching, and to the point.
I get that that when its some new proprietary product trying to enter the market, but when its something grass roots and community driven line the pinephone with classic linux distribution on it... I dunno, I guess I just expect HN to have more intellectual curiosity in technical projects, rather than surface level critique of packaged goods. That's the sort of thing I spend time on this site for, but those sorts of discussions are far and few between. Maybe its just time to move on, I can't relate to 90% of HN comments anymore.
It is sad that pioneers and early adopters often suffer more and are anonymous heroes that enable advanced user-respecting technology for the rest of the people.
Think of this like the people who used KHTML based browsers. Their compromise allowed us to have the quick browsers we enjoy today but they had to endure broken websites for years.
Security: Android is choke-full of spyware.