How good are Pinephones[1]? Are there better alternatives?
I used to have a Nokia N9; great phone. But it didn't support WhatsApp and I was out on the loop on the WhatsApp chat all my other coworkers were in.
Then there's things like banking apps, flight check-in apps, food ordering apps, dating apps, etc. etc. Can you do without those? Sure, of course. But if I want to order food where I live then the only option is to use an app.
No platform will have any chance of any sort of adoption unless it supports some way of running those apps. There are options here, for example Jolla/Sailfish OS can run Android apps (no idea how well that works in practice; the latest update says it supports "Android 9, and the support for Android 10 is already nicely on the way").
It's a "vendor lock-in" ecosystem that's worse than the Windows lock-in of yesteryear IMO.
Since I don't really use my phone all that much I decided to "just use an iPhone" (because it's the only phone that's not huge), even I think they're really horrible.
The web is dead. Kids today grow up using the "google app". They did what AOL couldn't.
I'd love to be wrong.
For regular companies, if they want to shoot themselves in the foot by not being on the web, they're welcome. It's not such a huge issue as it would be with government for example.
Also "any chance of any form of adoption" is a bit overstatment. I still use a dumbphone, and if I migrated to pinephone, lack of the kind of apps you mention would certainly not concern me. Even then, many apps have web alternatives here, or alternative GPLed clients for Linux (that includes whatsapp, apparently), that can be made native on pinephone.
Revolut, Grab, Gojek, Tinder, WhatsApp, and many more are all successful that offer a mobile-first solution, with either no web/desktop client or just as a an additional client (usually with fewer features, and/or still requiring access to a smartphone).
> Also "any chance of any form of adoption" is a bit overstatment. I still use a dumbphone
Of course it's possible; but depending on what your interests in life are you will pay a price, and in practice for the vast majority of people the price is too large to use a non-Android/iOS compatible device.
> many apps have web alternatives here, or alternative GPLed clients for Linux (that includes whatsapp, apparently), that can be made native on pinephone.
Unless they somehow hacked the encryption, you're still going to need a connection to the phone's WhatsApp client.
Apologies if I sound a bit naive, but what would be there to "hack"?
WhatsApp clients are available for many platforms, whatever encryption they might be using can easily be figured out by decompiling the code, and if they are using a key on the client side to do any encryption, that key is available for extraction from the distributed client too.
Basically, my question is what can a closed source downloadable client do to protect the encryption it uses to connect to a public network?
You can't. Sure, there are technological solutions to all of those, but in the real world that alone is pretty much useless.
I thought WhatsApp also had a web interface but I wouldn't use it anyway and there are similar chat apps that do so why would you?
You imagine wrong.
> I thought WhatsApp also had a web interface but I wouldn't use it anyway and there are similar chat apps that do so why would you?
The web interface is just a proxy to the phone app. The other "similar apps" don't have all my contacts on it.
Although, if you're using Whatsapp at all you're either massively ignorant or stupid. I mean, giving Facebook your phone number is just not wise.
Good grief, I keep bloody repeating this. Do you people actually read anything?
> Although, if you're using Whatsapp at all you're either massively ignorant or stupid. I mean, giving Facebook your phone number is just not wise.
I'm a normal human being who values social contact and doesn't want to pester all my friends in using some other app, and a lot of businesses use WhatsApp here too.
I am neither "ignorant" nor "stupid". This is literally the worst of HN right here. Do you even listen to what people have to say and consider perspectives outside of your own?
Also, people who can't get in touch with you because you don't use some fad-of-the-year app are not your real friends. Tell them that you still use MySpace (wearing a Myspace T-shirt), or prefer WeChat (a billion of users can't be wrong), and see how it goes.
I'm in touch with many people, most of whom are not close friends. To break up a social contact just over this is too high a price to pay (and acquittances can be upgraded to close friends over the years, too, but not if you start by badgering them in to using some other app).
That said, I am considerably less concerned about Facebook having my phone number versus Facebook being able to mine all my conversations to create a pretty complete profile of who I am and what I do.
Lets not name call here. Many people have different motivations and concerns different than you. Most people likely already gave facebook their number, or someone else did for them through contact book sharing.
I just returned some IP cameras recently because of this.
Websites.
(Or same where the 2 phones are somewhat multiplexed on a single screen, preferably in hardware.)
I'd encourage more people here to purchase one, even if just to tinker with. There's so many "I'll buy one when it's ready" replies, but that may never happen if there's no money to fund the companies trying to make an alternative to Android/iOS.
Android is opensource, and is technically really great. There is a great opensource community of people that are very capable in this area, and supports already the vast majority of devices in the world.
You only need to get rid of Google. Which many custom Android provide. Personally my smartphone is a Pixel 5 (IMO best smartphone currently available that fit in a hand), running Android, without any Google application. I'm very happy with it, and from what I discussed with Pinephone users, it's lightyears more usable than what exists for Pinephone.
Android itself might be really good, but it's pretty obvious that deGoogled phones have a strong chance of being functionally useless in the future.
For push notifications, microg does fill the gap, so I'm not sure what you're talking about. UnifiedPush is coming to fill this gap without violating Google's ToC, with self-hosting, and fully FLOSS. Is anything like that coming to PinePhone or Librem?
The Google phone-home "features" can be removed, and this is exactly the point of this thread. Android is opensource, you can control this platform however you want, especially removing all connections to Google services.
I'm guessing what you're saying is that you installed some custom Android ROM, and expected it to remove any Google tracker, but that's a wrong assumption, most Android ROMs don't target deGoogling.
Even my AOSP GSI, with FLOSS variant doesn't target removing Google phone-home features. Why? I don't approve of any data collection on Google's DNS, AGPS, or generate 204, which means it is illegal for them to use it to track me without my consent, and I believe that they are not total outlaws. Running a DNS, AGPS, or even generate 204 reliable infrastructure is hard.
I'm running LineageOS without Play Services too and didn't about know this!
Do you have any reference materials (I guess getting busy with Wireshark and the source is my next step)? I found this Reddit thread[1] talking about a connectivity check but am keen to start tracking down any others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/5qnfxf/why_linea...
Their product line does not really inspire much faith. I can't say I've bought a device in the past 10 years which has dead pixels on the display. To me, this is a defect, given that I can pick up a device, overwrite Windows with Linux, and have a device without dead pixels.
How do you know if you're the target customer for a PinePhone? You read the 'dead pixels' warning and think 'I don't care... I want a Linux phone'. People who would find a couple dead pixels unacceptable would also likely find the features and functionality of it unacceptable as well. For months it couldn't take pictures or (reliably) make phone calls/text.[1] Now we can take poor quality pictures and have marginal phone functionality and think life is good! It's not that we're nuts (ok, maybe a little ;-) but rather that we accept this a long term process/effort and not something that will be even remotely perfect anytime soon.
[1] Hell, mine will never be able to reliably work with most USB-C chargers due to a hardware bug in the first iteration. Didn't care... I want a Linux phone! (and I'm too cheap to replace the board, I'll wait for a v2 to fix that and other issues)
Though of course as it is a much smaller venture, you can’t hound a sales rep until they accept to repair it nonetheless.
[0]https://www.fxtec.com/ [1]https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
I like mine, but the ancient CPU needs a serious upgrade. There's also the Librem 5, but it looks like they're heavily back ordered.
If this droid script equivalent were going to start reading my emails watching me through the camera, reading my clipboard, or tracking my real world location, I’d definitely want something that alerted me to that before it happened.
Android has supported permissions since at least Froyo (2010), and these permission requests were made on-demand/runtime rather than pre-install with Marshmallow (2015). So Droidscript would be unable to do any of those things (except reading the clipboard) until you explicitly granted those permissions to the app.
So just get serious about using alternate stores, which the platform fully lets you do (f-droid, amazon app store, whatever).
Overall I would agree, but I don't see how this specific example has anything to do with that sentiment.
You still have control of your device and can install DroidScript from APK or F-Droid, it was only removed from Play Store, Google's own store.
Obviously this is awful for DroidScript themselves, but you as a user didn't really lose any ownership over your phone due to this specific issue.
I don't really care what software is ran in my truck, as long as it works (And that's why I'll not buy a Tesla). It's a phone, use it to call text and guide and browse some internet. That's it.
For pure pocket sized computing, why not use RPi? It's both much cheaper, more customizable, and it runs Linux. With enough tweaking you can make it run completely headless, plug-and-run mini computer that you can ssh over local network.
I think the biggest problem with the combining idea is that computing in general is about productivity, and phone is about phone stuff.
With a Pencil and Procreate, it's really hard to beat for drawing and illustrating. With an external keyboard and some kind of stand writing is a joy, I like it better than on a proper computer because of a ton of little things that help me keep focused and because the device is so portable and doesn't have the laptop form factor with a permanently attached keyboard, with bluetooth periphery it's more like a wireless battery-powered external screen.
Light to medium spreadsheet work is also totally doable, and I've build dozens of slide decks in various apps, with hand-drawn illustrations.
I use a Pi as a mini server, but doing creative work on one, I can't imagine that to be as nice and slick as on the iPad. Last time I tried the PiOS desktop, it definitely wasn't.
Pinephone is basically a smarthpone shaped SBC, with much better software situation than rpi, and you can use it as such. I ssh into mine all the time. You can connect anything you like to it via USB hub, incl. the full keyboard and mouse. You can use bluetooth keyboard, and just do normal computing you'd do on your dekstop, etc.
Except for small display and lower performance there's no differnece.
I mean, exactly what recourse do you think you'll have once it stops working..?
You'll sell your not working truck (to who?) and buy a new one (that is also soft-locked because it was the only way to stay competitive?)?
Right to Repair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvVafMi0l68
Also, the software vended by traditional car companies are usually bound with hardware and readily replaceable if a reboot can't solve the problem.
Maybe it's time to call phones what they really are: pocket computers with a legacy voice call functionality that is increasingly irrelevant to anyone who isn't a Boomer.
Now, regarding the locked-down of both iOS and Android ecosystems, I can see both points of view. The majority of ordinary users need to be protected from increasingly sophisticated malware stealing their online banking credentials or other mischief, but power users also need to do whatever they want to do once they've signed a disclaimer
Sadly this requires mobile Internet prices to at least match voice call prices, which is not the case in many (developed or not) parts of the world.
I don't necessarily agree with this, because this is the direction that everything is moving towards.
It is so much cheaper to embed an SOC into everything that needs some form of automated/assisted control. Not necessarily a good thing, but that's what is going to happen regardless.
Your fridge can become a pocket computer with refrigerating capability - but you'll still see it as a fridge. It's really about how you see and utilize these items.
Only if you have huge pockets ;)
With that said your truck analogy isn't perfect. Your truck will last as long as you keep it going. That can be 20 years or more. It would be more like having a truck that the doors do not lock anymore after 2 years and you cannot fix that you must buy a new truck if you don't want thieves.
The difference from phones is that a phone is a computer, and as such it has computer's endless potential. For some it can be just a phone, sure. But many people want to use it as an extension of their mind, as knowledge management tool, as a creative tool, etc. The frustrating bit is that is many aspects phones are much nicer and better suited for such tasks than regular desktop computers (think portability, having cameras & sensors etc), yet because of these walled gardens it's much harder for a knowledgeable person to leverage this potential.
I use it for chat apps, phone calls (usually via chat apps), and occasionally wandering around Imgur when it would be socially awkward to not be on my phone.
The rest of the time I've come to appreciate being present in the moment.
So yeah, I'm looking at the new generation of Linux phones with interest. If I can run the chat apps in a browser OK, then I think it might work for me.
Related, if in a group, everybody else disengages to be engrossed in their phone, it can be helpful to do the same if one does not want to demonstrate a vulnerable dependency on the generosity of their attention.
A lot of awkwardness comes down to self-perception of vulnerability.
Though if everyone else is on their phone, and the crowd is large enough, I find it fascinating to people-watch.
I do find it useful to sometimes be absorbed in my phone and not aware of what's going on around me. Or at least to have that impression.
The point isn’t what you call it. OP’s point was and I agree that you don’t need to have full control over every device that can possibly run code. Just let it be a device that does its thing.
It’s the difference in people that want calm technology vs “power users”. I want the device to exist waiting on my input and even though I have deep knowledge of its internal systems and processes, I don’t care, I just want it to work, solve a problem for me, and I’ll put it away.
Go ahead and root your phone to do whatever actively complex thing you need... it’s a tool for me and I personally want the walled garden to prevent it from possibly not working when I need it.
I argue that if the device sends data to third parties over radio/internet and/or the manufacturer can remotely push updates that changes the devices behavior then users must have full control.
Something like that should become law.
Then manufacturers can keep devices locked down as long as they stay out of the surveillance game.
That's not how I read the op, who said "It's a phone, use it to call text and guide and browse some internet. That's it". The tone in that reads not like "you don't need to..." it reads like "you should not...", which I disagree with. I rarely use my phone to make calls. I use it as a multi-function tool of tremendous capability. If I wanted a simple flip phone, I would have bought one of those, instead.
I've read that Tesla abstracted all that with electric signals coming from a computer, now a proprietary software system sits between my legs input and the brake pads.
What if it goes wrong? You can try to convince me that it is an RTOS where signals from the brake pedal have the highest priority. And it seems to be that way, but I'd rather not.
I've dealt with enough computer problem to trust some onboard computer that can receive updates from the internet over how I brake.
Per mile driven Teslas are the safest vehicle on the road. The software helps ensure the safe operation of the vehicle. It’s really not that scary. The software is overlaid on a pretty standard vehicle aside from tue fact that it uses electric motors instead of an internal combustion engine.
Have you ever been on a plane?
But it does suck if there is no legitimate way to release an IDE targeted to run on a mobile device via the Google Play Store.
As with privacy (Facebook privacy settings, cookie boxes), it's easy to bamboozle the general public with complexity and then interpret their confusion and (violated) trust as consent.
Change your point a bit.
People are fine with giving up Freedom because they were never really Free in the first place.
Circular reasoning is sucha seductive fallacy because it'll fit any use case like a glove.
I may have the freedom to bash my neighbor's head with a rock, but they have the same freedom to do the same to me. This isn't as useful as the freedom to sleep at night, so we voluntarily give up this freedom.
Reframing to the topic at hand: if the freedom to mutate the code on my mobile device makes it more likely that I'll get pwned by some clever social-engineering than the odds I'll improve my quality of life by tweaking some behaviors on the phone, then it's entirely rational for me to give up that freedom. And, indeed, millions of phone purchasers annually make that decision.
... which is, unfortunately, a weakness of F-Droid's own making (for the right reasons!). Because they don't do stat-tracking on users, they don't have numbers. So Play Store is able to claim "1 billion active monthly users" (as of 2015) with some certainty, F-Droid can give an approximation and a shrug.
JavaScript is allowed on iOS and Android already. So if Goole or Apple do not allow you to run some scripting language you want then the reason is not security(the sandbox and permissions should be enough and if is not enough then it means the sand boxing is a lie).
"The average person is giving up nothing by losing the free speech, because they never were saying anything."
It's not like people didn't have the experience of using Internet-enabled devices without an app store equivalent in the nascent days of the Internet, where many options were good, a few would inject malware onto your system, but (most importantly) all of the options were equivalent and there wasn't a "correct" one to choose.
Don't make the mistake of assuming that people spend so much on Apple products for no reason. A major portion of the marketplace likes the lack of choice paralysis. The ability to run arbitrary code is one giant choice-paralysis engine. Google has found a good middle ground in selling a device that is basically configured as "safe by default, but here's the break-glass button if you want to run arbitrary code and maybe be more vulnerable to someone tricking you into root-kitting your own device," but their average customer would still rather never worry about the risk of rootkits and they have the data to know that.
If we are to be in the business of protecting the right to free(-as-in-speech) machines in the mobile ecosystem, we need to understand the average consumer that is paying the bill for that industry to exist, and asserting they just don't get it isn't how you start that process.
If a phone manufacturer started shipping Android phones without GApps and they got popular enough, developers would start being more careful with relying on Google Services. We saw this with Huawei - their phones are reall popular where I live and after tons of complaints from huawei users, a bunch of companies fixed their apps to gracefully handle the lack of Google Play Services.
I like what they are doing, but it is definitely not mainstream products.