The PinePhone could bring the Linux mobile ecosystem to life
vice.com
vice.com
Theoretically, there could be an open platform like the PC (with usb + pcie + ATX case/power supply + etc..) with open interfaces. However the reason this came into existence was by microsoft's design to commoditize the hardware to drive software sales of its (closed) operating system.
With cellphones all of those interfaces are being subsumed so the trend is one chip + a display + a battery. The chip is IP of many vendors.
Additionally, the linux distributions have not had the highest performance. For example, frequently there is poor or no graphics acceleration.
I think Linux will always be behind commercial/proprietary platforms. One could arguably say that the iphone is a multi-billion dollar platform, with more careful engineering, development and tuning than any other device on the planet.
That said - I do believe linux based phones are nearing that "good enough" stage where dedicated users can make it work for them and people may at least have a choice.
One could have expected the same wrt. proprietary *NIX workstation and server hardware in the 1980s and 1990s, and where are those today? Linux is dominating that market. Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's. The underlying dynamic is clear enough.
Server hardware is of course commodity and dominated by Linux.
The high end workstation proprietary workstation market seems pretty alive and dominated but a closed Unix still.
> Embedded brings more trouble because the hardware, far from being a "multi billion dollar" endeavor, is all-too-often entirely undocumented and sloppily hacked together, where a barely workable state is considered "good enough" for shipping. But even there, Linux is easily gaining ground over proprietary OS's.
This is true of ‘embedded’ but phones are not embedded.
> The underlying dynamic is clear enough.
I think this is wishful thinking. Embedded and servers are quite different from phones and workstations.
Don't make the tail wag the dog.
IBM was in control of the hardware design and the rest of the ecosystem, heavily influenced by their previous work on the IBM System/23 DataMaster.
Microsoft just jumped on board for the expected lucrative ride, supplying a CP/M-like OS that they purchased from a local shop (SCP's QDOS).
IBM PC history:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/07/ibm-pc-history-part-...
Byte Magazine, Sept. 1990, "The Creation of the IBM PC"
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09/page/n451/...
here's another fun article: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
The IBM PC-compatible BIOS from Phoenix Technologies allowed more companies to jump in the PC clone wars.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-BIOS-for-a-computer-motherb...
the dumb thing of this whole situation is that 50% of the "commercial/proprietary platforms" in this market are android phones, still using Linux as kernel.
All software is "just plumbing". The shiny-shiny on top is the mere tip of the iceberg and not what makes everything, you know, actually work.
That's why GPL and AGPL exist.
(Personally I haven't been excited about a new phone feature since the S7's notification LED - and that apparently wasn't important enough to keep in newer versions).
while it is nice to have a powerful phone, it really doesn't need to be any more powerful than what is in a tv set.
I’d like to believe this, but if it were true, the Pinephone would be super responsive, and nobody would be complaining about iOS browser performance.
Couldn't get past your rewriting of history just to paint MS in bad light because you don't like them.
(To the degree I'd argue with the statement, it's that it was as much Intel's doing as Microsoft's; Andy Grove even dedicated part of one of his books to this.)
fun article:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
I think Joel is taking some liberties to push his narrative. Either that or he's regurgitating some nonsense barfed in his ear during his time at Microsoft in the 90s about how it was their plan all along. Microsoft wasn't being savvy with the way it licensed DOS to IBM, they didn't seen the coming reverse engineering of the BIOS. Quite simply, they didn't license DOS exclusively to IBM because they couldn't.
After licensing BASIC, IBM later approached Microsoft to source an OS in part because they had a deadline and because their failure to license CP/M was by virtue of the fact that they were IBM. Gary Kildall heard "IBM" and basically told them to get fucked. Microsoft became their Trojan horse to prevent another Kildall situation.
There's a lot of different stories about the origins of QDOS from Microsoft paying SCP to reverse engineer CP/M to QDOS containing CP/M source code. Regardless, Microsoft didn't have an exclusive license to QDOS when it re-licensed it to IBM. It wasn't a tactical move, Microsoft didn't provide IBM with an exclusive license of QDOS because at the time it simply wasn't there's to give. They managed to acquire ownership of QDOS from SCP prior to the PC launch but again that wasn't with the intent to commoditize computer hardware.
Post PC launch and COMPAQ clone, Microsoft wasn't fully at the helm either. IBM saw the error of their ways and sought to rectify it with PS/2 and MCA. If Microsoft had assumed control then IBM probably wouldn't have teamed up with them to build OS/2. Microsoft did however understand what OS/2 meant for their own bottom line and sought to subvert IBM. I would argue that up until the mid to late 90s, Microsoft was largely protecting it's own interest from IBM who was trying to wrangle back control of the PC market.
Again, Microsoft didn't design this. It wasn't their intent from the onset, the market fell into their lap and they fought off everyone else's attempts to take it away.
When the distros get good enough, they can price out higher end hardware.
That $100 Android phone is going to be carrier locked (subsidized by the carrier) and probably an older model where the R&D has already been paid-off, not an all new device. Once the Pine64 has been out for a few years, it's possible its price will drop to similarly competitive levels.
A major problem is that people almost always underestimate the difficulty of a good UI. Good UIs can be a lot harder than the rest of a system and a modern UI toolkit has a feature set and difficulty level approaching that of a good 3D game engine like Unity.
But I disagree because it is really rare to have a completely unified UI with Linux. We have separate applications for Gnome and KDE for most tasks. Sometimes one is better than the other, or one has a feature you need, but you have many different competing applications. If you want to use the “best”, you end up with a mix of different styles.
Or, if you want to use an office suite, Libre Office is a different style altogether!
So, you say KDE has a unified style. That’s great. But KDE != Linux. And Linux is never going to have a unified style. That’s just the nature of the beast. There isn’t one group out there that can make UI/UX decisions for all of Linux. No group that can set priorities and make decisions about what features stay and what can be removed.
But that’s okay. That’s the trade off we get when working with FOSS software. We get to make those decisions for ourselves. But it rarely results in a “unified” UX. Powerful, yes. unified? No.
I am interested to see how the new KDE/pine64 relationship plays out though. Hopefully it will be great. And maybe I’m just a bit pessimistic after the last time with Nokia/Qt.
I mean neither does Windows 10, which basically does a split between at least 3 different styles. Tacked on top of everything sits the metro post Windows 8 style, but is a toy UI for many aspects, click on a random setting and it is likely you will then encounter settings in the windows XP/7 style.
The third one is the older Windows XP style UIs, which you still encounter once you have to venture outside of regular user territory (registry editor and the like).
You can run a complete desktop on KDE and have a good, well-integrated experience. Maybe some people will try to tell you that Firefox would be a better browser or whatever, but as long as Konqueror is good enough for you then why do you care? (Personally I actually think it's significantly better, and a lot of the KOffice tools are better than their LibreOffice counterparts, but taking it as a given that there are "best" versions of some things that are not on KDE).
Maybe you value one particular tool that doesn't fit into your integrated desktop, but that's a common experience on other platforms as well. But if a unified UI is what you want, you absolutely can have that.
This isn't entirely true, because e.g. Gnome has been an enthusiastic adopter of all those anti-patterns. But, unlike other platforms, you still have other DE options to choose from.
Here's a secure channel: Dump your phone. There's no personal security with a device like that if you live in a state that might use your affiliations against you.
The difference being that the point of the PinePhone is that the whole stack, from the hardware up to everything software, is open source or runs on open source firmware.
The Anom was a completely closed-source solution which required a large amount of trust in a single entity. The Pinephone (and by extension every other Linux phone, whether it exists yet or not) leverages the strengths of the Linux community and is in no way comparable.
Looks interesting, what temperature can it reach?
edit for more information: all tests done with leaded solder.
Maybe the stable binary api of Fuchsia drivers will be usable on Linux with a wrapper, but that obviously won't be open enough for projects like the Librem5 (I'm not sure what is Pine64 position on binary drivers).
It's open source and it has a modern, secure capability architecture.
Running Linux binaries, not just source code, is a design goal of Fuchsia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26104667
In Fuchsia's model, you can run the latest OS with these vulnerable, non-updated drivers, or your device ODM could even release nothing and you don't have the GPLv2 to fall back on to get the Board Support Package for your hardware to build your own updates with.
1 - https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/8/22163225/google-fuchsia-o...
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueBorne_(security_vulnerabil...
I think having a sandboxed driver model is a great idea in general, but this will only encourage hardware manufacturers to care even less about supporting their drivers beyond the initial more-or-less-working release.
That requires a level of investment in engineering competence that they aren’t doing because there is little incentive.
How would you suggest changing that?
How do you create the incentive for it?
Also seizing source code at gunpoint seems antithetical to the notion of free software.
> How would the law define ‘support ends’?
Whenever the company refuses to fix security bugs.
Seizing property at gunpoint doesn’t seem related to this.
It also happens to solve some of the pain points with Android: in a way it is "Project Treble on steroids" aiming to resolve the issue with fragmentation and lack of long term support from Android chipsets and OEMs.
I agree that Fuchsia will become a problem going forwards, even if Fuchsia drivers can be reverse-engineered. It's also possible that phone hardware is commodified enough that google will be unable to lock us out, or that google abandons or delays the Fuchsia project.
What it is about android that allows you to do so is the copyleft license on the linux kernel. Chips can be locked down, and they generally are.
Either way, I was hinting at a possible liberation through the laptop/desktop/server ARM SoC market, which is certainly coming. I think x86 is “over”.
It doesn't prevent anyone from providing linux firmwares, but it takes away the reason they must do so.
Fuchsia, once it reaches the level of polish required of proper Google products, will be as closed as iOS. And security will be the justification for it.
For now. It doesn't yet have all of the proprietary bits added in, nor has it been shipped to OEM devices using mobile device hardware. Most of the proprietary Google bits of Android are proprietary by choice, there's no way Google is going to be any more open with Fuchsia.
Hopefully SoC vendors and IP vendors release the source for their device drivers.
Secure from what? One of the major risks in the mobile phone threat model is surveillance carried by the vendor, the OEM and so on.
Closed source drivers, OS components and apps are themselves the attack vector.
They’re excellent toys. Great effort to ship such a difficult product. But if your phone is going to struggle with running things besides terminal, it’s not going to be a great daily phone.
I’d love them to be on par with the latest Android flagships in terms of power. Cost is not an issue. I just want to be able to actually use Linux on a phone, rather than just run it.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Windows side of things. Windows 10x looked really promising on top of the Surface Neo, but both seem to be shelved. Now the closest alternative is handheld devices like the GPD Win 3, but that lacks LTE unfortunately. No ditching Android just yet.
For me, i need more than what the pinephone offers, but it doesn't need to have all the features of a high end phone. A decent processor and RAM would make the pinephone a lot more appealing just by itself.
if it was equivalent to a $300-$500 android phone, you still wouldn't have all the bells and whistles, but it would be a lot more viable for daily use.
The 3GB of the bigger model are enough for most users (LibreOffice or Firefox with several tabs open can run on a XFCE PC deskop with 2GB), but the CPU is indeed limited, and battery life is short. Admittedly just by optimizing the software they recently squeezed out a lot more compared to the first iterations of the software, however we're not there yet. I wonder if having a much beefier battery could allow the use of faster processors although not aimed at the mobile world. Personally I can't even keep in my hand a modern phone without it risking to fall, I find their thinness extremely uncomfortable, and would be thankful if producers made a full 1.5 - 2cm thick one with the additional space occupied by a decent battery.
I don't want to carry two devices, or have to reboot twice daily, so that I can still the weird 2FA app my employer uses. I wonder if the ideal endgame is a VM style model-- you have an Android VM that you give 2% of CPU to, just enough to keep that app alive, but normally spend your day in LumeOS or whatever your flavour is.
I think this (terminal) might be a key market segment to focus on, though. Lots of people are turned off by the colorful yet wasteful designs of modern smartphone apps. Third parties are never going to get anywhere trying to compete with Android or iOS. If you want buy-in, you have to target the people who want to leave the mobile app paradigm. This is either people who want all-in on web (Firefox OS) or people who want all-in on CLI (nothing really exists here except SSHing into a Linux VM).
It might honestly be pleasant to use a smartphone with a terminal-like interface if you can provide vim-esque keyboard shortcuts to accomplish complicated tasks, like creating content (documents / todos / calendar events / songs / photos / videos / websites / etc). It would only ever appear to power users, but those power users would become life long customers.
But the problem with $800 phones is people can't afford to buy them unless they're daily driver ready. At $150, you can buy it as a testing phone/a spare phone, and start building apps for it.
Windows Mobile was murdered first and foremost by the lack of wider support and a larger app ecosystem. Getting as many phones out there as possible is the key to avoiding this with Linux phones.
I feel like the phone respects me. It's a computer and when I decide that I want to do [X thing a computer can do] it lets me do that. It feels much better to struggle against real problems I can solve than it does to struggle against fake problems inflicted upon me by other people in order to extract value from me.
I would seriously much rather deal with "Which file do I pipe `1` into using a shell on a phone screen in order to turn on the flashlight LED?" than having to deny Google location tracking privileges for the millionth time because they will just keep asking me until I accidentally hit yes instead of no one day.
Minimalism/down-sizing is a lasting trend, I think quite a few people are fed up with being hooked to modernity’s love bombing and are up for making the phone a tool again.
Can't speak for the other distros, but Mobian/Phosh has reached a point where it's usable as a primary phone. Tons of work from the community has brought battery lifetimes up from ~1 hour to the point where it lasts me the day under normal use. Firefox is usable, and most every piece of software I need has a workable counterpart.
That said, the experience is still quirky (think c.a. 2000 linux on desktops). Most things work, but the final mile still requires a decent amount of poking at config files and trawling wikis. Doable, but not everyone's cup of tea.
(Posted from a pinephone)
Of course I could just have an Apple/Android phone sitting at home for such purposes, but it is definitely less convenient.
The phone app is effectively used as a hardware security token.
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-shadow-prison...
Great stuff. (No affiliation.) I need to dig into her other work. Apparently quite a bit of her other stuff is also available online for free.
But for banking there is absolutely nothing and bank in the EU requires a mobile phone app to unlock the account. I fear that the only way to solve that is at a political level but this probably also means something unreachable for now. This sucks.
[1]: https://invent.kde.org/network/tok [2]: https://invent.kde.org/network/neochat [3]: https://invent.kde.org/network/tokodon
Plus some apps I don't strictly have to use but I want to: WhatsApp (to use the web app I should run the android one somewhere it can receive messages with my phone number, cough), Telegram (probably OK), OSMAnd, NewPipe as a YouTube adless replacement (YouTube web is not OK), Google Street View and satellite maps (the web app is vastly worse), car sharing apps (less of that now), random apps from my customers.
All considered I'll have to carry an Android phone anyway so I'm carrying only an Android phone. No Linux phone. But I've been using Ubuntu as my only OS since 2009.
Actually, Invidious and the likes (viewtube?) are quite good for this. SponsorBlock even works there.
FreeTube makes the phone very hot and is very slow, unfortunately.
Something like NewPipe would be neat though.
> OSMAnd
Something like this is sorely missing. A-GPS isn't integrated in current distros too (a script can load AGPS data in the Phone's modem)
I really hope it'll work out, but we'll see.
I've heard binary distribution is a problem, with many overcomplicated methods like Appimage, Snap, and Flatpack. But it doesn't matter because linux users will prefer installing from source code or a trusted repository anyways. And they should: This is the more secure way of doing things. Closed source programs need not apply.
For me, 99% could easily be web-based, which makes "mobile web" the standard, and not necessarily "linux-phone."
Some can be operated via the web but they tend to require a hardware authentication token, which is as inconvenient as carrying a second phone (each bank requires a different token or card reader).
Some can be operated via the web but use their phone app as an authentication token for web access.
And some don't provide full functionality via the web at all.
Plus, the apps are way more convenient than logging in via the web in practice.
I opened a business account with an (at the time) exclusively mobile bank last year, because other banks took too long to authorize setup (they generally take weeks or even months), and I had a new company starting. I went with the only bank I knew where I could get set up within a few days to start taking revenue, as I had a client ready to pay from the start. It turns out that being mobile also meant they had a streamlined electronic setup process, and no visit to a branch during a pandemic. It still took a few days, as various people checked out my identity, read my LinkedIn profile to confirm what kind of business I was in, etc.
Last time I opened an account for a new company it took over a month and two in-person interviews, so the mobile bank was a big improvement.
Since then they have added web access as well, which is great, but use the phone as an authentication token, which is a bit annoying. It's not ideal, but neither are any other options I know about. Having to carry a separate physical token/reader around (or in practice, leave it at home and not have it when needed), as all the other business banks I've used require, is more annoying.
Not only is that unnecessary, it is also not practical as the entire purpose of Open Source is that if you do not like something you fork it and make it your own.
Linux on the Phone should absolutely avoid the Wall Garden draconian approach of iPhone and modern Android
Things like viewing your computer files from tablet or phone, or responding to text messages from your laptop, using your phone as a trackpad, etc.
That said, Snapdragon 845 is inching towards becoming a good general purpose Linux platform, with decent upstream support, and some phone platforms supported. Alas, like the rest of the Android ecosystem, only like 2% of the phones made with this chipset have unlocked bootloaders & will be able to be good long term devices that are well supported by mainline kernels. The rest of these devices are already running out the end of their support life, either no longer getting security updates or real soon about to end support.
I feel like once a device manufacturer no longer offers security support, then is when Right to Repair laws have a moral, ethical, legal obligation to step in & demand the bootloader be unlocked, so it's possible for owners to maintain their devices, given that the manufacturer wont.
I want a phone with a decently polished OS, smooth (given hardware constraints) that can run apps that I control (deny ads, location info. etc) and provides an alternative to the Android/IOS duopoly.
I just hope that the Pine Community will realize this and focus energy and work towards having a canonical OS on the PinePhone that just works.
Without millions of dollars in corporate support, hardware vendors like Pine64 and Linux on mobile developers need user support to make progress. If you want a performant Linux phone, put some skin in the game.
The reality is that this ain't going to happen. There will be never enough volunteer-based work to enable the level of effort that it requires to develop consumer devices like smartphones. Commercial actors have so much money and power, and people have bills to pay. This is something where full open source model just doesn't work.
One example of where the manpower just isn’t there for both Linux desktop and the PinePhone is a solid maps app. All solutions are little more than tech demos compared to OSMAnd on Android. Yes, OSMAnd itself has grown through contributions from the community, but it basically soaked up already what little manpower there is. There are other examples where running Android apps on the PinePhone under a compatibility layer is seen as a necessity to get around the PinePhone's lack of manpower.
For an overview of the current PinePhone app landscape I suggest a look at https://LINMOBapps.frama.io – contributions welcome!
[0] I recently brought back old posts to my blog https://linmob.net that I wrote 1.2 years after the G1’s initial US release.
After IBM intervention and their contribution to GNOME 40 - I'm not sure about suffering anymore.
So yeah, we need more players on mobile Linux field.
Everyone I know working on something PinePhone-related is concerned about the small size of the dev community.
(I'm not sure I agree, I just think that's the argument)
And things like Wayland and Mir and some desktops reinventing their own wheels all the time are/were seriously putting that into jeopardy.
The second issue, which I saw based on reviews alone was a very slow camera interface.
One surprise with PinePhone optimized distros is Ubuntu Touch (ubports). Not sure what type of magic they are on, but accelerate 1080p video in the browser and fluid mobile interfaces.
Check out the Short Circuit youtube channel for their PinePhone video. Watched it expecting to see just laggy interfaces, but ubports really takes it to the next level.
I can also confirm that the camera interface is slow. It takes like 30 seconds to dump a single image and render it into a jpeg. The main camera app is called "Megapixels". I'm not sure, but i've heard there are some paralellism changes coming downstream that may improve performance somewhat now that they have updated to gtk4.
But Palm Phone totally screws it up by marketing themselves as "companion phone" (your second mobile phone, why would I have 2 phones??) and the battery life is 5h (wtf is this??).
Other minimal phones focuses on calling, and guess what? 99% of my calls in the past few years were with spam.
Currently, there is absolutely no minimal small smart phone.
It ran quite well. Most apps worked fine. It was a little slow, but it almost never had problems. Typing aside, I'm surprised how reasonable it was, I used it as my only phone for a few days and I really had no complaints.
Small is good though.
I think it's like 5h max
Android and iOS devices are tools and platforms to gather data and use the consumer as a product more than anything else.
Break the slab like form factor and my addictive habits dropped, drastically. Break the app stores, and marketing and I got a lot more time back in my life.
I have a separate hotspot for internet, a tablet for internet access, a phone only simple communication with a 2GB plan and an offline GPS. The convergence of these is an optimized tool to farm the consumers.
I think this is an important point and one of the potential problems with the PinePhone - by having the same form factor as Android and iOS devices, it will end up being sucked into copying along with their designs the way the Linux desktop iterates towards MacOS.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I really do admire the project, but it's far from ready. It needs financing I know, but I don't like funding things for a subpar experience. I certainly do have excess cash to devote to these projects, but I have no recourse that they will get at the state I want it in in a reasonable time frame.
That all being said, I can't wait until this gets better.
You could donate, in the hope that donating will make it get better faster (or, depending on the amounts involved, you could get an agreement that they'll use the funds to work on the specific things you care about).
But you won't donate, because they still need orders of magnitude more funding than what you can provide? Well then you're going to be waiting longer. But then, you will donate once they're good enough, which is when they no longer need your extra funding to do the work?
Edit I think I figured it out after thinking about it further.
Let's say they're at e.g. 10% of the way to towards a usable device, and you could afford to donate enough to fund 10% progress. If you donate now, 20% usable is still useless and there's no visible difference in how long until it's 100%, but donating later when they're at 90%, if they ever get there, would "immediately" result in a useable device.
Also, hardware kill switches are useless — if you can’t trust the software to not listen to you than all is lost. Also, sound can be recorded through the motion sensors as well. And my all around point: Linux’s user space’s security is a joke. If it ever wants to grow out of the niche of 5 tech enthusiast, something should be done.
By comparison, the toolchain isn't so bad for Desktop, the copies are mature or experimenting in their own ways, and there's wine (Wayland is unfinished, but most users can still use X for now). Still Linux Desktop has a minute marketshare.
Once you'll get decent hardware performance a lot of devs will happily give up on their laptops and switch to mobile. And that will bring a lot of traction to software for mobile linux...
Android is open source. Android is already using linux. I really don't get it. I wish somebody could answer this question with convincing arguments, because writing another mobile OS doesn't seem like a trivial task.
So the first problem with that is that the work to remove their influence becomes progressively harder, and the bigger problem is that if you want to maintain app compatibility, you basically have to accept nearly everything Google decides to do as is... you can't really "just fork it" without losing the main perk of running Android: Running Android apps.
As it is, most Android apps won't work on a device without Google Play Services, because Google has pushed app developers year after year to switch from depending on Android platform APIs over to Google Play Services APIs for basic functions like location.
How so?
> you can't really "just fork it" without losing the main perk of running Android: Running Android apps.
> As it is, most Android apps won't work on a device without Google Play Services
Most, so you mean it's still possible to not depend on google play services. Although of course, app developers will always prefer the play store as it's the only way for them to make money in a reliable way.
> for basic functions like location.
What do you mean? All phone have GPS chips, they don't depend on google for that.
Even with all those problems, the main one being that app developers want to make money by participating to the ad ecosystem or with microtransactions, to me it doesn't seem like android is completely tied to the google ecosystem.
So, basically, an app has to import the location functionality it wants to use: android.location is such an API, and when Android first came out, most apps used it to get location information. However, most apps on Android now import Google Location Services instead from com.google.android.gms:play-services-location which only works on a Google-flavored Android device signed into a Google account.
If an app is written for the latter, it won't be able to work on a forked Android device, because the dependency it uses to get location information is missing, regardless of the presence of the physical GPS chip.
As an example, back when I had Android, I found I couldn't use Skype without having Play Services on the device. Even Microsoft, Google's direct competitor, didn't ship Android apps that would work without Google's proprietary components.
In many everyday instances, the phone won't quickly get a signal from GPS satellites, rather it relies on network-assisted GPS. Even the open-source Android distribution (AOSP) uses Google's servers. It used to be straightforward for phone owners to switch to a different location assistance service like Mozilla's just by installing from F-Droid and then changing a setting. However, in a subsequent Android version Google made a change to require location-assistance services to be installed as a system package, not a user package. That requires connecting to the phone over ADB and using the shell, which means that only a tiny, tiny minority of techies will ever do it. That is just one example of how, over time, Google has made design changes to Android to benefit itself at the expense of privacy and competition.
Bring on the real spec Linux phones with flagship CPU / ram / cameras. If only to act as a catalyst to improve the other platforms. But mostly so I can run What I Want (tm).
But first, the market needs to be tested. So, these early devices are a good idea.
Are they secure, and do they offer fine-grained permissions?
Of course, Sandstorm is built to present a cloud-like web app interface, not local desktop or mobile apps.
I still think personal servers are the eventual way to go, such that people's mobile devices they carry with them aren't the definitive location of lots of their valuable data.
It's available on Mobian and is shipped with hundreds of profiles for popular applications.
This got me thinking, how easy is it to find a replacement?
"My Other Phone is Pine64"
with what apps? cat, ls, htop?
pls moxie let me foss
axolotl is cute but it's not canonical, you know