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Comment by eldaisfish | Hacker News Reader

I would pay for a mobile operating system that was not from Google or Apple and that i could install with one click. Before someone recommends Android ROMs, that's too complicated for most people and i don't have the patience or time to dig through forum posts for the solutions to bugs.

I avoid google where i can and this includes their mobile operating system. I despise apple because of their design choices that prevent you from doing even the simplest tasks.

An easily installed alternative would be great.

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Then you'd need to first pay for a phone that isn't bootlocked to a certain OS. Not many phones are.

Once your Android phone is boot-unlocked, it's actually pretty straightforward to flash a LineageOS rom. It could be streamlined, sure, but since the hard part is unlocking and tends to require some tech skills, not many need the flashing to be any simpler than it is.

This is highly dependent on where you live. For example there are pretty much no bootlocked phones in Finland

Are you sure you're not referring to simlock? If not, is that mandated by law in Finland?

Google Pixel line is, funny enough, not boot-locked. And it offers quite decent hardware. Being build for Googles non-bloatware versions of Android the Pixel phones also offer a high degree of compatibility with de-googled versions of Android out there.

Hmm, I surely had to unlock my Pixels; get a nice big fat warning on every boot too. Don't remember how exactly though.

Because it's also for developers.

Are there actually (current, available, lineage-supported(1)) COTS phones, where you can add your own signing keys, and then re-lock the boot-loader? With mainline/non_ancient Linux kernel?

Because without that, aren't all (modded to unlocked_boot-loader) Android devices susceptible to an Evil-Maid attack? Even if the device/user uses FDE, the evil maid could just spoof the key-entry frontend, no?

(1) or whatever other ALT-Android/Linux FW.

> Are there actually (current, available, lineage-supported(1)) COTS phones, where you can add your own signing keys, and then re-lock the boot-loader? With mainline/non_ancient Linux kernel?

You may want to check out https://grapheneos.org/

Only supports the Pixel devices, no?

`fastboot flashing lock` is available on some phones, but is there a comprehensive list somewhere of devices, where you can freely/add remove signing keys?

While not one click, GrapheneOS is fairly easy to install (series of clicks on the phone and a web page), and does not require digging through forum posts.

However, it is based on AOSP and only supports relatively recent Pixel phones. Also, like all non-Android/non-iOS phones, some apps may or may not work on it. Depending on your phone use case, this may or may not be acceptable.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://pine64.org/pinephone.

> I would pay

But no one else would. You won't get the same level of support, features, or app compatibility unless you're willing to pay the salary of those who will make it possible, or you're able to find a niche group of people (eg. a million developers) to split the cost of making this possible. The OS duopoly is only a thing because making a functional & useful mobile operating system takes a enormous amount of human effort by some of the most skilled people in their fields.

And yet the base OS of Android is made by volunteers ;)

How much of it is volunteer work nowadays?

I paid for Symbian and Windows Phone as long as I could, it did not help.

To be fair, Windows Phone would have - inevitably - eventually had the same issues.

For God's sakes, I saw a post yesterday about ads within File Explorer on Windows, it's nuts.

I'm very happy with my Fairphone 3+ bought here:

https://esolutions.shop/

They sell mobiles with /e/OS preinstalled, which is their privacy enhanced version of LineageOS (Android).

I looked into Fairphone, but their current offering — Fairphone 4 — seems to have persistent issues with the camera quality, and no official LineageOS build either.

It really bums me out. I need a smartphone that will run Android apps, because the duopoly is not going anywhere and governments and banks are pushing hard to use theirs, but also because there is no way around WhatsApp here in the Netherlands if I want to give my young son a chance at going to play dates and stuff.¹ I also like Fairphone's more ethical hardware side, but their offering just falls short a bit at the moment. Am I missing something here?

1: Personally, I'm fine without apps, and would much prefer to have a phone that does what Linux does for me on the desktop, but I'm not an island.

WhatsApp works fine on /e/OS, its even easily installable from their appstore! As are loads of other apps.

Including banking and government ID apps only spread though official app stores?

You’re in luck!

https://sailfishos.org/

> that i could install with one click

Come on, there isn't even a button "install" on the sailfish website. You certainly have to go through the "developers" menu, but even there, it's not clear where to go to install it.

It does not fit att all the requirements

I think you're the one with unrealistic expectations here. There's quite literally no way for you to install another OS with one click; even if you do have a device that allows you to flash other OSes to it, you have to unlock the bootloader and -- oops! That's your one click.

OP means it figuratively. Amazon's "one click" checkout isn't actually just one click, it's a metaphor for how simple they're going to make it for you to buy the item. Similarly, a "one click" install of another OS should be taken to mean "dead simple to install" instead. You're welcome to debate how easy it is to install Sailfish OS on those grounds, but if we're being pedantic then there's quite literally no solutions that actually fit the parent's description.

One click really was one click. They had all the payment and address info shared. You just clicked one button. They did have an undo.

If you could click one button on a website and override your entire OS, malware makers would have a field day with it.

Such things sound cool but are untenable in the real world. Microsoft used to have downloadable binaries on websites (ActiveX) and that showed what a stupid idea it was :) There's a reason internet explorer has such a bad name.

You have to grant webUSB permission and enable OEM unlocking on your Pixel, but GrapheneOS can be installed from a website: https://grapheneos.org/install/web

It is arguably easier than installing windows on a laptop (if you were someone who had done neither before), since it is just a few buttons to press.

I just read their install instructions and there are over 20 steps to follow.

Technically, Sailfish is what you're asking for, though it's a little bit niche, Europe-focused, and only supported on specific Sony devices: https://sailfishos.org

> I despise apple because of their design choices that prevent you from doing even the simplest tasks.

That seems a little dramatic. I'm quite sure that iPhone owners are able to complete "simple tasks."

I'd recommend trying a device with a recent iOS version, giving it a chance, and seeing if that opinion still rings true. The iPhone as a platform is a lot more open and flexible than it used to be.

I switched from Android in 2016, and the most shocking thing about it was just how much of the experience is essentially identical to Android. Apple and Google have been borrowing identical features from each other for quite some time now.

If you last tried iOS back when Steve Jobs was alive, you might think that all of these things couldn't be done on iOS:

- Install full browser extensions (introduced in iOS 15)

- Integrate with 3rd party password managers (iOS 12)

- Change default browser, email apps. (Default navigation app still can't be changed, sadly.)

- Removing icons from the home screen without uninstalling the app (iOS 15)

- Adding widgets to your home screen (iOS 14)

- Use an alternate keyboard (iOS 12)

- Tell Siri to play a song in Spotify or other third party services

- Use third party communication, navigation, and music services with CarPlay (Spotify even adds a custom UI element for its favorite button)

- Play videos with Picture-in-Picture

- Cast to Chromecast and other non-Apple casting devices (app-dependent, but you can always use the Chrome browser, YouTube, and Spotify apps to cast that way)

- NFC is no longer locked down

Really, the only difference between Apple and Google is that their business interests are aligned in a slightly different way. They're both restrictive when it comes to features that threaten their business model.

I agree with you that we should have more/better alternatives, or at the very least more consumer protections and restrictions on Apple and Google's duopoly.

I know you said no Android roms, but GrapheneOS can be installed from a website over webUSB in just a couple steps. It's as simple as enabling OEM unlocking and clicking install - just make sure you have a supported non-carrier variant Pixel.

That's the closest you're going to get to "install with one click". There is no preinstalled Google spyware or bloat

The problem is not the operating system itself, the problem is the secrecy of the manufacturers and the complete lack of standardization in the ARM environment. It's trivial to make a (tiny) operating system for PCs as all the early initialization is done by the BIOS/UEFI and the interface that calls the OS from there is clearly defined. And in theory you don't even need to write hardware-specific drivers for basic system functionality - video, storage access, mouse and keyboard are all abstracted by the BIOS/UEFI. If you want, you can write a "hello world"-capable "OS" in a day or two - it's about 20 lines of ASM code [1] that you put onto an USB stick and that's it.

For ARM, everyone ships their own bootloader that has certain expectations on the hardware built-in (especially flash layout), there are no standards at all that serve as some sort of fallback... it's an utter wild west. And Google seems for whatever reason very reluctant to force the manufacturers as part of the Google Services license to adhere to at least some standards (=following the open source mandate for the kernel and other GPL-licensed parts, publishing device trees, allowing access for people to flash their own OS).

As a result, to even get started on ARM you need at the very least information from the platform vendor how memory is structured, where to place the image, how to flash it, how to bring up CPU cores... and that's only going to give you a serial port at best. You then need to develop at least basic functionality to initialize the graphics processor, and only then the user can actually see something.

[1]: http://mikeos.sourceforge.net/write-your-own-os.html

I still want to read up more on the subject, but I was under the impression, that the EFI-support in U-Boot was/is supposed to remove most pain-points from the above list of valid points.

The boot-sequence (I thought) that is becoming the new "standard" is: B1 ... U-Boot -> grub-arm-efi -> whatever_OS.

That applies for ARM-based appliances which in most if not all cases run U-Boot... the problem is, in literally every appliance whose firmware I touched for one or the other reason the respective fork of U-Boot was extremely old, and the vendors did not publish the sources at all or lacking the configuration used.

In the mobile sector, most don't ship u-boot but some other bootloader, in this case mostly because u-boot doesn't support GUI operation/output which is vital for a phone.

LineageOS without Google Services/gapps is pretty nice... I only miss Google Maps.

Copperhead os? Not cheap.

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