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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

It’s sad that no phone maker is playing the open and standard platform game. A brand like Asus would have everything to win with this : they already are recognized as a « geek » brand, they could ship updates with no effort and they could get free marketing from the word to mouth of the « geek of the family ».

Instead of that, like any other Android manufacturer in the market, they ship great hardware with shitty or soon-to-be shitty software that will make your premium phone worse than the next Chinese phone.

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Critical phone components (or rather, their drivers and/or firmware) are not open however. I would like a platform with x86-level standardization but competitive power efficiency a lot. I don’t see it happening though. It’s not down to the phone makers, but to the component suppliers—like Qualcomm.

I'm seriously looking into Sailfish and, by implication, a Sony Experia for my next phone.

Sailfish is interesting, but depending on what you do on your phone, you may find it an inappropriate choice of daily-driver. Just like a PinePhone is interesting with trying different Linux distros, ultimately you will very likely realize that you need battery life, reliability and to stop farting around with your phone actually working and get on with your everyday life.

> Critical phone components (or rather, their drivers and/or firmware) are not open however.

They are either open or isolated in Librem 5.

Librem 5 is much more expensive, too. And the performance isn't even comparable.

It's not viable for a company like ASUS to go for the same approach. And not many consumers would buy them, either.

Android manufacturers, unlike Apple, don't really earn much via the software - so there is really no reason for costly updates which keeps the customers from buying the next phone..

It's unfortunate that lack of updates don't prevent customers from buying the current phone.

It feels like we need consumer protection laws that require companies to prominently advertise the software "warranty". So Google and Apple can put "5 years" on the box and Asus needs to put "0 days". The problem is that it isn't something that most people think about. But when you point it out to them it definitely changes how they evaluate phones when you show them that this one will be dangerously insecure after 1y but this other one is good for 3y.

Sony has an open devices program where some models end up a year or so after their release. Jolla uses this program to make Sailfish releases tuned for select models.

I think it's hard to have easy open-source support by default as ARM hardware needs a model specific device tree and some of the required software might not be fully open.

Asus might not own either all software or rights to release a fully open model themselves, even if they'd like the idea.

> It’s sad that no phone maker is playing the open and standard platform game.

How about this one: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5?

by 'phone maker', GP probably meant something that normal people can use and not terribly overpriced for the value it provides.

I don't think it needs to be fully open source. Its fine if its even kernel + blobs too.

Since I have choose to use CalyxOS/any privacy focused ROM, I have been locked to pixels, because all the others have some crap in the system that devs don't want to deal with.

The niche brands fall into this, like Fairphone (have one and love it, also for the modularity guarantee of 5 years of OS updates!) or Swiftphone, which very much encourage use of alternative OS.

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