Is there any development ongoing for a mobile OS that is not full of crap like Android, but not as restrictive as iOS?
Not sure if Windows Phone or PalmOS were like that, but those are both gone…
Never used PalmOS to comment.
I think third place these days is Tizen which is in a worse place than the two big ones for apps, and then fourth might genuinely be GNU/Linux but there's massive dropoffs between third and fourth, and between second and third.
It's available on a few devices (I have it running on a pinephone; also tried running on a galaxy 4 but got stuck in a boot loop). The wiki is a bit out of date, but there is an active community on their IRC [1].
iirc third place is KaiOS, a proprietary fork of the discontinued FirefoxOS [0]. It's primarily used on feature phones though. As for app support, an official youtube and whatsapp app are available on KaiOS.
Not trying to attack but can you explain what you mean with that?
There are at least 200 current android phone models and at least 50 popular flavours of android around.
Sure you don't find a stock Samsung phone feeling 'luxury' but even a cheap Xiaomi with cleaned up stock android feels 'luxury' to me.
android is not full of crap if it doesnt come preloaded with it. the google apps , which you can download are pretty great and the interface can be replaced with another launcher. The app selection in the stores seems identical to me
Frankly - I don't like Apple or Google, and I'm damned tired of being sold hardware that has software locks I'm not given a key to (And at least in this case, Google is better - so I'm still on android hardware for now).
But what I really want is a linux phone at this point. Google had exactly the same reputation 20 years ago that Apple has now (height of the "do no evil" stage). It turns out that companies literally cannot help themselves.
So just like I've moved almost exclusively to linux on non-work computers, I plan to move exclusively to a free OS on my phone hardware. Right now that's un-googled forks of android, but I genuinely hope to see usable phones running on debian/arch/etc in the very near future. We're tantalizingly close with things like the pinephone pro, and the librem.
I was able to use the non-pro pinephone as a daily driver for a bit, and it worked, but not well. And despite sounding negative - that's frankly a huge jump from where we were 5 years ago when a working linux phone (in any shape) was mostly a pipe-dream. I think there's a lot of interest in this area right now.
which distro were you running on the pinephone? If you haven't tried out PureOS yet, I'd recommend giving it a shot. The Phosh UI has improved a lot, firefox is now installed by default and scales well, and a lot of usability issues have been fixed. For some workloads, its actually works pretty well as a daily driver.
At the time (about 10 months ago) it was the most solid I could find. I'm a little out of date at this point, but I'll probably check back in on it some time in the next few months.
And I agree - even at the time it was a usable phone. A tad slow for my tastes, but hard to argue with the performance given the low cost of the hardware.