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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

At the very minimum companies should be obliged to unlock the eol devices and provide the firmware of their components.

Many of the components could have a second life. The main camera for example of the the 2016 iPhone is still better that most webcams. One could use these salvaged sensors to build new hardware.

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They should but that also won’t solve the problem. No one is going to maintain a custom OS for ancient iPhones to a standard that makes them work with modern apps.

You can actually install Linux on these old phones, the technical restrictions are long since broken. But there is no funding to make something usable using this capability.

> You can actually install Linux on these old phones, the technical restrictions are long since broken. But there is no funding to make something usable using this capability.

I gave postmarketos a shot for 6 months or so, and sadly I have to agree that it's not ready for daily driving, even by experienced users.

This fairphone 4 on the other hand with lineage 20 looks like it will keep me going for a few more years.

There is an under appreciated world of difference between “booted Linux” and “I can use this as my only phone”. The community can manage the first one, they typically can’t do the second.

Postmarket OS is a cool project but I wouldn’t count on it ever being more than a neat way to tinker with obsolete devices.

To be clear, it could place calls and run a web browser on mobile data. The device was very much a phone.

It falls down (of course) at the larger list of secondary use cases many take for granted. For me it was mobile navigation, though it would also still hard crash noticeably often. I do expect the crashes at least to be fixed next time I look.

We already have LineageOS for phones, and it seems to work fairly well. Mfgrs providing specs/driver code/FW would make that effort much easier, and probably attract more volunteers too.

You don't have to maintain a custom OS. You just have to be allowed to run your own code, then you can just write a simple webcam app and never need to fiddle with it ever again. You'd probably be surprised at how many developers there are today that do in fact maintain custom software for older rooted iphones, and given that I'm sure a lot more devs would release and maintain even more software if every old iphone under the sun was fully open. Not just the few still on the lucky iOS versions that have a jailbreak released but isn't yet patched.

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