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Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

With android termux you can install e.g. django/wagtail and take it from there.

In a sense these projects prove the obvious yet hidden-in-plain-sight: the vast numbers of mobile computing devices that have circulated since the "iPhone moment" could be reconfigured in all sort of ways to be more than a dumb touch screen client for scrolling down social media pages.

If we ever get to see a true open mobile OS there might be a Cambrian explosion of new applications and use cases. Not holding my breath though. The failure of open source mobile to reach a workable stage is now pretty clear. It seems this domain is TITO (too important to open).

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I ran small POC as you mentioned earlier and it worked well.

https://avilpage.com/2018/02/deploy-django-web-app-android.h...

> If we ever get to see a true open mobile OS

PinePhone and Librem 5 are already here, both running various GNU/Linux flavors.

fingers crossed that they get traction but lets face it somehow the economics is stacked against these projects (there was also firefox OS which I once owned and ubuntu touch etc.)

after all the effort of the communities and companies involved, 0.1% adoption of something so differentating as an open source phone is "not normal"

even if you consider this delusional idealism we are not that few :-)

It doesn't need to be popular for you to use it.

TITO? Blah.

Lots of phones are open enough to install lots of things on. My daily phone has lineageos (I'm using it), which is an existence proof that you can run a kernel of your choice and userland of your choice, and my previous one had something called treble, which I didn't look into but also involved supplying your own kernel and userland.

If you have the ability to run a kernel and userland of your choice, what can't you do? I know something you can't do: applications that require much electric power. And something else: applications that require many people (or even everyone) to run the same software. But really, if there were to be some sort of cambrian explosion it ought to show up on my daily phone or one of the many similar ones.

you need critical mass for things to happen. for critical mass you need a reasonably open migration channel. for that you need a combination of device manufacturers and open source communities to make it easy to drift in and out from this space (the dual-boot equivalent)

So... we need critical mass without early adopters, because the things to invent will be created only after critical mass is reached? I think you're just inventing excuses: "There would be a Cambrian explosion of new uses cases, were it not for (excuse goes here)".

> the things to invent will be created only after critical mass is reached

yes, what is so strange about this? Lets check some numbers [1]. Total active installs on the planet: 4 mln. So something like three orders of magnitude less than existing mobile devices in use. Further, there is large dispersion geographically. The majority (when country is known) in China while Vietnam is next. 200K devices in the US. 160K in Germany.

Next, there is a tiny number (< 4000) of open source android apps [2].

The idea that this miniscule ecosystem has explored everything there is to explore is just bizarre. Breakthroughs that change people's perception of what role a platform can play are not just there for the plucking. You need trial-and-error, feedback, iterations etc.

> you're just inventing excuses

I think you are just bragging ("If I could do it, why don't you").

If you want to continue arguing you need to adress my dual-booting point. Would linux ever get anywhere if you could not dual-boot on Wintel?

[1] https://www.lineageoslog.com/statistics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid

I was an early adopter of linux; single-boot in August 1992. Not because of anything that would happen only after some future threshold, but because it was worthwhile for me when I did it, at the time. The motivation was in the present, not in the far future.

So I'm an early adopter. </bragging> So what. I still say that the advantages are described in vague terms like "cambrian explosion" and are supposed to arrive much later, that means those advantages don't exist.

EDIT: Actually, let me put that differently. If you posit something impossible, then any consequence is possible: If pigs have wings, then anything is possible. The consequence ("cambrian explosion of uses" or whatever) are meaningless if they depend on an impossible condition. So it's necessary to show that the condition isn't impossible, see? So what could the possible but currently unmet condition be? I'm sure it's not an unwillingness to produce a phone that'll sell to 10% more users than the last phone. Your other part was the existence of an open source community. There is one that serves the current users, what's stopping the next 10% of growth? What I'm saying is that they have to be install because of current reason, not because of a future Cambrian explosion. So name it or argue that it plausibly exists. Naming only something vague in the distant future is tantamount to saying that it doesn't exist.

> which is an existence proof that you can run a kernel of your choice and userland of your choice

Isn't LineageOS dependent on the original kernel of the phone for blobs? My understanding is that the device specific downloadable versions have just already had that RE work done for you instead of requiring you to do it.

So many possibilities have been crushed.

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