I give up on free software phones (2019)
yotam.net
yotam.net
I'm willing to compromise a lot in order to go with the free software approach, but my god, just do better. There's no excuse for how un-functional this thing is. Try harder.
I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago. At least that one shipped sooner though.
it simply cannot be permitted. somebody realized PC market/platform made a huge "mistake", letting anybody make software for them and permitting random hardware. this 'mistake' was avoided on smartphones for very pointed, clear, intentions of social control.
there exists NO homebrew smartphone hardware like for PCs.
Heck, you’d think people on hacker news would be all over open source alternatives to proprietary hardware, software, and services. Yet take a brief wander over to one of the many (many) recent Reddit crisis threads and you’ll find countless naysayers talking about how lemmy and the like will never succeed, despite gaining hundreds of thousands of users in a week and a half.
how could lack of demand be made to happen?
but I'm not trying to imply anything. I merely wonder if such a thing (to create or destroy demand of something) is possible; and if it were, how would you do it?
surely it involves marketing? but I also want to reflect on the market cap of convenience...
For an open phone to be truly successful, it has to be better for its users, and in a way that's worth shifting ecosystems for.
Yes, every PinePhone thread has people posting that it's unusable because it's not as good as a flagship iPhone or Android. Or the usual "not ready to be a daily driver" ... because the definition of "daily driver" is apparently a constant of the universe written by God so everyone is expected to have the same one. Meanwhile I've been "daily-driving" my PP for two years at this point because calls, SMS, voicemail, Firefox and the camera work well enough.
I have quite a bunch of pine64 devices, but after I saw these interactions, I didn't even dare to ask anything nor to interact with them on any level.
Install the OSS firmware. Quectel firmware is shitty. For me the OSS firmware doesn't crash at all, though I've heard other people say it still crashes for them once a day or so (?). In any case eg25-m will bring it back so it won't be "unusable".
>"if you don't like it, go away. we are happy with it as it is, there is no solution, and you shouldn't be seeking one. you are bad person for even asking. pine* is not made by apple/samsung, you can't expect it to do things".
You only get these responses if you reveal yourself as someone who didn't read the warning labels before buying the hardware and/or if you act entitled to a solution, as AndyKelley did in this thread. We indeed do not have any patience for someone who comes in and says "It's complete trash. The software is shit, the battery is shit, it's expensive, low specs, completely unusable."
I won't try to convince anyone about the (un)friendliness of the community. If you enjoy its current state, good for you. I, for one, avoid it. I guess everyone can decide what community they want to participate.
While GP's language was definitely coarse, he does make some point. Personally I'm in for the hacking, I care relatively little for other people's (userspace-) software on these devices. But I do see a lot of sentiments around the web saying things like "look how good phosh/kde/XYZ is running on the PP, wow, such speed, many responsiveness" - even though it is objectively not running good when tried in person. Such statements can definitely trick users who just want a novelty phone - they read these reviews, and think that finally there is a viable alternative.
(Disclaimer: while I'm not a fan of some aspects like userspace sw and community, I'm a big fan of most Pine64 hardware, and I not only don't regret any cent I spent with them, I plan to throw more money at them.)
Either you're saying those reviews are lying / wrong, in which case the problem is not the product but the reviews, or you're saying those reviews are accurate but don't reflect the use case of the buyer for whatever reason, in which case it's not the problem of the product nor the reviews.
In my very first comment I said that he was welcome to come onto the IRC etc and ask if the phone can do X, Y, Z that he needs it to do, and he would've gotten an honest answer for that. You've decided that you don't even want to do that because you've been soured from the community for whatever reason, and frankly I don't care to convince you otherwise.
In the same way, AndyKelley spending a $1000+ without doing the research and then whining about it is his loss, not mine. Even in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36414414 he's still going on about "The issue with librem is that they [Purism] put very little effort into the basic user experience of the software." because he thinks it's an iPhone or Android that only has one choice of OS or UI.
Locked down platforms without user freedom are a goldmine
Judging by consumer behavior it appears that ease of use is more important than virtually any other concern.
People who really care about things like privacy and freedom are too few in number to tilt the market, and this is compounded by the fact that as a rule FOSS people don’t pay for things. So the market here is a small number of cheapskates.
The people I care about are the power users, the posters, the creators. People put effort into building communities. Those folks are very few in number but extremely important. They can create a community anywhere they go.
They’re also willing to put in effort to begin with so it’s generally easier to get them to move to lemmy when the experience may not be as polished.
Mobile software is far harder and more costly to produce than desktop because the small form factor and rapid casual use cases mean there can be zero tolerance for bad UX. The amount of effort that goes into just getting things like touch keyboard and touch gestures just right is monumental. The tolerances are very tight.
PCs with big screens and keyboards can support I/O paradigms that are much less demanding of perfection or require much less polish to make usable. A PC can just put some buttons on the screen or use a command line and that works fine. A phone UI needs obsession.
Modern phones are probably the most advanced products humanity has ever produced.
Keep the GUI as simple as possible with the smallest number of options and features as possible and focus more on perfecting what is there. Ship a more minimal better polished product. If you don’t have the resources to perfect it, drop it.
Make anything more custom or advanced configurable via ssh, but make the core features entirely usable without doing that. At first you might not even have an App Store, just a CLI package manager you can access from a PC with ssh.
It’d basically be a hackable minimalist phone. Someone who just wants a privacy oriented minimal phone could use it as is and power users could ssh in and hack on it.
We may as well be talking about an open source, community developed trip to the moon. There are no viable intermediary steps. You either have billions of dollars to find it, or you can't do it.
If you only care about a portable hackable device, the steamdeck is probably the product for you.
In other words Apple could outspend a member of the EU. I don't think a crowd-sourced community project can match that.
Considering how many desktop linux distros fall down with this, you may be expecting too much of your beta-level phones. It's been years, yes, but power management isn't exactly easy. Just look at how bad Linux laptops were even just a few years ago - hell, look at how long it took the multinational mega-corporation to get Android's background power consumption down. It was so bad people on XDA set Tasker to turn off BT, location, and even wifi when not in use.
You're right, FLOSS phones currently aren't good. But they finally exist, and that's enough for me to be excited about
Also people forget that android is still FLOSS. You don't need to be running upstream/mainline linux to be FLOSS. It's mentioned kinda off hand as "oh well running android without google sucks" in the article but graphene OS has proven that you can get a very pleasant, well ironed, and secure/hardened user oriented phone while using FLOSS for basically everything except some firmware level blobs for high end phones. And FDroid proves that we can have 90-95% of all the quality apps we could need without even installing anything google dependent (even FCM push notifications which were historically limiting can be replaced with unifiedpush) That experience contrasts with the "FLOSS phones" like the librem or pine phone which show that you can get most if not all of the hardware working without firmware blobs even if the software up the stack sucks.
So what is stopping us from just starting with one of the generic AOSP targets for graphene os and focusing it for one of these FLOSS targets?
Do we just not have the specs in the hardware with decent FLOSS support? If that's the case, doesn't that mean we are quite literally steps from the finish line?
My other question was, why the first iPhone is significantly faster than a recent PinePhone.
Also FOSS GPU support depending on what device/SOC you have really varies. So weak GPU support can end up handicapping the experience.
Personally I'd like to mess with an android pinephone pro (not the stock "linux with android containers") but I'm not willing to foot the bill to set one up to play with.
Was it bad early on? I seem to recall even the original Nexus One would last all day on one charge.
By contrast the Librem barely lasts 4 hours, rendering it completely useless as a phone.
>I had the same reaction with the pine phone a couple years ago.
Anyone who writes "the software" like you and TheAceOfHearts did, as if it's an iPhone or Android, doesn't understand the first thing about a Linux phone. Please resell them to someone that's less PEBKAC than you. Thanks. They'll appreciate it.
And in the future I recommend asking people who have them before you buy them, so that you know ahead of time not to keep these phones from going to people who will make better use of them. For example, we in the PinePhone IRC channel will happily listen to what you want from the phone and tell you whether the phone meets those requirements or not.
It's okay. Really. Not everything has to be for everyone, and evidently Linux phones are not for you. Please don't buy them. Thanks.
And as for the PP the manufacturer has always been very explicit about it:
https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...
>Beta Edition PinePhones are aimed solely at early adopters. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience.
And yet here you are hectoring the plebs, putting us in our place. It sure seems like you care, because if you didn't you would have kept quiet and got on with the good life.
It feels like as soon as the community is moving in the right direction, the entire state of technology has moved on to something else and they are constantly trying to realign.
No really. Best phone I've ever owned. Better than apple or android. It's loss was immense.
It's just a good phone which happens to run Linux, not a mediocre phone hyped because it is one of the few Linux options available.
Maemo was gtk+ based and many Gnome applications ran really nicely. Eg Gnumeric was great. The desktop dev environment worked so you could port or write stuff from scratch then load it onto your phone. apt-get worked - apt was the app store iirc.
But who cares that stuff?
It was as slick and nice a user interface as the then recently released iphone! No really, I'm not making that up. Fold-out keyboard was terrific too. Way, way ahead of android at that time and arguably still. From memory the touchscreen on the iphone was better but nothing else was.
Microsoft bought nokia and killed it. Nothing has been as good since.
Only the Java/Kotlin userspace and the small set of NDK libraries are considered official and stable.
Anyone that ventures outside this path and isn't an OEM doing their own Android distribution, is on their own if the application actually works at all when deployed via the PlayStore, as the Termux guys eventually found out.
> It is currently in a usable state with support for various targets such as the N900, Motorola Droid 4 and the PinePhone.
Neat!
The N900 was my dream device, and the prototype of the latest model still is on eBay for ridiculous price ranges.
I wish the pinephone would be exactly like the N900, but with better CPU specs.
I would, on the other hand, leave the CPU as it is, and welcome any change to battery life. That's the only factor preventing me from using one as a daily driver.
Looking at the comparison[1], it looks like the N9 was a bit more advanced, but it lacked the keyboard the N900 had. At least I also had a N97 :)
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=3398&idPhone2...
All my horses on this being the #1 reason why Microsoft panicked and pushed Nokia into a partnership that ultimately forced Nokia to sell its mobile business to Microsoft, which of course meant the end of Linux in those devices.
But I didn’t really care. No calculator? No problem, I just fired up Vim while I was bored in class and wrote my own. Contacts book would crash? Again, a simple program I wrote let me quickly grep through a CSV file and add/update/call people.
It was such a joy to use I would carry it around even though I ended up using an iPhone as my daily driver.
Based on those hypes, Purism probably thought they can just create a phone for hackers first... and never realized the reality that even hackers loves consumer products. Just take a look on how many hackers owns a MacBook as their main driver despite the existence of many good Linux laptops. People are hiding some truths here, and they wanted a smart businessman to figure it out.
As one of the hypered, I'm sorry, Purism. This is the baseline that I actually wanted from a handheld device:
- Runs open source Android and Linux without bug, maybe also iOS;
- Powerful, as least 8GB of RAM and a relatively fast CPU;
- Big swappable battery, 4~6 hours continue use without a re-charge;
- But most importantly, INexpensive, at least not far more expensive than their consumer counterpart;
- Then you can start thinking about ergonomics, self-serving ability, usability and extensibility (builtin keyboard, swappable modem etc)
I should have listed all this clearly in my hype post...
Apple silicon is becoming one of the best options for Linux
Do you have a source for this? This sounds a bit hard to believe, and I can't find a source. The sources I found show that within Steam installations, Steam Deck users are a significant share, but not the majority [0]
[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/06/steam-deck-already-hit...
It probably isn't, but the fact that it seems like a possibility isn't a great sign!
A small consolation may be the fact that not all the software development effort we’ve paid for is lost. On the contrary, the work Purism has done both in userspace and kernel have immense value. One day, another Linux-based phone will appear, and it’s going to stand on the shoulders of what Purism did. It’s never going to be perfect, or even nearly as polished as the duopoly UX we’re accustomed to. But it’s going to be good enough, no matter if Purism will even be around by then.
Also, the software for our Librems will only become better with time, as annoyances are ironed out.
tl;dr Purism is definitely underdelivering, and we have all reason to be mad at them. It’s only going to get better though.
1. you can dial phone numbers somehow
2. you can talk on the phone
3. you can hear the person on the other line
4. the cell reception on the phone is decent quality
5. antenna is properly placed for very good reception
6. basic SMS works, all the time
7. has been extensively tested to work with a single carrier, any other carrier is no warranty
8. boot time and shutdown time are so small that it opportunistically shuts down instead of suspend
9. bonus goal: contacts, can maybe play snake
Librem 5 fails #5 and #8 (and can't really succeed at #8 unless you just drop into a command line, but then you wouldn't be able to input phone numbers). I've read some reports that #1, #2, and #3 have improved enough to be usable. On #7, they offer a bundle with a simcard for a carrier that was tested with the phone. (Doubt it was extensively tested, though.)
Of the little I've read about Pinephone and Pinephone Pro, they've had problems with #3, #6, and #7, and #8.
Overall, however, both appear as a smartphone complete with messaging and browsers. But Librem 5 can't do hardware acceleration for Firefox ESR (because the etnaviv driver doesn't have recent enough OpenGL features for webrender to work).
Pinephone is too slow to browse.
I'm not sure about Pinephone Pro (though I'd be quite surprised if it passes the Firefox webrender tests).
I'd much prefer a much more basic device that gets all the basics right, and then be pleasantly surprised that I can play mp3s on it, too.
Edit: Isn't there some kind of wake-on-lan on arm chips that the Baseband OS could use?
Especially since both Pinephone and Librem devs are essentially dumpster diving for their hardware. Even Dell with all its resources couldn't get fast suspend on Ubuntu working (or whatever it's called). And that was just x86_64. But even I know how to power an RPI on/off! (I can even run the systemd thingy that reports startup times for various processes, which already puts us years ahead of the competition.)
If we work smart I honestly believe we can have a Linux device with the feature set and battery life of my LG VX5200 by the year 2030.
Edit: here's a sheet on that wonderful little indestructable device:
https://www.lg.com/us/mobile-phones/pdf/VX5200_Datasheet.pdf
Notice the support for "Mobile Web 2.0!" I don't believe that included SVG-- so already we're even closer to our goal!!!
Not advocating for this, I do not own one, but I'm pretty sure this substantially covers all goals listed minus #8 (plus an unlisted one - Signal integration).
I investigated and considered this option carefully. Ultimately ended up doing a Pixel running GrapheneOS (no microG) as a stop-gap until I buy either a Pinephone or Librem, once those are a little more usable.
Something else that platforms like that, and for everyone else, is a standardized means of communicating with banks. That way it is not up to the bank to build and maintain apps for seperate platforms. That one devices like Punkt could build alternative apps to do these kinds of functions.
Great in theory, a nightmare in practice. It would open up the means of fake apps to steal details. Also as the XKCD comics said - You have 15 standards, lets make a new better one, there are now 16 standards.
Side note on Punkt. They have one of the best monthly emails and I would highly recommend. Usually only a 2-3 minute read, lot of promoting their alarm clock (whatever) has a decent book recommendation and occasionally a link to a short article.
Maybe we should back up before smartphones.
Even back up before desktops.
Could 2023 be the year of the Linux alarm clock?
Also, is it free software? I know I only said "Linux phone" but we are in the realm of FOSS on this thread...
Where's the Librem 5 antenna? Can you link to reports of reception issues stemming from this?
Any newcomer, Linux or not, would immediately face the most obvious problem, which is a complete lack of a well-stocked store.
[0] I sometimes take my smartphone abroad for a combination of offline Google Maps and WiFi hopping.
For Linux devices, if you have a powerful enough phone (Pine64, can we please have a really beefy PinePhone?), you could bundle Waydroid + Aurora/F-Droid.
From the original list, I really don't care at all about 1/2/3 (phone calls) and only care vaguely about SMS.
My requirements are for an excellent browser and an app store with support for messaging platforms (telegram/signal/skype/slack/teams/etc) and email support, everything else is either "extra" or an outright distraction I'd probably be better off without (twitter, reddit, etc).
I recognize that's true for you, but it's definitely not true for me, and I expect many others, too. I'd honestly be fine if my "phone" dropped the "phone" part entirely. The only purpose of that feature is for spammers to make my phone vibrate a couple times per week. In the very rare (less than once per month) instances I need to actually talk to a human on the device, I'm sure someone could invent an app that allows for that.
1. Yes, has a dialpad. Works as you would expect
2, 3, 4. Yes, works well on my carrier
5. The antenna is along the side of the phone I believe and the reception seems good, I haven't had issues with this
6. I would say SMS only works about 95% percent of the time. The phone does randomly disconnect from the celluar network maybe once every day or two
7. Works well on my carrier, no issues here. I have a data plan and it works fine
8. It takes maybe a minute or two to boot, but to be fair my Samsung A52 Android takes longer to boot, maybe 2 minutes
9. Yes, there is a contact app, don't know about snake :)
Other:
10. The phone is slow, firefox works and all the websites I visit (including google maps, uber, etc.) render and work correctly, but slowly. I wouldn't say too slow to browse, but 100% it is slow
11. Be CAREFUL inserting the SIM card, it is extremely easy to break the SIM pins and brick the phone if the SIM card is not inserted correctly (I learnt this the hard way)
12. Surprisingly a large amount of apps available via flatpak/flathub, including both foss apps for things like email and 3rd party clients for things like spotify and whatsapp (text only, no video or audio calls). All the core linux stuff and lots of the foss apps via apk
13. However not all apps on flathub are compatible with the PinePhone since PinePhones uses aarch64 architecture, not x86_64
14. Very poor battery life out of the box, about 4 hours tops. However, after installing tlp and irqbalance (via apk) and setting auto-suspend to 1 minute, the battery life is about 8 to 12 hours of "normal" usage, so quite usuable
15. Camera is very basic
I should probably try postmarketOS on it and use it as a burner travel phone.
· I can program the phone to block numbers and send http requests over the net.
· Tethering, even if I need a USB cable for that.
· I can record calls. Both sides.
If I can't program it, I'd just buy a dumbphone. If I can tether, I can do without anything else, just carrying a tablet or small laptop.
For me, all this is obvious, but it doesn't seem the same for others.
number 7 points at why this won't really work. providers can just say it's a security vulnerability and shut this kind of cellphone down.
8. would be awesome, it's even a good idea for typical locked down smartphones because the battery life!
Personally, I have no interest in making phone calls. 99% of the time when my phone rings it’s a spam call. The other 1% of the time it’s one of my uncles or aunts, all of whom are in their 80’s or thereabouts. After they pass on, I will have no reason at all to make a phone call, except perhaps to book a doctor’s appointment with some doctor who hasn’t switched over to online booking.
You say that now, but wait until you need to dial 911.
It may well be the last phone call one makes in their life, but the ability to do it at all is predicated on the integrity of a piece of glass. It's insane.
The issue is that you don’t want the button to be easy enough to press that 911 gets flooded with butt dials.
Before switching to a smartphone in late 2020 various multi-message SMS texts dropped the middle message for some unknown reason.
> After they pass on, I will have no reason at all to make a phone call
You may think so, but things pop up. Moving states required calling my insurance company. I've made a couple of emergency calls.
This is actually one of the major problems linux phone operating system hackers have been trying to solve — idle power consumption is really really important for a cell phone, but most hardware open enough to run custom operating systems on don’t have easy ways to suspend to a reliable low-power state.
I think that to be practical, you're going to outsource the cellular comms to a prebuilt module that's got the carrier certification already sorted out.
I have one, played snake on it, liked it (hurray for real buttons). Haven't bothered set it up as my daily driver because 90% of my phone usage is Signal and so far as I know that's not yet working.
If somebody has the bandwidth to hack on it in a way that will move the project forward, I'll send them mine for free. I love the idea but it's just not my kind of tinkering.
Even that aspect is wildly overblown in my experience of using Google-free Android devices for the last 12 years. Yes, the thing will prompt you to install some Google-thing because it supposedly does not work without it - there are currently two such notifications on one of my devices telling me so. The thing is, nearly everything I throw at the device works even though some things complain about the supposed lack of Google services. I click away the warning if it appears and just use the software, this includes e.g. BankID - a Swedish electronic ID provider - and similar apps. I do not have microG installed on my main device either, I just forego on using Google services altogether.
All in all I think the current situation with de-Googled Android is quite useable. If ever some mobile thing comes along which more resembles the way software is installed on personal computers - i.e. install Linux or BSD of choice, add required software, configure accounts and you're in the game - I might move to that but until such a time I'll keep on using AOSP-derived Android distributions in combination with self-hosted services.
It is, mostly. So far, I've still been able to reject having a Google account on new phones. Then I delete the "first time" app Google sticks on there, disable Google services, install F-Droid, and use only F-Droid apps.
Does that still work? It's been three years since I started a new phone?
Calling/4g/5g require specific hardware that seems difficult to integrate at a hobbyist level (unlike say installing Linux which is possible in an afternoon even for some not familiar with it.) And even though you could get android to run on a raspberry pi, it appears impossible to use something like google pay (which likely requires safetynet) on it.
I'm not sure if the reason is the "blobs" that ARM uses instead of drivers but it is disappointing that I can't take something like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 dev kit, dualboot linux and android and use it like a phone-laptop hybrid. /Disappointed rant over
(Here's the kit - https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/snapdragon-8-gen-2-h...)
* - technically even laptops like with an SBC or the framework board. I can make the hardware but the software challenges seem huge. If anyone familiar with ARM development has any info/suggestions, I'd love to know more.
Not exactly.
What I mean is the average x64 Intel/AMD device is relatively much more "controllable" than an equivalent smartphone, assuming decent BIOS/UEFI options are provided. If I want to customize the looks with rainmeter, or even system-level tweaks (eg mactype), it's relatively trivial on desktop OSes (possibly excluding recent locked-down MacOs versions). I can even jump between Windows and Linux and Hackintosh/MacOs and BSD as I have a "pretty decent" level of control.
A rooted android phone is also quite decent, however issues start creeping in the further you stray from what your manufacturer provided. It starts of with things like Widevine/DRM not playing nice (unless you have a Titan M chip or something similar), and the further you go (stock rom -> custom rom with gapps/microG -> deGoogled rom), the more painful it becomes to even use ""basics" like whatsapp.
I guess all this is a very roundabout way of saying that desktop OS is a first class citizen (mostly), while mobile OSes (which are necessary for booking an Uber/paying at the checkout POS/navigating with Google Maps with turn-by-turn nav) do not have other freedoms. And while the hardware absolutely exists for an arm board to do it all with the right daughterboards, doing mobile stuff on a desktop is impossible, and doing desktop stuff on mobile is limiting thanks to software.
For this specifically, ath9k cards don't have blobs. You can get upto a/b/g/n with them. Depends on whether you consider n to be modern enough or not.
Particularly on the hardware front, since there is a vested interest/requirement for operating Telco's to maintain backdoor functionality/capabilities for the local government. It's just like payment processing.
Everyone having their own stack is such a great sounding idea, but the Establishment/System is tuned such that it can never happen, and in the event it does, it's guaranteed to be dismantled because every ne'er- do-well will start exploiting it, and the vast majority of people are not interested in protecting themselves... They want someone else to do it for them.
It's one of those nice things we just can't seem to get our shit straight enough as a society to have.
Some CPUs and SoC can be operated to their fullest capabilities with pure open hardware and software designs where you have all the control in the world (if we draw the line at silicon diffusion and packaging), but those usually lack one thing or another making them less feasible for common modern use. Often these are things like memory controllers and I/O where internal SoC peripherals need special initialisation before they are usable. Even in cases where the driver side of things is reverse-engineered a bunch of Real-Time OS code needs to be loaded at boot time to get things like GPUs, Basebands and storage to work at all. So far, there are practically no cases where those have been reverse-engineered and replaced.
For a lot of internet-commenting-people, 'open' means something specific to them, like changing some design aspects like colours and fonts, or installing cracked software. Those are mostly just end-user features and have little to do with openness. This has a sad side-effect making searching for 'open' information get littered with what essentially boils down to appearance and recompositions of existing software.
Perhaps we need 'levels' of openness or other words to describe what we mean. The Snapdragon example is a good one in that it essentially uses an openly available and targetable ISA, but closed system design which still makes it impossible to use as-is (thus needing the blobs you mentioned). On one hand it's all legal and NDA stuff, on the other hand it's also laziness and cheaping out on the long-term usability. If a company were to spend just a little of their marketing budget on finding out the parts of the hardware that doesn't need all that NDA coverage, making open software to run the hardware becomes much easier.
javascript:(function() {window.location=window.location.href.replace(/^https:\/\/appgallery\.huawei\.com\/app/g, "https://appgallery.cloud.huawei.com/appdl" );})()
Source: me. I daily-drive 7 year old phone running LineageOS with almost no issues. I also have a backup phone where I multi-boot LineageOS+MicroG and postmarketOS for fun and experimentation.
So now I am almost tempted to see if I can get the bank app on my current phone, and then, finally try out postmarketOS on the OP6
I would be surprised if these issues were because of pmOS and not because of Alpine. For example everything involved with bluetooth headphones or with calls or with SMS is in Alpine, with the exception of one ALSA UCM config file from the pmOS device-pine64-pinephone package that hasn't changed since 2021. In the ~2 years that I've had my PP (running pmOS Edge), the only time phone calls were broken were because of pipewire updates in Alpine repo. SMS has never broken. I don't use bluetooth headphones so I can't say anything about that.
Alpine is maintained somewhat "amateurishly" compared to other distros. Eg one of the main Alpine devs frequently makes commits to the packages repo without any sort of merge request or review process, which sometimes introduces new bugs and they then make more commits to fix. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, quite the opposite; it's just what the dev culture is, and it means fixes and changes go in quickly without bureaucracy etc. (And I'm pretty sure ddevault is aware of this.) Also while Alpine does involve pmOS folks in discussions about issues that might affect them (and many of the pmOS folks are also Alpine folks), things do slip through the crack many times, like the pipewire issue I mentioned and many others.
At the same time I expect these things to happen on edge but not on stable, so I'm surprised that he says he experienced them on stable too. I only use Edge myself so I can't say for certain.
In any case, to the overall point of having a phone that is 24/7/365 reliable at calls and SMS, I agree that "PinePhone running pmOS Edge" will not meet that requirement, for both software and hardware reasons.
Of course there's a price for this.
I gave up and got a Nokia 105.
These 4G dumb phones are cool but the power requirements of 4G can be a burden once you actually start making calls. So you get weird things like 30 days stand by but 3 hours talk time
The community around it was amazing.
They chased trends instead and couldn't keep up.
That's because stuff running in the background in a way that cannot be optimized by the system must inform the user it's doing background operations.
I think that's a good idea. Hiding the notification is easy (hold it to enter the notification settings and disable that specific notification category) and it clearly shows which apps are killing your battery life, hopefully making the entire platform less dependent on aggressive task killers.
It is not only possible to live google free, it is fucking easy.
How is that not monopoly behavior? Why don't they just put an iMessage alternative in Android at that point?
1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
Google Messages is the stock messaging app, and contains iMessage-like features. AOSP is mostly irrelevant. It's not clear why iMessage-like features would be an antitrust issue for Google anyway.
1: https://twitter.com/MishaalRahman/status/1669026188399112192
Now it's abandoned so it definitely won't be anything now.
I'm sorry, but no, you don't need to halt execution simply because I'm an admin on my own device. Particularly if I can do exactly the same thing by just using your web interface (90% of the time this is available).
Then I tried GrapheneOS, which was driven by Daniel Micay, who seems a hardcore security-minded person. GrapheneOS seemed to be working beating AOSP internals into better security shape, and very slowly tackling the apps. So, with GrapheneOS, it seemed I was starting with as clean and trustworthy an Android as one can get (to the extend Android can ever be clean or trustworthy), and in the interim I could add missing open source apps to my install. (Email, maps, SSH, chat, etc.)
GrapheneOS isn't the ideal I could imagine, but it exists, and I feel less violated by GrapheneOS than by other phone in the last ~15 years or so.
So now I have this very nice Android phone that does not have a Calendar app because Google won't allow such a thing to exist unless they get to see my appointments. Guess I'll have to write some kind of web app calendar thing if I want a freaking calendar on my phone.
Also helps they are open source and can be installed via F-droid if needed
Etar: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ws.xsoh.etar/ Offline Calendar: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.sufficientlysecure.local...
Replace the car GPS navigation functionality with a dedicated car GPS and you have most of the same functionality but with better longer lasting devices.
you also "miss" being sent to a known slow and long rout just because the buggy algorithm wants to bucket test some random path close to the daily rush hour.
Yes, accidents always happen in the same spot at the same time on the same days, and new people visiting new places always know about those things.
I have had Google try to send me on slower routes, but I use my brain and drive the more logical way and it updates the map accordingly. Though most people are not logical, and such practices theoretically help everyone overall including the petson who is sent on a different route that time.
I load free OSM maps on my GPS.
It's not quite the same orwellian level of detail but it helps with the big ones.
I do, and so do a majority of smartphone users. Good for you that you are fine doing without it, but most people will not accept that trade off.
I ran CyanogenMod back when that was a thing, but at that time SafetyNet didn't exist, and it was a rare event when an app that ran on Google-approved Android didn't run on CM. Nowadays I can't run an alternative ROM without sacrificing things I care about using.
No idea if these work on Lineage, etc...
Even logging in to the websites is a chore.
Perhaps as a last resort, after getting your install set up, close the bootloader again. I don't do that but I've heard of people having trouble from leaving the bootloader unlocked.
Back in the CyanogenMod days it was the other way around.
Would I prefer an OSS UI? Yes. But for a real, viable duopoly alternative it is worth the sacrifice to me.
it’s got rough edges compared to an iphone, and performance is worse, but it is insanely better than a pinephone.
I guess your mileage might vary. If you're keen on a particular app and you can't make it work, that's a frustration. So far I haven't found any reason to come back to a standard OS, and I appreciate my phone not sending constant signals to Apple or Google to the tune of hundreds per day.
Only problem - which I actually think is a feature is that I don't get any notifications for a lot of apps, unless I actually open the app. I really think this is a great thing because most of these apps that use google services for notifications are just sending marketing modifications which I would have blocked anyway. I do sometimes miss WhatsApp call because the notification doesn't work properly but I have told all my friends and family that they can contact me on signal for fastest response.