Hacker News Reader

Comment by surgical_fire | Hacker News Reader

> Google is positioning Gemini not just as an app, but as a OS level feature

Eeewww.

We need a mobile OS competitor.

I am seriously considering a move to Fairphone with /e/os.

GrapheneOS would be a possibility, but I don't trust Google to make decent hardware, so not super excited to get a Pixel phone.

View on HN

I definitely had to tweak the settings a lot for the battery to not get warm on my Pixel. But after a week I managed and battery life is better than with comparable phones since the background bloat isn't there on Graphene.

So far there was a solution for everything, I don't do online banking on the phone though.

I wonder if LineageOS might solve this problem already though, /e/os probably would as well

> I definitely had to tweak the settings a lot for the battery to not get warm on my Pixel. But after a week I managed and battery life is better than with comparable phones since the background bloat isn't there on Graphene.

I am sure a detailed writeup will be very appreciated if you bother and manage.

> We need a mobile OS competitor.

Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS exist.

Yes, I have an older phone running LineageOS for that matter.

But those are typically community efforts, so software support is not certain. It sucks when so many things just expect you to have a working cell phone.

What company will jump in the competition meat grinder between Google and Apple. Maybe if it’s state-sponsored. I don’t know how much HarmonyOS/Huawei are state-sponsored so I can’t claim there are.

> What company will jump in the competition meat grinder between Google and Apple

Purism did. My Librem 5 works remarkably well given how small the company is.

How do you deal with things such as mobile banking? So many services just presume you use either an Android or IOS.

At some point I thought I really needed Android Auto, but I can probably just get a MStick only for that. There are other things that keep me jailed to Android though.

> How do you deal with things such as mobile banking

One way is to have a spare Android phone sitting at home with no sim-card. Also many (not all) banking apps work with Waydroid. The best way is to switch your bank to one not forcing the duopoly on you.

One from Europe is the most likely contender. The disdain for USA corporations is growing abroad. Could even see Canada and Mexico moving to such entities when a solution is viable.

I have been investing in possible startup organizations. We need it!

Punkt has a phonen using a fork of grapheneos out of switzerland with some cloud services like VPN attached to make it a completely degoogled 'secure phone', called ApostrophyOS

https://mc02.punkt.ch/en/mc02-5g-secure-phone/

https://www.apostrophy.ch/

Can't vouche for it, I just use a flip phone.

to get an overview of the degoogled phone market: http://customromhardware.miraheze.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com