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Comment by JasonHarrison | Hacker News Reader

What will you purchase instead? It sucks that the modern smartphone OS market is a duopoly.

The Motorola one, when it comes with GrapheneOS!

Fairphones are easy to unlock, repairable, have a long lifetime and offer a variety of different operating system distributions.

Fairphone with its 8-year updates, swappable battery, and decent repairability is great for those of us who doesn't like to be forced to change phones often. I'm not sure, however, what variety of distributions you mean. It supports 1 Android, and 1 de-googled Android. Which isn't bad at all, but still doesn't sound like "variety".

It also supports PostmarketOS. This post made it to HN yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338285

Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...) lists /e/OS, CalyxOS, IodéOS, LineageOS, postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, the latter two being non-Android, the rest Android derivatives on Fairphone 5. Fairphone 6 has only /e/OS and IodéOS listed at the moment, but that will probably change after some time on the market.

There are also various reports of things like running e.g. Fedora on an FP6, https://www.notebookcheck.net/Fairphone-6-turns-into-a-Linux... or Debian on FP4/5, but those generally aren't something that is usable due to lacking support for basic things like calls.

I would love to have a Fairphone, but sadly I live in the USA.

They just launched it in the USA a couple of days ago! Link to HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49344811

Oh, nice!

It's been possible to buy Fairphone indirectly in the US for quite some time, as I understand.

Fairphone have just announced direct sales within the past week or so (noted by others here).

Since they're saying "Google phone", not "Android phone", I imagine the next purchase could be a Samsung or such.

Comments elsewhere in this thread say other major brands are even more locked down.

Edit:

> With One UI 8, Samsung removed the OEM-unlocking capability globally,

> Samsung uses a physical Knox Warranty Bit/e-fuse. Loading unofficial software can permanently trip it.

This seems far worse than google releasing source slowly

Samsung was a bad example of a plausible alternative, yes.

If you want GrapheneOS, the only other option, still pending, is Motorolla.

A partnership was announced earlier this year, but no devices will be delivered until 2027.

See: <https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117078064184215730>.

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