> you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community.
It's far ahead, but at the same time, I think we shouldn't over-emphasise how much. Functionality at the beginning of a project's lifetime is way more important than incremental improvements (or just changes) made later, and thus while much more effort has been invested into Android, new projects primarily need to catch up when it comes to e.g. phone call support and stability, and won't have to redo a lot of the effort of e.g. implementing Material You 3 or whatever.
Which is to say that we're still years out from a viable competitor, but at the same time, there could be one five years from now, which is also not that long.
Material 3 is mostly not part of the AOSP tree (aside from some very, very deep code like shadows) and is just UI libraries. I actually wonder if M3 has View implementations, or if everything has been migrated to Compose.
You're also underestimating the amount of fundamental work that goes in Android. The vast majority is hardware integration. It's not all fancy little bells and whistles. It would have the added benefit of not having to relearn the security mistakes like LIST_ALL_PACKAGES or READ_SMS permissions being open to all, at least.
I'm not saying it won't be a lot of work, and I'm not saying it'll be at feature parity in five years. But I'm saying that we shouldn't assume it'll take as much work/as long as it got Android to get to the current point, to get to the point where it's viable for some use. For example, when a usability baseline for some common usage patterns is achieved, it could be at the point where some external event could push a hardware vendor to start experimenting with specific support.
(I'll also note that there has been a lot of non-"fancy little bells and whistles" work that has been going on in the Linux world, specifically with lots of lessons learned from mobile. Think atomic distros, and sandboxing, for example.)
iodé is available for my device as well, but it looked fairly similar to /e/OS to me (and the latter has an official partnership with my phone's manufacturer). What makes it a better option - should I switch?
When I looked into it, /e/ constantly used to be many months late with security updates. LineageOS for microg and iodé were much quicker (~ 1 month max which is still not that great).
Hmm, possibly I'm looking in the wrong place, but as far as I can remember, I've been getting new /e/OS versions about every month, and looking at the release notes [1], they usually seem to include the latest "Android security patches", which I assume is what's relevant - unless there's something else that should also be included?
A subset of their future devices will meet all of the official requirements for GrapheneOS and provide official support for using it. They may sell devices with it but that would be a separate announcement.
I'm on /e/OS and don't use Murena Workspace (which I think is just a Nextcloud instance that they host). For the past couple of years in which I've used it, I have felt zero pressure to use Murena Workspace. Though I imagine it might be neat if you host your own Nextcloud instance, which might be nicely integrated too.
(That said, yes, I don't quite trust their VPN or app store, since it's unclear who's running it - in the latter's case, I imagine that's also a legal matter.)
> Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.
I appreciate the vibes where this is coming from, but does it really? I think that assumes that everyone that works on this would work on a true open source OS otherwise, and that if they did, that would result in us breaking free from Android where we otherwise wouldn't. I'm not confident about either of those assumptions.
Meanwhile I'll keep complaining to orgs that don't allow me to work through their website, and tell them that their app won't work on my phone.
There are more OSS devs active on Android ROMs than OSS devs working on independent mobile OSes. We are running out of time, and we are misallocating ressources.
It's like bailing out water from the Titanic. We should prepare the lifeboats instead.
(GNU/)Linux on mobile is the true sustanable, independent OS. It relies on the existing, strong Linux development, natively runs existing Linux apps and guarantees you lifetime updates. What else do you need?
According to the website[0] I’d need 20+ hrs idle time, video recording, Bluetooth, and GPS.
I’m being gently snarky, of course, but the goal shouldn’t be an MVP that nerds who are deeply into privacy or FOSS or hate Google can tolerate - it should be something that disinterested normies could seamlessly and happily use.
Well, it idles for about 22 hours, can record videos, does multi-constellation GNSS and both classic and LE Bluetooth.
The way to make disinterested normies able to use it is to have lots of nerds capable of fixing various papercuts themselves switch already and contribute rather than complain.
Thanks for sharing! I hadn't heard of this before. IMO any competition in this space is good competition.
But the reality is that it's not quite that straightforward. Linux desktop is a perfect example of that. We have tons of nerds working on the Linux ecosystem. Many on distros meant to ease transition from Mac/Windows to Linux (like Pop OS).
But if I were to tell my mom to install Pop OS, she would look at me like I'm crazy.
In some ways, Linux has become "cool" — Steam Machine and Steam Deck run Linux, and they're popular. Unfortunately, they're popular within a niche, and even then, they're popular for only a slice of digital life. People don't do work on a Steam Deck and I can't imagine many doing work on a Steam Machine.
Mobile phones are completely different though because most people have one phone. And that phone needs to do everything they need it to do. It needs to run the apps they need. It needs to play the games they want. It needs to integrate into everything. And it also needs to look trendy, because smartphones have become a bit of a status symbol of sorts.
So, while I agree that us nerds must become part of the solution than the problem, it's not enough. We need buy-in from major service providers. We need marketing. That's all stuff that the typical nerd can't/won't do.
> But if I were to tell my mom to install Pop OS, she would look at me like I'm crazy.
What would she say if you asked her to install Windows? It doesn't matter. Normal people should either buy preinstalled or ask technical people for help. Using GNU/Linux desktop is as simple as Windows. It will be the same with phones one day, if we push it.
If I told her to install Windows, she'd at least know what to tell the technician in the event that I'm not around.
If I install Pop OS on her computer she will just tell the technician she has a laptop because she doesn't know the difference. I would hope that the technician does know the difference, and moreover, knows how to use it (which I assume someone calling themselves a technician would know how to troubleshoot basic stuff on a foreign operating system, but I've been wrong on lighter assumptions)
Username checks out (I kid, I'm also a fan of their work).
Also, if you're using PureOS, what's that like? Have they updated to a debian 13 base yet? Pretty much the only thing stopping me from at least trying it out is the super old version of GNOME
I'm considering to switch to your device and start contributing to gnome mobile soon! I'm interested in your experience, what do you like and dislike the most on it?
If mobile Linux runs through the same kind of tortuous adoption and rejection cycle that desktop Linux is still doing, then it's a non starter before it begins.
I've been happily using it on several phones since 2008 (and writing this on one of them right now), only two years shorter than on my desktops/laptops. "Non-starter" is in the eye of the beholder.
Everything that works on desktop GNU/Linux should work on the phone, too. I use Pika Backup app.
> communication
AFAIK none of the apps you listed officially support Linux ARM, so you have to go through some configuration unfortunately. I do not use any of them, I use Matrix.
The parent wasn't speaking of a perfectly secure OS but about "preparing the lifeboats". Also, GNU/Linux somehow sufficiently secure on desktop, especially if you rely on the apps from the FLOSS repos.
If you're in Europe, I saw quite a few comments here saying that banks not requiring the duopoly do exist. Otherwise, a dedicated banking phone might be the way.
And there are even more devs working on Windows. It's like we're actively drilling a hole into the Titanic.
The thing is that those people aren't "resources" that you can just "reallocate". And even if they were, two extra buckets weren't going to save the Titanic.
That's cool and all, but them investing $1,100 and two weeks of one engineer's time doesn't yet give me confidence that they're in this for the long haul. It'll be interesting to see how long the long tail of remaining issues will be (it doesn't sound like in another two weeks, they'll have pre-rendering and cache components working), but I'm definitely not adopting this any time soon.
One question I have, that perhaps you might be able to answer (though I see you've gotten too many replies to this comment already): I'm aware of a number of such systems being developed, and "is over 18" is always the example given.
Are there, say, two other potential use cases that anyone has come up with yet?
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