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Several phone brands rumored to be planning a major shift away from Android
(www.phonearena.com)
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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We need phones with standard Linux. Without strange "Java only mediator" or something. Just a normal OS.
Android is a pain in the ass.
Exact! And please no bloatware!!
Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L
So you exclusively want ai. Got it.
-Microsoft, probably
Clippie coming right up!
So AOSP
Dude, you get free third party bullshit with every update. What’s not to love?
Already exists. Several iterations are active and work as a daily driver: phone, sms and mobile networking works reliably, apps exist. Just not as many as on Android, and some features are not part of the OS. This is enough for many to declare them "a failure". That and limited hardware support.
Google has coddled us for way too long, and at what price.
I don't believe that they're likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they're going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.
Android's had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren't doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they're Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.
That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there -- MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.
If the mobile OS space fragments further -- like, Android splits into "Google Android" and "China Android"
my guess is that that'll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.
Is this the year of the Ubuntu Touch Smartphone?
Probably not, but it should be.
Oh dear ..... Are we gonna be forced to snap on phones too?
is it ready for normies to daily drive?
No. I have a second phone with it just to play with.
It's functional, but rough. App support is lacking, VoLTE doesn't work still which means on countries like the US which shutdown 2/3G you cannot make or receive calls. The UI is clunky and dated.
I think a lot of these issues would go away pretty quick if it got a lot of attention. But then it's unlikely to get much attention without that stuff. Vicious cycle. It's a good base to build on.
thanks for the insight. if you use google voice app on it would that work as a replacement for VoLTE?
There isn't a Google Voice app. It's not Android.
You could probably place calls from the browser but not receive them.
I heard of some people setting up IP phone stuff for it, but it doesn't seem simple.
Seems pretty polished, but I genuinely don't know. None of my devices support it, so I haven't had the opportunity to test drive it.
At some point, "normies" are just going to have to break down and learn something.
I think postmarketOS will probably win out on market share for Linux phones, mostly because it can use regular flatpak apps, you don't have to develop special apps, which i thought you had to do for Ubuntu touch (which I guess is now called ubports). Not sure, someone correct me if I'm wrong about the specially built apps part.
Palm OS was really good, but without a great app store it never stood a chance.
I would love to have a phone that I could just plug into a USB C dock and use as a normal computer. They've got plenty of processing power for that now. Every single program I use except for games could run on a phone if it used normal GNU/Linux.
Samsung Dex already does this with Android.
Was about to say that - while it's sadly proprietary and most FOSS Apps are not well supported, it is a nice showcase. But I don't think it's actually used much by people.
Which is kind of sad.
Honestly love Dex, it's such a smooth transition
Convergence! I think Ubuntu tried to go that way for a while.
I was given an old Chromebook tablet by a friend that wanted to get rid of it, and it just happened to have mainline Linux support. I was able to get postmarketOS running on it, and got gnome shell mobile as the DE. It works, and works well. The apps that support the touch interface and are made to be responsive, etc work really well, and the waydroid integegration works fantastically well. I was able to get android version of jellyfin working, with vlc, and a few other apps I use daily. All this in 4GB of ram, I'm really impressed! This screenshot was running gnome shell I think, I've since switch to the 'mobile' variant of it, and running system monitor with android vlc and android jellyfin running, zoomed out so you could see all the apps running at once.
Its time for a Linux phone, I put in an order for the 2nd batch of this phone, hopefully they start shipping soon, they supposedly already shipped the first batch to users.
https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1/
What's that link got to do with PostmarketOS? It does not look like FuriOS is a version of it?
Good catch, while I guess they're not using postmarketOS, that's what was supported on the device i had, and what enabled me to test out the mobile version to gnome shell, and try out the phone app ecosystem. It seems like its ready for prime time, especially since waydroid performs so well, android apps can fill the void for any missing native Linux apps.
Furiphone flx1 looks promising
They have been promising a good Linux phone for forever. Is this one any good? Will support last?
No idea as i haven't gotten mine yet. They're still filling the next pre-order batch of production, but from the reviews on their website, it seems as responsive as you'd expect from android, which was a huge problem with Dev phones like the pinephone, they were way too sluggish with terrible battery life.
postmarketOS?
Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.
If you can implement an equivalent to Apple's Secure Enclave on a device running that, I'll be interested. I haven't seen even a device running Android doing that yet though.
Samsung actually added Knox to their Android implementation a few months before iOS added Secure Enclave. I think Qualcomm had some sort of trusted execution environment around that time, too, if I recall correctly. And Google added Trusty to the AOSP two years ago. So it's already running on Android, and has been for ages.
But I'm not convinced a TEE would be necessary for a device that doesn't run any third-party native code. Browser tab sandboxing is already pretty robust; I haven't heard of an escalation exploit being found in ages on any major JavaScript engine, meaning that the risk of data exfiltration or bootloader compromise are extremely remote, and would be much quicker (and less risky!) to patch via browser updates than firmware/OS updates.
The only other reason I know of that you'd need a TEE is for DRM, and I'd be willing to wager most people who would want a FirefoxOS phone would actively prefer not to have that on their device.
Yeah, Meego was really nice.
I worked with it. Just Linux. Rpm was at that moment.
GNU/Linux is about 100x more painful than Android...
How so?
Let me know when there's a phone with Linux that has a security implementation that matches Apple's Secure Enclave.
No idea what that is.