HarmonyOS I love the new Huawei OS and love that they made an open source version, OpenHarmony, me and my friend screw around with it on an old recycled google home with the big touch screen. But yeah, I love HarmonyOS, way prefer it to android os
this post was submitted on 05 May 2023
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I am using Lineage but not really sure if it qualifies, it is still an android. Overall, it is pretty good. The main issues I am getting is due to the fact that I didn't install version with Google services, and I am using MicroG instead (open source implementation). Some applications don't like it, and you have to do some trickery with rooting to have a chance to run them (for example our national identification application), but it is pretty rare.
I would recommend it if you want to still be able to use everything you need but want a bit more FOSS experience.
I run Arch on a PinePhone Pro. It's been working really well. Recent updates have improved it a lot. The phone now wakes itself up from sleep when it receives a call or SMS, calls and SMS have been very reliable, MMS messages now work, etc. I even have Android apps running on my PinePhone Pro using Waydroid, which is now hardware accelerated. I use it as a daily driver and it's a very good daily driver.
The only major issue is that the drivers for the cameras haven't been mainlined yet which means that even if you get a kernel that supports them, most camera apps won't support them and the ones that do don't have postprocessing yet, so the white balance is off and the quality is horrible. If you don't need the cameras though, it works really well.
Here's a screenshot of Waydroid running on my PinePhone Pro. I'm using an Android image with microG. The black bars on the top and bottom are part of Phosh, the desktop environment I'm using, then everything in the middle is Android running inside a Waydroid container.
I run Graphenee and it is an awesome user experience - most of the conveniences of stock android with the peace of mind of privacy and security
graphene and lineage seem to be the most popular. Anything about it that doesn't work, or missing functionality compared to android?
With graphene's sandboxed play services, mostly no - if you need to use play store apps, it has the ability to install google play services in isolation with a compatibility layer on top that allows you to restrict google's access to everything while letting you use play store apps as normal, granted you may need to sign in with a google account for functionality like paid apps. Everything for me has worked well so far app wise.
The one thing that has been not exceptional is location services. At the moment, graphene uses gps/glonass for location while stock android uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, WiFi and Bluetooth scanning which it sends to google servers to get precise location. This means graphene's location is much worse/unusable indoors and isn't quite as precise outdoors, so while google's location services are invasive they are also quite useful. You can configure it to use google location services but I find this counter productive, and the website says that they are working on bringing more precise location services locally.
I've used lineage in the past with MicroG and was both excited to try to degoogle but also realized how much I relied on play services. MicroG is a package of apps that mimic play services but I found it to only sometimes work. Notifications were broken on apps that rely on play services until I realized I needed to sign in with google, but signing in with google ended up causing multiple problems. When you need to sign on to gmail on a new device it will automatically try to use your android device as a two factor sign on. Because I hadn't yet set up a two factor authenticator app and MicroG doesn't implement this feature, I was locked out of my gmail account for a few days. Additionally apps that wanted you to sign in with your google account did not work. This was all frustrating enough that I ended up switching to lineage with google apps, which worked but kind of felt like it defeated the purpose.
Just to round it out, a few nice to have features of android won't work out of the box like "what's playing". Android auto nor google pay will work either. I've never really used these features but others will definitely notice them being gone. At the same time there are so many awesome things to discover while having graphene or lineage like all of the privacy respecting apps on F-Droid, and I feel way less about my phone sharing everything I do to google
thanks for the detailed response.
having precise location is kind of important, but obviously how google goes about being that precise is problematic....
what device are you currently using graphene on?
No problem!
I got a pixel 6a (you need a pixel for graphene) and it comes with 5 years of hardware support from google which means it will be fully supported by graphene for at least 5 years. All pixels from 6 on come with 5 years while earlier ones only had 3 years
oh cool, thx
btw how's the battery life
I have a pinephone pro and an og pinephone. Neither have met my needs to replace my android phone(pixel 6).
Im hopeful in the next few years the ecosystem will mature, and it will be a viable platform.
yeah that's my concern; that other phones don't have the same usability as android or iphone