Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years.)
I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why. I use my bank's app maybe once or twice a year when I need to Zelle someone, which I only need to do when they don't have Venmo. (Unless we consider Venmo a banking app.)
I only have one bank's app installed, the rest of my banks I only interact with over their website, on desktop.
As for insurance, I've never had an insurance company's app installed.
Am I just an outlier here? Honestly, if I switched to a non standard OS, I'd be more annoyed about losing, say, Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, or various chat apps. Banking and insurance just don't come to mind at all as something I need my phone for.
I get an alert when a payment comes it - handy for knowing if a client has paid.
I can quickly check my balance - handy for knowing if I can afford another round of drinks.
I can repay a friend in two taps - handy if they've paid for dinner.
Is anything essential? No. Is it something people use multiple times per day? Yes!
No. The "banking app doesn't work" argument against non-corporate mobile OS, raised incessantly is HN comments, is bogus
I want a "phone", i.e., small form factor computer, that can run something like NetBSD, or Linux. But I have no intention of using it for commercial transactions. Mobile banking is not why I want to run a non-corporate OS
I want to use it for recreation, research and experimentation
> I want to use it for recreation, research and experimentation
I am a firm believer that phones are personal computers and should have all the end user freedom we have come to expect from personal computers. I am totally behind what your saying.
Personally, I opt out of services that require the use of phone "apps" and any potential attestation they provide. Unfortunately, I just offload that into my wife's iPhone. Want to go to a concert in a TicketMaster venue-- you have to have a phone. Pay to park in some places requires a phone. Mobile ordering for some restaurants requires a phone.
I don't think it should be this way, but it is. I think we need consumer regulation to insure software freedom on phones and curtail awful user hostile "features" like remote attestation.
Until that happens (if it ever does) there is a realpolitik with needing corporate phones for some activities that can't be denied.
Ditch your bank if they have issues. If their retention department asks why you're leaving, tell them their app doesn't work.
Make sure to leave one star reviews on all such apps that you run into.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723594 from Emre @emrekosmaz
It is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11
Actual link https://nexphone.com/blog/the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...
If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone.
If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
I'm running custom ROMs for the last 15 years
Yes, that is generally the case. As a general rule with an Android phone reflashing the OS itself or the bootloader carries no risk of bricking the device (meaning making it impossible to recover without specialized hardware and/or opening up parts that were not intended to be opened).
There are plenty of ways to "soft-brick" a device such that you might need to plug it in to a computer, and adb/fastboot can definitely be a pain in the ass to use (especially on Windows), but if you have a device with an unlocked bootloader it's very rare to be able to actually brick the device while doing normal things.
Now, if you're doing abnormal things like reflashing the radio firmware you can absolutely brick some devices there, but you don't have to do that just to boot an alternative OS and generally shouldn't be doing it without very good reason and specific knowledge of exactly what you're doing.
I'm not going to say there are no devices where the standard process to flash an alternative OS is dangerous, but none of the relatively common ones I've ever owned or used have been built that way because OEMs don't want their own official firmware updates to be dangerous either.
tl;dr: It is sometimes possible to brick a device by flashing the wrong thing incorrectly, but the risk of doing that if you are just installing an alternative OS through a standard process is basically zero.
There's a whole lot of shady crap underlying the infrastructure and the hardware that consumers cannot touch, pinephone / librephone or otherwise. It's not designed for consent. At best you can gain ephemeral relief, but even that is illusory, because by simple process of elimination, differential analysis allows fine grained ID and tracking of people even if they don't have accounts, phones, interact with websites, etc.
It's not a shady cabal of lizard people, it's just the grubby natural alignment of interests by a wide ranging set of companies and regulators and groups who allow it to happen without imposing any accountability, and ensuring that the system remains structured such that no effective accountability can be imposed.
Extorting constant streams of data for adtech is too valuable and the entire thing is too complex for silly things like ethics to interfere.
Only when the kill switch is on. I control it.
Also, it's possible to get AweSIM service hiding your data from the mobile operators.
We should be enforcing informed consent regulation of network infrastructure, treating privacy and anonymity as synonymous with liberty and freedom. Allowing the system to operate as it does is a choice; those with lots of money get to make it grow by exploiting a constant invasion of privacy with no concurrent return to the society being exploited.
Phones aren't built to be privacy respecting, and kill switches are a mitigation of a symptom, they don't do anything to address the disease.
What you're saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).
A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.
Sent from my Librem 5.
So practically I cannot use it as a daily driver.
Librem 5 does have enough GPU horsepower, a functioning camera, and good pmOS support. But $800 is a lot to ask to test out switching to linux with no guarantee that my workflow will work or I will have enough battery life. It looks like the librem 5 can't record videos or do GPS navigation yet.
I am looking at the librem 5 specs again. The EG25-G is probably a better starting point for the modem now that it has been better documented and reverse engineered as a result of the pinephone project. It is interesting that the L5 has a generic smartcard reader though.
It won't.
It's really a shame that you always wait until you really get forced. Particularly in situations when every individual's inability has consequences for the others as well. I really gave up all ideas of a better world. With this community, the best you can hope is that the decay will be slow.
So everyone who would describe himself/herself as a FOSS enthusiast, or at least a friend of a somewhat open system where the user has some actual rights beyond sole consumption, put some pressure towards having actually de-Googled systems. A system that mostly comes from Google, would not fit my definition of that term at all! Even if they removed some parts of it. It's an euphemism. And it's dangerous because you constantly get trapped by these euphemisms. Ever. Single. F'ing. Time.
Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.
While MS code signing certs are more circumventable for power-users than Android's new approved developer program, their pricing is far more prohibitive for independent OSS developers and hobbyists, costing hundreds of USD per year.
I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:
https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116103...
So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.
Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace
I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social
Hopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone
I understand some amount of reticence with commercial OSes, but there’s no justification for being against it on open Linux based desktops and mobile OSes. We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time with the only (scantly) meaningful safeguards coming in the form of *nix user permissions.
I do agree with that, and I strongly believe that the iOS and Android security model is way ahead of Desktop Linux. But what I observe is that nobody seems to care about the security model. A recurrent complaint I see against anything AOSP-based (including Android) is that people "want to be root".
But both Flatpak and Snap offer this new model from the two biggest desktop players in the Linux world: Red Hat and Canonical.
As the sibling comment said though, being an administrator for your own computer (including a phone) does not mean that you will be running untrusted applications as one: on the contrary, if you assume an administrator role and run an untrusted application, naturally, all bets are off. But even as a power user, I'd love to be able to safely run programs I do not necessarily trust, feeding it only data it needs and no more.
Again, Snap/Flatpak provide this model, but we need to see more application authors take them up to ship their software.
The fact that Android complains and tells any app that asks whether the owner actually, you know, owns the device they paid for is an implementation detail.
A Linux distribution that adopts an Android style security model could easily still provide the owner root access while locking down less trusted apps in such a way that the apps can't know or care whether the device is rooted.
This is not surprising. The desktop Linux community reacted with hostility to the well funded security efforts (selinux, apparmor, grsecurity, etc)
As a datapoint, everything in /dev/input/* is owned by root:input on my Debian Bookworm install, and my main user is not a member of the "input" group either.
Biggest problem with most security hardening for Linux desktop is that it breaks the natural usage pattern: I store my files by their content, not by their format (eg. I might have a folder for my project containing image files, spreadsheets, FreeCAD files, maybe even some code or TeX/ODF files). If programs are restricted to access the entirety of my $HOME though, there is not much benefit to that protection since that's where my most valuable data is. If they are restricted to per-program folder, I need to start organizing my data differently and unnaturally.
Android mostly does not use the "files" metaphor and basically does exactly that (per-app data): coming up with a security model and file management UX that does both is where the challenge is.
It's the same reason I choose to keep my front door unlocked basically all the time - I know my neighborhood, the risk is really low and the convenience is high.
Further... practically everyone agrees that they don't need bank vaults as front doors. It makes zero practical sense: The cost is incredibly high, and the convenience is very low.
There are ALL sorts of wonderfully cool things you can do on a system where applications are allowed to trust each other, and the system is permissive by default.
You can customize behavior more easily, you can extend software more easily, you can add incredibly detailed & functional accessibility support, you can create incredibly powerful macros and commands.
This is so important that fundamental OS design from the early 90s actually prioritized and catered to exactly this style of open, trusted, platform (ex - all of COM in windows...). This is what made personal computing a reality...
All of those fall flat when you try to impose "well funded" security efforts.
Those efforts have a place, in the same way that bank vaults have a place. Whether that place is a personal computer is a different question.
Implying those folks are hostile for no reason is... at best a woeful misunderstanding of the situation, and at worst a malicious mischaracterization.
A solution that's integral to the system and not just loosely taped on is required.
They've for sure had more than their fair share of security issues, but those are bugs, not fundamental design problems as far as I understand?
However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.
I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.
Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.
The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.
- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
Gaming on Linux took off with Proton. Linux on phones might go the same path.
The reality is that we're lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.
Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.
Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that's mostly-good, they'll finally get something that's even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else's).
In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.
Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html/css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.
If only there weren't Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else's.
Also, the open nature of AOSP gave Google its advantage during the early days. Since then, Google has morphed into a company that would likely not make the same decision to create an open-source OS free for others to use and contribute to.
So in the end, what we as consumers actually get, in 2026:
- Google encourages application developers to use hardware attestation to prevent themselves from running on non-blessed, third-party AOSP distributions.
- Google builds basic functionality people care about (including passkeys!) into Play Services, a closed mega-application that happens to require a Google account for most features, and is a moving target for open distributions to mimic.
- Google has closed AOSP contributions to themselves and OEM partners only. AOSP releases are now quarterly source dumps.
- OEMs which traditionally allowed bootloader unlocking (and thus actual ownership of the hardware) have removed it as a matter of policy.
So what exactly is open about Android anymore? Does "source-available OS you can see and not touch" align with your interests? Because it's increasingly not aligned with mine.
death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?
A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
I mean, breaking news from 2010, but of course never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don't see why they would not remove the verification and that's an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.
I know iPhones aren't affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the "customization" things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don't care about.
I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow/habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I've seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development/distribution environment is gone, etc.
If people can't even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they're really just a shitty iOS knockoff.
These are all due to limitations imposed by Apple.
In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.
I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.
However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.
If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.
How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.
Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.
I'm not even talking about its "walled concentration camp" app model.
wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.
That said, I want off the iOS ecosystem, but Google has basically said guess what? We are going the way of Apple, so we don't care about you either.
So right now there isn't really anywhere else to go. I'm going to keep trucking in iOS for now, but I hope I find something better soon.
uBlock Origin on Firefox Mobile is significantly better than any Safari adblocker I've been able to find. (1Blocker's the best I've found for Safari.)
That's for me to decide, thank you very much.
And you know very well, There are only meme adblockers for the browser on IOS.