We need a real GNU/Linux (not Android) smartphone ecosystem

As much as we laugh at IBM and Intel nowadays and praise the success of ARM, the x86-based IBM PC ecosystem with standardized BIOS that maintains compatibility for decades is such a blessing, a huge breakthrough that we don&#x27;t even notice anymore because we&#x27;re so used to it.<p>Before that the OS development was tightly coupled to hardware development. Booting an existing OS on a new device even with the same CPU required prior patching, configuration and re-implementation of the floppy drive driver. And it wasn&#x27;t seen as odd because that&#x27;s the way it was.<p>I don&#x27;t think the problem is a lack of OS enthusiasts, we probably have more of them than at the time Linux was born. The problem is they&#x27;re fighting an uphill battle against a swarm of slightly different CPUs and device trees and uncooperative vendors that do anything they can to lock the device.

Nokia had a chance for greatness around 2010 with Maemo and Meego. And either by stupidity or malice they ruined that. It was the right moment to have a chance, the smartphone game was still starting up, Nokia was still very influential in that arena, and the 2 devices it made (the N900 and N9) were great in their own way, for what was around that time.<p>But between their own internal sectors still betting on Symbian, not being open enough and the mole that Microsoft introduced with Elop that opportunity was lost.<p>From there on there was Sailfish (that never managed to get enough adoption), Ubuntu Touch and Firefox OS among others, but no big vendors backing.<p>And the opportunity moment was already passed, as the de facto platforms for mobile development were iOS and Android, not even Microsoft was successful pushing their own platform there. All the killer apps are already released for those platforms, trying something new won&#x27;t give the essentials to communicate with others and participate in society as of today.

The mobile ecosystem is basically the world Stallman and his comrades-in-arms wanted to prevent.<p>It did&#x27;t come to reality on the PC, but sneaked in through the backdoor with the advent of mobile devices.<p>I have little hope that this can be undone, but we need to be prepared to nip these tendencies in the bud for the next paradigm shift.

It’s happening (albeit slowly?)<p>Librem 5 PinePhone and its Pro variant FuriLabs FLX1<p>Mobian UBPorts PostMarket OS And all the other distributions.<p>Still what’s really lacking is some kind of critical mass that can’t be ignored. Many many services even in real life are locked behind an iOS&#x2F;play store wall (even sometimes with no alternative outside needing a smartphone).<p>We’re not completely locked in yet so there’s still time…

Something I think people in tech sometimes don’t realize is that the complexity of modern software generally requires a lot of money to be thrown at it to get meaningful amounts of stuff done, and that money is getting thrown at open source by the giants, who may have whole teams dedicated to advancing it. That means they’re the ones directing the R&amp;D and advancing the state of the art, so your little indie&#x2F;hobby&#x2F;crowdfunded&#x2F;grassroots thing isn’t going to be able to keep up, probably. Call me cynical, but that’s just what I seem to see right now.

No we really don&#x27;t.<p>What we <i>actually</i> need is to do all over again what has been done for the last 30 years on computers: developing and reverse engineering open source versions of the various drivers for mobile devices&#x27; hardware. Without them you will be forced to pray for ABI compatibility at every update and you will never get to know your actual hardware

As an analogy: I use Sway but it doesn’t stop me from running GTK apps. I could use Gnome as my desktop software — a giant GTK app for running other GTK apps — but I don’t <i>have</i> to.<p>Job scheduling, URL handling, settings daemons… we have standard tools for doing this as well on a Linux system. Somehow they remain only very loosely bound together and different bits can be omitted or swapped for alternatives.<p>With Android &#x2F; AOSP, are the components bound tightly together? I suppose the acid test would be: can I run Google maps APK on my Linux desktop as an app showing in a native window, or do I have to run an entire android emulator which has to take over a portion of my screen (and provide separate versions of all its own system services) to run one app?<p>If a WINE-for-Android like thing exists, then I’d be very happy to run a standard Linux system on my phone and have it boot into an Android launcher that could run Android apps, but also be able to do anything else I wanted to do with a bare Linux system.<p>Steamdeck from Valve does exactly this and it’s very good. The stock behaviour is to boot into their launcher (SteamOS) but if you sang you can toggle to a KDE desktop, get a shell in a terminal emulator, and hack away on what is just a regular PC.

We already have it, and it&#x27;s called Sailfish OS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sailfishos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sailfishos.org&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sailfish_OS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sailfish_OS</a>)<p>The paid version even comes with Android App Support - the &#x27;killer feature&#x27; that allows a Sailfish device to run full Android apps in a sandbox (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jolla.com&#x2F;appsupport" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jolla.com&#x2F;appsupport</a>).<p>Some people will inevitably moan that it&#x27;s proprietary, but that&#x27;s just the UI layer; the rest is wide open, familiar Linux. I can SSH into my device without any fancy workarounds, and it works almost identically to a desktop machine.<p>(Besides, how else is a company meant to survive in the super-competitive mobile device market? The OS is cheap. Android App Support is awesome. Pay up and be grateful!)<p>The UX is simple and consistent, WAY superior to iOS and Android.<p>Most importantly, it has an ecosystem: the Jolla app store, a comprehensive SDK, and an alternative open source app repository (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrepos.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrepos.net&#x2F;</a>).

No we don&#x27;t, because it would be UNIX command line and X11 on our phones, as proven by multiple attempts to GNU&#x2F;Linux phones since OpenMoko.<p>For all their flaws, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, and the gone Blackberry, Windows Phone, Symbian, actually rethought the whole programming stack, using modern programming languages, and UI&#x2F;UX.

The unforgivable part for me was Google prohibiting Android forks in their vendor licensing agreements for their add-on software.<p>It was a deeply cynical way of doing an end-run around the GPL, and I&#x27;ve held them in utter contempt ever since.

We need real FOSS Android. I wish people would start building from there.

Google et al pour billions annually into making android a first-class and dominant mobile OS. I think the FOSS community should leverage that and focus on liberating Android instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.

We already had not one, but multiple. They lost to android. I imagine there were multiple reasons, really, but one of them seems pretty basic: simple SDKs. Even when there was no Android apps, making one was easier, than making... whatever. Now, when there are thousands (maybe millions? I have no idea) Android apps, I don&#x27;t really see anything else catching on. To be fair, now there is this react-native approach, but still, all these permission frameworks, drivers, really necessary apps nobody will port and everybody needs...

We already have it, but people aren&#x27;t willing to use it. Using a real libre system will always be a little harder than using a nice and polished billionaire funded walled garden. For obvious reasons. People just aren&#x27;t willing to sacrifice even a little bit of comfort for the freedom, so products like Librem or PinePhone get mostly just complaints, comparison with Apple, and current users are ridiculed as nerds or weirdos. We will never have freedom as long as this is the prevailing culture. It&#x27;s up to us, the customers, the commenters.

The title and the fact that it&#x27;s posted on reddit gives a real &quot;someone needs to do something, but it&#x27;s not gonna be me.&quot; vibe.

Google AVF&#x2F;pKVM will allow unmodified Linux VMs on Pixel 7+. GrapheneOS has shipped early plumbing support, not yet exposed to users.

We need mandatory FLOSS and mandatory open-hardware with the obligation for all commercial products to be design and built openly from start to allow a community to form and switching marketing from mass advertisement to community flaws of interests. Essentially OEMs instead of being advertisement driven with brands like religions they should evolve toward being innovation-branded.<p>That&#x27;s would create a much better and knowledgeable world BUT it means having entrepreneurs in chief and managers and technicians aside ate the same level, &quot;high output managers&quot; do really dislike that.

As much as I like the concept, I&#x27;m not sure Linux phone is a good idea. Desktop Linux is not particularly prone to spyware scanning the filesystem and uploading it mainly because they mainly use free software from package repositories that are vetted by maintainers. If Linux phones are used like Android or iOS phones are used today (downloading random binaries, often to interact with real world things you can&#x27;t opt out of, with distribution controlled by a corporation not too worried about your privacy), it would be a privacy nightmare.

We do have one. I guess not many people even here know about it since it doesn&#x27;t have a multi-million ad campaign around it. I&#x27;ve been messing around with a few distros on my Pinephone. The base Pinephone is much too weak to be used as a daily driver, but maybe the Pro is better. There are distros like Ubuntu Touch and Arch Linux Mobile. There are specific phone DEs like Phosh and (KDE) Plasma Mobile. Hardware compatibility is low, but you can at least check them out in a VM on your desktop. The best part is that you can run any software that works on ARM desktop Linux, so &quot;app&quot; compatibility isn&#x27;t even a worry. Whether the software is usable in that form factor and resolution is another factor though.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.pine64.org&#x2F;index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_Releases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.pine64.org&#x2F;index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_R...</a>

I’d like a portable device with good battery that would run free software, mostly for privacy reasons. Anything with a good battery could do, GNU&#x2F;Linux would not be strictly necessary. Running TOR or a VPN over Wifi and a browser and fast enough to stream a YouTube video at 720p is all I need.<p>I wonder what would be the closest hardware today that could do it. Smartphone or small tablet form factor would do just fine for me.

The problem with open mobile phones is neither the phone hardware or software. The main problem is the damn <i>cellular network carriers</i>.<p>Until some government agency gets serious about forcing the cellular carriers to actually allow phones on their network without having to go through the anal violation that is &quot;certification&quot; for their network, the open mobile phone ecosystem will continue to suck.

How do you build such a thing when it doesn’t exist on PCs in the first place? In order to build an ecosystem you need cross compatible applications as well as some kind of strongly supported and strongly emphasized programming interface.

In the opposite direction, would Android make a decent Linux desktop if it got a little more polish for this use case? What about it&#x27;s code quality? Is it a mess or is it on par with GNOME + Wayland + whatever?

Kernel land is almost entirely Linux. Just without open-source drivers for some freakish reason.<p>Userland is as different from desktop Linux as you can possibly get.

There is sailfish OS. And it runs quite a few Android apps too.

No, we need an alternative smartphone ecosystem like a hole in the head. Android won, and AOSP is free software. There is no reason to undertake the Herculean task of writing a new mobile userspace core. You might as well write a new kernel while you&#x27;re at it. What would be the point? What are you going to do better than AOSP? A 5% more efficient binder?<p>At Google HQ, there is a veritable mountain of skulls of Android competitor projects. Please notice the skulls before doing something that will almost certainly add your project to the pile.

I&#x27;m fine with Android.

Is this a parody post?

We don&#x27;t need a non-android ecosystem. The compatibility is nice. The security features are nice.<p>What we need is more devices that allow unlocking the bootloader and rewriting the keys.