PinePhone – Beta Edition Linux SmartPhone Preorder

:shrug: I don't have a bank app installed on my phone right now. And there are absolutely going to be Open Source 2FA apps being built for Pinephone, so I'm good there.

Currently, I don't use a banking app because I don't trust my bank to have that level of access to my phone with a proprietary app, and because my bank's app isn't particularly good in the first place. So I'm not really losing out by using Pinephone. In fact, I might have more functionality after switching, since Android development is a mess and on a Linux platform I might be tempted to build something quickly for myself that periodically pulls down the CSV data from my bank and does a few things with it.

I'm not saying that proprietary devs are going to start mass-building apps for this, I'm just saying that for a segment of the population, this may turn out not to be the problem you think it is.

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Apps on my phone that I need replacements for:

- NewPipe

- Podcast app/music app

- Maps

- AndOTP

- Signal (and/or Matrix)

- Orgzly

- Email

- Good browser support

- Maybe a few misc utilities, probably something I'm forgetting

Do I have confidence that those apps or equivalents will be ported? Honestly, yes, I do. It would not take an insurmountable amount of work to build a Linux ecosystem that was more functional than my current phone setup.

I ordered one and then realized the GPU is from 2008, doesn't even support OpenGL ES 3!!!

Trying to cancel the order, even if supporting the initiative would be nice, my 3D MMO needs OpenGL ES 3!

> Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android?

This is an excellent question. The basic answer is that the incentive structures are different. Apple’s platforms are primarily designed to efficiently deliver commercial software. The app-store, the apis and everything else about their OS ecosystem is designed around the idea that packaged Apps, immutable to the user and remotely maintained by a commercial developer, are the answer to solving end-user problems using computers. They implement this model better than anyone else, but it’s not the only model.

Two other models are GNU Linux and it’s open source ecosystem, and the Smalltalk model as exemplified by pharo. In both of these models, the user isn’t just a consumer of Apps or the system, but is an active participant in creating it.

I’m not suggesting that either of these are the solution as they stand. I’m just pointing out that the iOS / Apple model is not the only possibility. You are right that just competing with it directly would fail. Even Android is failing at that.

> I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone.

This is perjorative sounding, but a reasonable concern. If the answer was ‘people would use smalltalk instead of buying apps’, or ‘with Linux people can build whatever phone they like’, then I’d agree with you.

Of course we need something that end-users can plausibly use without being a technologist.

My argument is that we can actually build such a thing, and that it can be much better as a ‘bicycle for the mind’ than iOS.

> Many companies have tried before - Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, and failed.

This is to be expected. A company trying to compete with Apple on their terms, even if they have the resources of Microsoft, is going to fail.

The answer will be a low-end disruption - something that is good enough, but also capable of things that iOS is not because of the commercial model. It won’t come from one company trying to take on Apple directly.

They don't have to provide stories, just a working website, and most already do. The problem lies with authentication. Banks used to do authentication by providing a stand-alone card-reader for your debit card that basically generated OTP challenge responses using the private key on the chip.

But banks see this is an expense that can be cut if everyone would just use the Android or IOS smartphone they already own (conveniently making the customer pay for the hardware), and when you have that support in place, you would want to be able to do the actual banking on your smartphone too — not just authenticating. So now banks have two apps and a PWA they must maintain, along with the infrastructure for the dedicated card-readers.

So at this point your bank is asking all the people still using card-readers to please consider using the app, so they can kill off that feature. Dutch bank ING tried this when their old authentication method needed replacing (they where one of the last banks still using SMS tokens). Their approach was to nudge/annoy/scare customers into using their app for a year, but in the end they folded and grudgingly had to provide stand-alone card-readers as well.

Some of the newer small digital only banks in the Netherlands are 100% app only though, and the bigger banks are quite jealous, but can't just drop support for their existing customer base.

I'm not quite sure what the destination is with this phone. This particular model seems to be for hobbiests who will use it as a second device for development, or purists who value privacy over all else.

I would prefer to pay double or triple for a phone that has all the opensource and privacy goals but also competes in performance and build so it can be my daily driver. I realize that we also want open standards and privacy for the masses but they will be the last group to adopt not the first.

If this is the secondary 'dev device' now because the platform isn't complete enough to be a primary, the price point makes sense. Can't wait for when it can be a daily driver. How far can you get with a good phone+contacts (voice calls), sms, and excellent web browser? Pretty far. Other apps are nice but they can be the add-ons.