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Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

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Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#51

Post by palata »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #39

I am frustratingly blind to today's alternate OSes. Where does a lay-consumers even start? Do I buy a used, but well supported (by alt OSes) phone? Which one would that be? Do I attempt to use my existing phone?

For a while, I was trying on old phones. I had LineageOS on my Samsung Galaxy S2, and it had a lot of problems (camera did not work, it would sometimes get hot and reboot, etc). Not the best experience but it was fun to try when my S2 got old.

Recently I feel like alt OSes have become really mature. I have been using a de-Googled /e/OS on a Fairphone 3+ for 1.5 years and I don't have anything to complain about the system. Even the store now works very well.

So I'd say, for your next phone, choose something that is well supported by those alternative OSes (typically Fairphone is), so that you can try, and fallback to stock Android if that's not working for you.

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#52

Post by wpwpwpw »

There's this years long quest to keep old phones alive, which is amazing (i'm myself using lineageos). But what are the odds of doing the crazy stuff people at asahi are doing with mX macs? There are absolutely no drivers for that hardware, and they are building everything from the ground up. Of course it's a huge amount of work given the considerable amount of different chipsets, cameras... but am I dumb to believe there would be a lot less work to upgrade no new generations of the same chipset? Aaand would it be less secure?

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#53

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ccouzens wrote: post #36
mofosyne wrote: post #33

Could there be a chance for splitting android into two half? One for per device low level initialization and one for a shared image for all android devices? So the idea is you be able to easily upgrade or even multiboot different android or linux images if you wish, without having to recompile for every device.

Sounds like project treble. I don't know how much of a success it has been, and I don't think it has been used to multiboot a phone or to boot a more standard Linux. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...

Yeah, this is exactly what GSIs are meant to do - see https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/ for a nice wiki talking about taking advantage of that.

I thought mobian was distributing a GSI to do non-Android on the Android base, but I can't seem to find it if they do that.

Also, bear in mind that this almost intentionally doesn't solve some support problems - any bugs/vulnerabilities in the base layer won't get fixed by GSIs (which is why DivestOS says it explicitly doesn't ship a GSI).

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#54

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ramesh31 wrote: post #49
palata wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easier for Apple to do because they make both the hardware and the OS. Say you are Sony and make an Android phone. You take some version of Android and port it to your hardware (with patches for your hardware e.g. in Linux, etc). Your Android system is now effectively a fork. Now say you want to get updates from upstream regularly. Every time, you may have conflicts with your patches, and you have to fix them. T…

I’m not sure this holds up, though. I could install Ubuntu latest on any random laptop from 2005 right now with zero issues. What exactly makes mobile special?

PCs nearly-universally use standardized interfaces, phones go hard on cost cutting and everyone ships their own badly-done drivers that are never upstreamed running on custom hardware that wouldn't run a "standard" image if you had one.

Or more succinctly, because phones won the race to the bottom.

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#55

Post by _rdvw »

palata wrote: post #42
FireInsight wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a Fairphone 4 and recently had to decide between DivestOS and CalyxOS decided to install Calyx. GrapheneOS is bettet than CalyxOS if you own a pixel, but CalyxOS has a few supported devices more. I decided against DivestOS eventhough it had technically better security and privacy due to the lack of microG. There's also /e/os which works on many devices and uses microG, but they're kinda building their own ecosy…

Have been using /e/OS for 1.5 years on my Fairphone 3+, I love it! Not sure what you mean about their ecosystem, I personally don't have an eCloud account. They have a NextCloud integration that I don't use but could work with your self-hosted instance. So yeah, no lock-in as far as I can tell.

Please see my list of issues with /e/OS: https://divestos.org/misc/e.txt

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#56

Post by _rdvw »

palata wrote: post #44
palata wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have been using /e/OS for 1.5 years on my Fairphone 3+, I love it! Not sure what you mean about their ecosystem, I personally don't have an eCloud account. They have a NextCloud integration that I don't use but could work with your self-hosted instance. So yeah, no lock-in as far as I can tell.

Also it appears to me that there is quite some drama between GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, and apparently the author of GrapheneOS already had some drama with their previous employer. So overall it did not help me trusting both of those projects. With /e/OS I haven't seen such a thing, it just feels like a nice community.

There is no drama, only misinformation.

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#57

Post by kkielhofner »

strenholme wrote: post #37

The problem with long term support for my Android phones has actually not been the fact that Android devices have incredibly short security update windows. That issue has been somewhat mitigated with the newer Google Pixel phones which have five years of security updates. The biggest issue for long term cell phone support is, even if we get an OS with a 10-year security update timeline like Rocky Linux, will the phon…

I’m really confused by this - my iPhone 6 from 2014 has 4G LTE (and still gets security updates). What were you buying in 2018 that was 3G!?

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#58

Post by commoner »

DivestOS also develops a collection of useful FOSS apps that can be installed on any Android device. These apps are available on F-Droid.

Highlights include:

- Mull (https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix), a privacy-focused fork of Firefox similar to LibreWolf

- Hypatia (https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/hypatia), a malware scanner that uses ClamAV signatures

- MotionLock (https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/motionlock), automatically locks device when it is face down or has not been moved

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#59

Post by zozbot234 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #53
ccouzens wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like project treble. I don't know how much of a success it has been, and I don't think it has been used to multiboot a phone or to boot a more standard Linux. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...

Yeah, this is exactly what GSIs are meant to do - see https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/wiki/ for a nice wiki talking about taking advantage of that. I thought mobian was distributing a GSI to do non-Android on the Android base, but I can't seem to find it if they do that. Also, bear in mind that this almost intentionally doesn't solve some support problems - any bugs/vulnerabilities in the base lay…

Droidian is the GSI-based project from the Mobian folks. Note that GSI's are not totally unified; they'll still vary by CPU architecture, starting Android version shipped with the device, weird features like "A" or "A+B" boot, etc.

Re: Show HN: DivestOS – Long-term support for end-of-life Android devices

#60

Post by bpye »

ccouzens wrote: post #40
kernal wrote: post #22

Unless these devices have the ability to update their binary OEM blobs then these cannot be considered secure. This is why alternative OSs like GrapheneOS end their support when the Google Pixel is EOL. If you want long term support buy an iPhone or an Android phone that guarantees at least 5 years of security updates.

Don't forget that even supported phones can have unpatchable hardware bugs. For example checkm8 back in 2019.

At least that required hardware access. If you had an exploitable bug in say some GPU firmware, then you'd realistically need to disable accelerated graphics everywhere no?
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