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Linux phones are more important now than ever

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Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#471

Post by fossman »

everdrive wrote: post #400
nc30 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am starting to do that but I still find that will be annoying to keep up. The dumb device will need to be kept up-to-date because that's important for e.g banking apps so that automatically excludes "old" devices (usually 3+ years old) because most stop getting updates that fast. Even LineageOS isn't an option because it does not pass Google's integrity checks so I am afraid I will need to buy a new dumb phone ever…

On my to-do list is to join a local credit union after checking whether all services are available in person. All this mess is not worth simply being able to do stuff from my phone.

The trick is to never, ever install the banking app on your phone. If you only use their web app from the beginning (account creation) and say you don't have a duopoly phone, the app will not be required.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#472

Post by fossman »

Arch-TK wrote: post #412

But like, it won't matter how many viable Linux phones there are if the government tells you that if you want to pay your taxes you must first buy a piece of hardware blessed by an american corporation and running blessed software which doesn't let you control the device in order to access the tax payment portal. Because if you don't pay your taxes, the government will insist that you go to prison. The problem isn't…

I agree. Is there any country that requires an app to file your taxes?

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#473

Post by Nursie »

sterlind wrote: post #468
Nursie wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of major banks worldwide have apps, and they usually require un-rooted phones. People here seem to think this is some sort of Orwellian attempt to control them, but the reasons are more mundane and technical - many of them (mine included, from two countries) use security facilities on the phone to secure your accounts. For example, my HSBC UK app has replaced the little calculator thing they used to ship, and u…

> People here seem to think this is some sort of Orwellian attempt to control them, but the reasons are more mundane and technical - many of them (mine included, from two countries) use security facilities on the phone to secure your accounts. My GrapheneOS phone fully supports such facilities. I trust your app works on it? here's all you need to do, if not: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-g…

I can see how that reads like I'm an app developer! I'm not though, I just meant the apps from my bank that I use.

That looks like an interesting and useful capability.

I don't believe this will satisfy the crowd who want complete control over their systems though, as AFAICT graphene is not rooted by default and will likely fail these attestation checks if you root it. This will also not please the "Passkeys and hardware attestation are evil/non-FOSS by nature" crowd.

Definitely provides more freedom wrt. third-party app stores though.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#474

Post by Panzer04 »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #299
Panzer04 wrote: post #292

What's the hardest part about an open phone? Cellular support? App support? Maybe I'm unique, but nowadays 99% of my phone time is spent in a browser. If anything, it seems easier now to get something like this going because all you'd need is a bare bones UI and a good web browser. Sure, it's not competitive with a Samsung foldable, but he I've gotta start somewhere... I do sort of wonder if an x86-based phone is at…

I almost exclusively use the browser as well. I think the reason for that is simply because the software landscape is that bad. I hate the Playstore or Apple Store with a burning passion. They are all adware/malware nightmares that aren't worth the effort, never mind developing for them. We have really interesting and good hardware, but it is all moot because the software landscape is plain hell. I really puts me off…

Path dependence I guess.

Software is what people want and once a software ecosystem settles in place it gets a lot harder to move away later because of all the stuff you have to adapt and fix.

As far as I can tell there's no inherent reason an x86 device would have worse battery than ARM if you use the right processor. Pick up some small Lunar Lake chip, tune it low, aggressively tune the tasks you allow to run in the background etc.

Cellular is a bit annoying, and I can't speak at all to the difficulty of integrating with legacy phone services, but data access seems pretty easy to get with an external modem (maybe power consumption will suck..)

Definitely phone software landscape is abysmal. Everyone trying to lock down their stores and charge egregious prices to developers for the privilege of giving them access to their captive user markets. Makes me appreciate how fortunate we are to have Linux at all, and even Windows is leagues better, although MS is doing everything they can to develop their own little walled garden, albeit thankfully that horse has long bolted.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#475

Post by colonial »

Minority report: I will likely just switch to an iPhone, despite my typical gripes with Apple.

I've always seen my smartphone as a tool that doesn't do "much" (compared to a "real" computer) but can be relied on to always do what I need, whereas the inverse is ~true for my Linux desktop. (Think "bank app" versus "running Photoshop.")

By this metric, the only thing that historically ranked Android above iOS for me - even despite all the Google concerns - was sideloading and general openness.

Now that that's basically gone, I may as well move to a mobile OS that at least pretends to give a damn about my privacy.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#476

Post by fossman »

pessimizer wrote: post #102
neilv wrote: post #75

(Warning: Am only a software/product engineer, playing dilettante here, not an actual marketing/business expert.) Awhile back, I was thinking that one pragmatic way to get this viable Linux smartphone moving might be for hobbyists to focus on getting one easily available, affordable device working fully with pure Debian or PostmarketOS (no closed drivers or other modules, and preferably no blobs) and with Purism's Ph…

I would honestly just prefer that they use some semi-crap Chinese phone that is running on well-documented stuff a generation or four behind. If you could get Linux on a $50 phone, whoever was shipping them would sell 100K units. People would buy them just out of curiosity. I'm behind though: aren't the UIs for mobile Linux still bad? I still can't get the experience I got out of my N900 that had only 256M of RAM, ri…

$50 per phone would not make them enough money to pay developers. You would be left with a worse version of the Pinephone. We can't pay peanuts and expect the situation to improve significantly.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#477

Post by taneliv »

sterlind wrote: post #466
mrweasel wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Danish MitID identity "service" is actually pretty clever, except for the app used to approve actions or requests on your behalf. It's designed in a way that ensure that it can verify your age, but reveal nothing else about you. It isn't going to be used for "Porn ID" though. Instead it will provide your age information, basically 15+ or 18+ (I think those are the options), to an identity wallet, which in term wi…

it looks like MitID is basically country-wide SSO, isn't it? then isn't MitID collecting every website you authenticate to via the redirect uri?

Ah, yeah, that actually makes sense: now that the USA no longer shares intelligence information with some countries it previously did (or can't be trusted to do so), they have to implement alternatives.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#478

Post by jbstack »

nicman23 wrote: post #423
jbstack wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

because half of the internet is there

But in many cases a server operator doesn't expect any legitimate traffic from that half of the internet, or is willing to block traffic from it.

For example, there's generally no reason a customer would use their internet banking app with traffic routed via a datacentre other than for the reason you proposed (masking their IP address), so if the bank wants to prevent people doing that then blocking all data centre traffic is an effective way of doing it.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#479

Post by jbstack »

fragmede wrote: post #382
jbstack wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least with LLMs you have more options (Deepseek, Grok, offline models, etc.). It's still far from perfect, but it's not as bad as phones where you basically only have a choice of Android or iPhone if you don't want to have to live with major inconvenience (such as being unable to do online banking or pay for parking). It's also a lot easier to launch a competitor in the AI market: you just need capital. With phone…

> you just need capital The capital itself isn't going to do anything sitting in the bank. It's used to procure a team of PhDs, an team of SWEs, DevOps, business people, HR, marketing, access to a GPU supercomputer (renting a couple of 5090s off Vast.ai ain't gonna cut it). For, say, $50 million, you could get the blueprints to an Android phone and port your choice of Linux userland and get drivers working, and then…

That's not the point I was making. Both operations need capital. But capital isn't the only barrier to entry.

With a LLM, you can spend the money to develop the model, then spend some money marketing it, and if you get enough paying customers to cover your costs and a bit more then you're done. Done in the sense that you're now competing on the same level (roughly) as other LLM providers. Even if it's at a smaller scale, you can offer a similar product with similar features.

With a phone OS, that isn't enough. You need to become big enough that significant numbers of app developers are willing to publish apps on your store, including most major ones (Netflix, Spotify, WhatsApp, social media, banks, government agencies, etc.). Running a VM isn't a full solution: banking apps are already actively blocking usage just based on phone settings that they don't like; unlses your OS does a very convincing job of masquerading as a genuine Android/Apple device you're likely to run into problems (and if you do the latter you might hit legal problems). You also need to convince major manufacturers that it's worth bundling your OS with their phone.

Without those, for a significant segment of the population your phone OS will always be seen as an inferior product to Android / iOS.

Re: Linux phones are more important now than ever

#480

Post by jones89176 »

thebruce87m wrote: post #451
poetaster wrote: post #346

I'm a very happy Sailfish OS user, since 2016, before that Meego, Maemo (Nokia N900, N9). I do have an android phone for one App (Deutsche Post) which I use only when I need to ship stuff. Running on a Gigaset (made in Germany, 4KmA battery) I generally get two days of usage, 1 day if I'm stuck on Mastodon. From being able to do SDL2 stuff (Godot 3.5 for instance) with a wayland compositor to just not having f'ked UI…

> Sailfish OS On what hardware? Jolla C2?

I think Parent is using a Gigaset GS5
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