My daily driver is a Linux phone running Ubuntu Touch. Besides that I have three more phones running other Linux projects, basically to test them, and to report bugs.
In addition to those devices, I also have another one running Lineage OS because I need some apps that I can't run in any other way, v.gr. Monash University Low FODMAP Diet App.
It is just a deal breaker in my book, and likely for others.
It isn't even obviously stated on their documentation either, yet their homepage has "Keep your data private with an operating system that's fully secure."
I wish it were that simple, sometimes. Not everybody is in a position to, for varying reasons. We’re privileged to have that ability. There are entire groups of people who just can’t because of being “black listed” for one reason or another.
Initially this works, but unfortunately trends in society are making your options shrink over time.
I switched from the cheapest telco around (by a significant margin at the time, $10–25/month instead of $35–50 for what I needed), circles.life, in part because they had no website to control things, view usage, &c., but only exposed that stuff through a mobile app that I couldn’t run. (Also very clearly illegal conduct in matters like sending spam text messages from their service notifications number, which they refused to even acknowledge when directly confronted.) But the telco I’m on now, amaysim, introduced some new roaming arrangement a few months ago that you can only activate through their app, not their website. (I would like to use it next month, so hopefully talking to customer support will work. At least they actually let you talk to support without using their app, which circles.life made hard.) Also their website is painfully slow to log in: from hitting the login button to the next page starting to load takes fully 48 seconds, and their site is of the idiotic “insist on logging you out after ten minutes” variety (like most of these sorts of businesses, for baffling reasons), so viewing my usage is fairly painful. At least I can keep the tab open at the usage page, and then when I reload and get presented with the login form and press the login button, it’ll end up back at the usage page in a minute or so; some will lose what page you were on, so that you have to go through multiple steps each time.
Banks, most of the biggest ones in Australia still have online banking, but it’s generally painful to log into and use compared to their mobile apps, and they all have a nasty habit of adding new stuff to mobile either first or only. And newer bank labels are commonly mobile-only. Internet banking is largely treated as a legacy matter which they’re all just not particularly interested in.
toy phones are mostly the Google pixel, and Fairphones
- You can flash anything on these.
- You have 5-10 years of update on the android out of the box
- huge communities.
- consistent VoLTE and VoWIFI support
- lines are easy to understand (only a few models in each generation)
Samsung offers no long term support of phone, do hardly any publication to help open source communities to make a new image of android, and have the knox thing that makes it harder that it could be to flash. They just poop billions of different models every year without further support.
Xiaomi is like Porsche with the 911, which means they brand all of their phones the same, even when they have very different processors, vowifi support or not,... So pay attention to your exact model (the "pro" keyword isn't marketing, it can make the difference between a locked in Mediatek processor and a open source snapdragon)
I'm annoyed to have got the only flavour of Mi10-something without Vowifi support, for example, because I didn't read properly.
Sony has some OK phones to hack as well. And they look good ! But I think there was an article on HN a few days ago, about the hardware of the XA2 that called home to send analytics even with a custom ROM.
I'm also annoyed because I have had that exact model with iodéOS.
So yeah, I'd recommend to just get a Pixel phone if you want something compact (the 6A is pretty narrow), or the Fairphone if you want something large that you can physically repair, and update for the longest even if you don't hack it.
(I now have a Mi10 Lite and a Pixel 6A. I just had the latter, so that I can use one of these to hack a bit.)
Samsung community support is pretty good if you stick to the flagships, it's true that you lose Knox in the process but Knox is pretty much useless in my opinion anyways.
for a toy project, the pinephone is on my shopping list.
for serious use i stick to /e/OS supported phones. /e/OS has its own store that also gets apps from google play using their API. i wonder if that will be affected too. so far it's still working
how bad is the performance really? the pinephone pro is twice as expensive. is it really worth the price difference? it certainly is beyond my budget for toys, and at that pricepoint i'd rather invest into a fairphone.
interesting, but even if they did update it more frequently, i think most people don't update their phone that often either. divestOS approach to update webview independent of the phone is actually a clever way to make it easier to update
