Wow, this is looking dark. I thought bad vendors were the exception and you can expect to unlock any device (except Apple) and run your own software unless it's something like Huawei (who aren't allowed to ship a normal Android anymore in the first place, not that that's related afaict but they changed policy around the same time)
I use root for various things, including
- making a backup of my data over WiFi without having to work with GUI export buttons for each app piecemeal and get only a fraction of the data
- having most Debian packages run out of the box by using an app called Linux Deploy, for example things like qalc, yt-dlp, ffmpeg, python, etc. I can (and regularly do) run without having to look for if someone maybe made an android version for it or if it's included in termux packages. Nearly anything I have on my laptop works on my phone, only wavemon broke around android 9 due to selinux iirc (the update rate and detail level of the Android API-provided information is abysmal)
- being able to see what apps store on my device, like years and years of queued reports from SwiftKey which it couldn't send because I don't let my keyboard have network access were t funny to see
- denying network access to apps using iptables (AFwall, specifically). A fake VPN like trackercontrol is great but I don't trust it to limit system components like Google's or Samsung's stuff
- I browse pictures on my computer using an ssh mount. Matter of clicking the bookmark in Nemo (the default file manager) and it logs in with an ssh key automatically. Probably there's other ways to do this, but having 1 way to browse files remotely across all my devices, from server to phone, makes everything easy
- probably more I'm forgetting because it's just running in the background (I initially forgot that I had set up AFwall years ago, for example)
The choice of device is already very limited when you don't want to pay extortionary rates for extra storage and be able to charge and use earphones at the same time, as I do daily. If I now also need to avoid 9 out of 10 vendors for actually being able to control my own device... What's the point still, it really isn't more than a portable camera with a thin client for Netflix and Signal at that point
I've considered it but, sadly, the reasons to not do that are increasing rather than decreasing. Off the top of my head:
Can't use a public transport here without the app. They recently put a little animation on the ticket screen so that you now need to record a video instead of a screenshot as backup for when the app logs you out again; it also only runs on big tech and is only legally obtainable via the big tech stores (no apk download, for example). Germany is really big on privacy and free software but Deutsche Bahn is... very privatised, let's say
Which phone would function as the base installation of Signal, and does Signal Desktop work properly on 5" extreme-DPI screen?
Can I make and receive calls on those devices without being in data/WiFi range? I don't have full coverage at home on either of those and would drop if SIP clients are the solution for that
I also like having a decent camera in the same device. Tried Fairphone before and that was be very borderline (resold it for size reasons in the end); the FOSS software simply isn't there
Exceedingly few games are made for GNU/Linux on screens as tiny as these. Would need to run Android emulation to play virtually any mobile game, including the ones I currently enjoy
I don't think desktop OpenStreetMap software exists with even half the features as I use in OsmAnd, and for editing JOSM sounds not very nice to use on mobile as compared to, say, StreetComplete (different purposes; I use JOSM on desktop but not on a 5" touchscreen)
---
The only solution I've found that balances usability, stability, and the freedom to run what you want is the vendor's stock Android (e.g. for the camera app and lockscreen shortcuts) with Magisk and Linux Deploy. From there, you can merge desktop tools like restic for backups with mobile apps running smoothly. The market doesn't seem geared towards people like us, though
I learned of Waydroid yesterday in the NewPipe thread, haven't had a chance to look into it yet! It sounds cool but so far emulators have always been unusably slow. Since it's not being presented as some major breakthrough, I don't expect it to be better than Google's official emulator. Still planning to take a look, though
And good to know they're supposed to work with regular gsm networks! Didn't find much on a quick search, so I wasn't sure. I assume it requires specific hardware and software, like a Purism rather than flashing a distribution onto the phone model you like?
Waydroid isn't a VM, it runs parts of the Android software stack directly on the real kernel on bare metal. So perf should be good.
As to cell connectivity / telephony: Honestly I'm not super familiar, I just see it mentioned sometimes; I'd suggest asking in the postmarketos matrix chat. I suspect it works in a somewhat general sense but might need some work per device to get drivers working or something like that.
All other things held fixed, it would. Unfortunately, other things are not held fixed; proper unixy[0] Linux phones today are either 1. devices designed for that case, which are underpowered hardware and/or really expensive, or 2. devices not designed for that case (generally devices that shipped with Android) which have fairly awful hardware support.
[0] If you have a better way to describe both GNU/Linux and Alpine derivatives, I'm all ears, but postmarketos is arguably the biggest player in this space and it's notGNU/Linux so I'm a bit stuck.
What I really want from a phone seems impossible to get now. I want a phone I can run all my essential apps (whatsapp, firefox, all banks, obsidian), which will run open source, degoogled android (lineage or graphene), that's cheap, has a headphone jack, and a fingerprint scanner. This seems impossible. My current phone is ideal other than the bank apps will not run if I flash lineage to it or even unlock my bootloader, which is an issue since if I don't have them I essentially can't live in modern society due to 3ds.
The likely solution is an old phone with everything stock just for the banks, and this phone with everything else. That's not ideal either if I want to check my balance when I'm out, or travelling, and don't have the 2nd phone. Maybe someone will make a tiny android for €30 or so with the lowest possible specs for this use case. It could be sold as a device for putting banks and 2fa apps on.
In the Netherlands, it used to be standard that you receive a free 2-factor device for online banking. It takes your smartcard and basically emulates a transaction to generate a signature, so they're also interchangeable between people (someone in class would always have one), it has all the safety of a normal transaction in the store (something you know + something you have), it's pretty neat besides being closed source.
Now I haven't lived there in a few years and I've found that, in Germany, the bank asked me to pay some 35€ to get sent a customised device that only I can use so that I can log into the online banking. Seems pretty crazy if I'm going to subsequently loan them tens of thousands at zero interest nowadays, but okay that's the cost of privacy. They sent the wrong one initially (for someone else's account) but that got sorted in the end, but so this works not to need a banking app on my phone for authorising transactions
Perhaps you can check if your bank, or a different bank in your country, offers this as well?
While it is separate hardware and thus less convenient, I also find it much safer not to have something of this value accessible via my phone. The hardware device shows what transaction it is authorising so phishing cannot work (you'd see the amount and/or recipient doesn't match)
It really is a shame. Sure, the vast majority use phones as a consumer product. Maybe they are happy with that but for any engineer it really is wasted potential. The tool could be so much more if we just had sensible operating systems and open hardware interfaces.
All these manufacturers are also not reliable for notebooks either. Microsoft belongs in the offender list with trying to enforce secure boot and similar mechanisms we still only have to endure on phones as of today.
Wow, this is looking dark. I thought bad vendors were the exception and you can expect to unlock any device (except Apple) and run your own software unless it's something like Huawei (who aren't allowed to ship a normal Android anymore in the first place, not that that's related afaict but they changed policy around the same time)
I use root for various things, including
- making a backup of my data over WiFi without having to work with GUI export buttons for each app piecemeal and get only a fraction of the data
- having most Debian packages run out of the box by using an app called Linux Deploy, for example things like qalc, yt-dlp, ffmpeg, python, etc. I can (and regularly do) run without having to look for if someone maybe made an android version for it or if it's included in termux packages. Nearly anything I have on my laptop works on my phone, only wavemon broke around android 9 due to selinux iirc (the update rate and detail level of the Android API-provided information is abysmal)
- being able to see what apps store on my device, like years and years of queued reports from SwiftKey which it couldn't send because I don't let my keyboard have network access were t funny to see
- denying network access to apps using iptables (AFwall, specifically). A fake VPN like trackercontrol is great but I don't trust it to limit system components like Google's or Samsung's stuff
- I browse pictures on my computer using an ssh mount. Matter of clicking the bookmark in Nemo (the default file manager) and it logs in with an ssh key automatically. Probably there's other ways to do this, but having 1 way to browse files remotely across all my devices, from server to phone, makes everything easy
- probably more I'm forgetting because it's just running in the background (I initially forgot that I had set up AFwall years ago, for example)
The choice of device is already very limited when you don't want to pay extortionary rates for extra storage and be able to charge and use earphones at the same time, as I do daily. If I now also need to avoid 9 out of 10 vendors for actually being able to control my own device... What's the point still, it really isn't more than a portable camera with a thin client for Netflix and Signal at that point
Sounds like a GNU/Linux phone would fit your use case better.
I've considered it but, sadly, the reasons to not do that are increasing rather than decreasing. Off the top of my head:
Can't use a public transport here without the app. They recently put a little animation on the ticket screen so that you now need to record a video instead of a screenshot as backup for when the app logs you out again; it also only runs on big tech and is only legally obtainable via the big tech stores (no apk download, for example). Germany is really big on privacy and free software but Deutsche Bahn is... very privatised, let's say
Which phone would function as the base installation of Signal, and does Signal Desktop work properly on 5" extreme-DPI screen?
Can I make and receive calls on those devices without being in data/WiFi range? I don't have full coverage at home on either of those and would drop if SIP clients are the solution for that
I also like having a decent camera in the same device. Tried Fairphone before and that was be very borderline (resold it for size reasons in the end); the FOSS software simply isn't there
Exceedingly few games are made for GNU/Linux on screens as tiny as these. Would need to run Android emulation to play virtually any mobile game, including the ones I currently enjoy
I don't think desktop OpenStreetMap software exists with even half the features as I use in OsmAnd, and for editing JOSM sounds not very nice to use on mobile as compared to, say, StreetComplete (different purposes; I use JOSM on desktop but not on a 5" touchscreen)
---
The only solution I've found that balances usability, stability, and the freedom to run what you want is the vendor's stock Android (e.g. for the camera app and lockscreen shortcuts) with Magisk and Linux Deploy. From there, you can merge desktop tools like restic for backups with mobile apps running smoothly. The market doesn't seem geared towards people like us, though
FWIW...
> Can't use a public transport here without the app.
Does it run under waydroid?
> Can I make and receive calls on those devices without being in data/WiFi range?
I'm pretty sure that is supposed to work
I learned of Waydroid yesterday in the NewPipe thread, haven't had a chance to look into it yet! It sounds cool but so far emulators have always been unusably slow. Since it's not being presented as some major breakthrough, I don't expect it to be better than Google's official emulator. Still planning to take a look, though
And good to know they're supposed to work with regular gsm networks! Didn't find much on a quick search, so I wasn't sure. I assume it requires specific hardware and software, like a Purism rather than flashing a distribution onto the phone model you like?
Waydroid isn't a VM, it runs parts of the Android software stack directly on the real kernel on bare metal. So perf should be good.
As to cell connectivity / telephony: Honestly I'm not super familiar, I just see it mentioned sometimes; I'd suggest asking in the postmarketos matrix chat. I suspect it works in a somewhat general sense but might need some work per device to get drivers working or something like that.
All other things held fixed, it would. Unfortunately, other things are not held fixed; proper unixy[0] Linux phones today are either 1. devices designed for that case, which are underpowered hardware and/or really expensive, or 2. devices not designed for that case (generally devices that shipped with Android) which have fairly awful hardware support.
[0] If you have a better way to describe both GNU/Linux and Alpine derivatives, I'm all ears, but postmarketos is arguably the biggest player in this space and it's not GNU/Linux so I'm a bit stuck.
> underpowered hardware
https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/
What I really want from a phone seems impossible to get now. I want a phone I can run all my essential apps (whatsapp, firefox, all banks, obsidian), which will run open source, degoogled android (lineage or graphene), that's cheap, has a headphone jack, and a fingerprint scanner. This seems impossible. My current phone is ideal other than the bank apps will not run if I flash lineage to it or even unlock my bootloader, which is an issue since if I don't have them I essentially can't live in modern society due to 3ds.
The likely solution is an old phone with everything stock just for the banks, and this phone with everything else. That's not ideal either if I want to check my balance when I'm out, or travelling, and don't have the 2nd phone. Maybe someone will make a tiny android for €30 or so with the lowest possible specs for this use case. It could be sold as a device for putting banks and 2fa apps on.
In the Netherlands, it used to be standard that you receive a free 2-factor device for online banking. It takes your smartcard and basically emulates a transaction to generate a signature, so they're also interchangeable between people (someone in class would always have one), it has all the safety of a normal transaction in the store (something you know + something you have), it's pretty neat besides being closed source.
Now I haven't lived there in a few years and I've found that, in Germany, the bank asked me to pay some 35€ to get sent a customised device that only I can use so that I can log into the online banking. Seems pretty crazy if I'm going to subsequently loan them tens of thousands at zero interest nowadays, but okay that's the cost of privacy. They sent the wrong one initially (for someone else's account) but that got sorted in the end, but so this works not to need a banking app on my phone for authorising transactions
Perhaps you can check if your bank, or a different bank in your country, offers this as well?
While it is separate hardware and thus less convenient, I also find it much safer not to have something of this value accessible via my phone. The hardware device shows what transaction it is authorising so phishing cannot work (you'd see the amount and/or recipient doesn't match)
It really is a shame. Sure, the vast majority use phones as a consumer product. Maybe they are happy with that but for any engineer it really is wasted potential. The tool could be so much more if we just had sensible operating systems and open hardware interfaces.
All these manufacturers are also not reliable for notebooks either. Microsoft belongs in the offender list with trying to enforce secure boot and similar mechanisms we still only have to endure on phones as of today.
So many devices with non-unlockable bootloader.
It highlights a major legislative failure.