Mobile software is unfortunately not really a lego that can always be combined at will.

In your examples you compare Android rebuilds with real Linux distros. The projects also have quite different goals (providing full manufacturer ROM replacement for Android on Lineage OS to reusing any old hardware to basically run servers on PostmarketOS).

From my understanding of the article, Postmarket or Lineage or any other mobile operating system will be able to make use of this project. The goal is to provide FOSS drivers, so that you can run Lineage without proprietary blobs copied from the distribution of Android provided by the device manufacturer.

It's mainly a libre purity project. A Lineage user won't be able to tell a thing, but the system will be "ethically pure"

This project is about reverse engineering the firmware blobs. It states that they do not want to create a distribution like postmarketOS or other projects do.

> LineageOS has huge problems since the mandatory eBPF requirements of late Android versions

It's a mixed bag. The eBPF requirement makes it harder to support newer AOSP versions on very old downstream kernels (you now need a close-to-mainline port, like what pmOS aims to provide) but because it is a requirement, it will make it easier for newer devices to run a more up-to-date kernel starting from the available downstream sources.

> Open source loses this war because proprietary devices are streamlined.

"Open source" didn't loose because it didn't fight anything. It was exactly "Open source" that enabled Google to dominate the smartphone landscape.

FSF and many other have been warning us for decades that Android been open source didn't matter because firmware, play store and many other components of Android were proprietary.

People gave a shit to them and now do you want to blame them for the results?

The diversity of projects were not and are not the problem. The problem is people that do nothing and only criticize.

Did you read the article? They're not creating nor choosing an operating system for the librephone project. They're looking into reverse engineering the binary firmware blobs needed to achieve a fully free software distribution on a modern device. Afaik, this work will benefit all alternative OS projects for whatever devices they succeed with.

I guess maybe a good analogy would be like trying to port coreboot to a laptop.

That's just the unfortunate reality of free software. Free software is anarchy, and the only people who thrive in anarchy are the ones who band into fiefdoms, who then fight amongst each other and build mutually incompatible projects (often from the very same components) which are direct substitutes to each other.

There's tons of evidence of this with stuff like linux distros, desktop environments (each one MUST have its own sanctioned file manager, video player, music player etc, god forbid some godless charlatan come along and make its own).

The price of admission into these 'tribes' is the adoption of the local creed (libraries/HIG/coding style/whatever/not speaking out against the Dear Leader/Core Principles/local purity committee). As with other such despotic organizations, incompetence and laziness is tolerated, disloyalty is not.

Supposedly Graphene is partnering with a major OEM (they say "one of the top 10") to get better hardware support. Even then they're still at the whim of Google, though - the most recent QPR1 update still has not been pushed to AOSP even after many weeks. Supposedly partnering with an OEM means they get these updates quicker but who knows.

Why is eBPF a problem?

Why partner with postmarketOS, LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or CalyxOS? This would be an open source initiative that contributors from any of those projects to add to. The results could be used by any of the aforementioned distributions, and more. It might even make running vanilla Linux on our exiting smartphones viable.

Why partner with Fairphone and Pine64? They already have open hardware, and require zero reverse engineering to get a fully open solution working. In a world with thousands of Fairphones and Pinephones, and billions of corporate smartphones, replacing the proprietary software needed to run those billions of corporate smartphones is a hell of a win for software freedom.

And are you really expecting the argument "open source loses" to be a real argument against a project by the Free Software Foundation? This is like asking a cancer charity why they don't endorse your preferred brand of cigarettes.

What the FSF is doing here isn't about maximizing your experience with your preferred custom ROM, it is about tearing down the proprietary software barriers that prevent the vast majority of smartphone users from fully owning the hardware they purchased. It fits perfectly with the FSF's goals.

You're forgetting 1 tiny thing: the wjole AOSP ecosystem is running on volunteer dev time. It's much more difficult to organize and streamline vision / roadmap.

As in every idealistic movement, the fundamentalists(which contribute all the talk and non of the walk) hijack it and drive it into a wall.

Why are all commenters on HN ignoring the only smartphone running an FSF-endorsed [0] operating system, Librem 5, and only list everything else? I just can't get it.

Even the FSF themselves didn't mention it or provided any reasoning for choosing a Google-controlled operating system - despite recommending Librem 5 earlier [1]. What am I missing?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641

[1] https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11/

> GrapheneOS has huge problems because of Pixel devices, which LineageOS could help with.

What are these "huge problems" caused by Pixel devices?

You have a good point about things coming together, but open source often is a lot of design and development by committee, or interest.

Librephone appears to be taking existing linux approaches, and specifically reverse engineering the SoC blobs to be completely free. I may have mis read, but it doesn't appear they are building another android distro for android phones, as they already have done that in the past.

Just tried to learn the difference between these and it seems like:

- Graphene - For current devices only - An alternative for phones that are supported and updated by Google. Security Patches, etc.

- LineageOS - For devices while they're supported or may not be updated that often. Support can be sometime by community members.

- PostmarketOS - devices that no longer have a maintained Android version for it, can just become a linux computer. Mobile functionality doesn't necessarily.

Some phone chips overtime end up having a hardware security flaw that software can't fix.

I really enjoy using Android. Part of the issue is not all deices get timely security updates, even if they get monthly updates, the updates might be from 6 months ago. Google might release a security patch but sometimes it has to go through the device manufacturer, and maybe even the mobile company. Pixel / Android pure installs seem to improve this a bit, but it's hard to have complete trust.

I agree about postmarketOS but eOS isn't the same as Lineageos, I used both and they are pretty different. eOS wants to have its own non-Google ecosystem which is a non-goal for Lineageos

PostmarketOS has never achieved proper support on any device so far.

I prefer /e/OS to LineageOS because it includes sensible defaults (e.g. Maps app + MicroG with location providers and signature spoofing enabled) that are a pain to set up for yourself after flashing vanilla LineageOS.

/e/OS already partners with Fairphone, if you like that hardware: https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairpho...

I agree that PostmarketOS needs a lot more love, but it's very far from being a daily driver system today.

TLDR or something? They aren't making an OS.

The project is about opening up the closed blobs that mobile chipsets use:

"This project's goal is not another Android distribution, but a long-term project to better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by virtually all SoCs made today."

I got an FP5, would not buy again.

Why do we have to have million Linux distros? Why do we have to have dozen desktop environments?

Because in FOSS world every single actor is a snowflake with unique vision. Any form of cooperation ends up in drama and moral accusations.

> the results can hopefully be used by non-Android [GNU/]Linux distros

That was stated as a goal at the FSF 40 event, videos of which should be online in the next few days.

I hate to complain, but I can't help but feel this is kind of impossible with the resources available to the people working on it. Reverse engineering a modern phone would take years and years of work from many people, and by the time you have it worked out, the phone is obsolete and very few people still use it.

The Apple Silicon macbooks seem a good example. The M1 came out about 5 years ago now and with a whole project and a lot of work later there is still limited hardware support. Having to put this effort in for all the models of phones seems massive.

When it is this late, it might as well have been never.

> you can do that with web apps

And this is not even always possible. In Ukraine, government app is released as an app, not a web service. Same goes for banking app. You just can't do these things from other devices, you must have (mainstream) Android or Apple phone.

I've been looking into projects like GrapheneOS for a while now, but it is just impossible to use in Ukraine.

As an EU citizen the biggest issue for me is that even if I bought a fairphone with grapheneOS, it might as well be a "dumb" phone. This is because all the apps to make our daily lives non-annoying require the Google Play or the Apple App store. So to me it's the lack of digital sovereignty from the EU and our individual countries that is the main issue. Sure it would be nice if big tech didn't close their platforms, but that ship appears to have sailed. If they ever get around to making these apps available through a different store, then I don't see why I wouldn't want a different OS.

We still need open hardware and more companies like fairphone to utilize it, but we primarily need the EU to get it's act together and break the reliance on big tech app stores. I know there are a few companies trying to build app stores with the necessary security compliance and if the EU wants to be serious about digital sovereignty it'll need to support these.

I understand your views.

However, I still stand by the idea of having options. Many of us in developed Countries are likely to remain on our IPhones or Androids, but there is still a chance for FSF to shine in other areas.

Also, as someone who was a FirefoxOS user (I think around 2011-2016) I am always open to replacing my Android with FREE (as in freedom) alternatives.

As I mentions in previous comments - the main "fight" is convenience vs freedom.

Either we have the convenience of being able to do things on our devices with little effort of all (with variations of lockdowns and/or less control)... or we run something that respects your freedoms but some things require a few more seconds/minutes to do.

Personally, I would choose the latter. However, I know I am the minority in the world of phones.

Don't get me wrong. I am not some freedom(software) fighter. I accept that there is a convenience I need on phones today. In the workplace, I need MS Teams. If I don't have this, my Company will have to offer me a Work phone. Other than this, I do use it for banking, map navigation, etc. However, these are not deal breakers for me.

Also, we have the convenience with AI, which more and more will adapt like a special friend, will make things ever harder in the freedom world. Be interesting to see how this evolves.

At the end of the day - things change. It's hard to think like this but we don't know what we will be using in the next 10 years. Maybe in this universe, Microsoft Windows might still be king in the OS world. However, in another Universe Microsoft ends up making too many poor decisions even businesses are open to alternatives.

It's the same thing for smart devices. Apple might make a STUPID decision in the next 10 years. Although we still have Android variants on the market, the Librephone might get a big push by ex-Apple users.

We shall see. If this project does well and can do certain types of "convenience" then I would be willing to try it!

It is always a pleasure to have something with convenience but does not cost my freedom.

> ..users, who will never accept anything that doesn’t let them do things like banking, shopping, mainstream social apps, etc.

Plenty of users are now buying feature phones that don't come with these features. Think of a libre phone as a uniquely user-focused, distraction-free device that still allows for a core smartphone/PDA compute featureset.

Indeed, this is the right time. I really want to daily drive a linux phone, but i dont want to buy a used phone. I hope this brings more hardware support for newer phones.

I'm willing to suffer a rough beta or alpha experience, but let me use modern hardware of my choice.

The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.

That said, the phone market is huge. They could sell enough devices to fund future development which might be good enough even if it doesn’t slow down Apple or Google. At least then there will be a device for those of us who are not happy with the state of things.

If rich techies on this website want to support something worthwhile, here you go

I am pretty sure that it's not going to be the Librem 5, despite Purism's efforts to get it RYF certified (which, thinking of the Redpine WiFi card) went so far that they seriously impacted user experience.

Why? There's no Android port for that device and they keep mentioning LineageOS.

Even the PINE64 PinePhone would be more likely, as that has Android support and even some LineageOS 22 support [1]. The Replicant project had eyed it as a target device [2].

That said, I'd expect a different device, and, assuming LineageOS supports one, and I would not be suprised to see a device that's not powered by a Qualcomm, Mediatek or Samsung SoC.

[1]: https://github.com/GloDroidCommunity/pine64-pinephone/releas...

[2]: https://blog.replicant.us/2024/03/replicant-status-and-repor...

> If the FSF manages to muster a lot more open source volunteers

First line of my pitch is, "When hundreds of millions of people need something, it doesn't make sense to wait for a handful of volunteers to build it for free."

hahahahaha 2k for a phone that cannot last a day. yeah no. i d rather go for a redmi with postmarket os. it does not even have a blob free modem

Congratulations, you just invented the open web circa 2006.

I think this is the right place to start.

A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there. If the OS is tightly controlled, we have no recourse.

Even in the worst case scenario, we could use a cheap big-tech-approved phone for these applications (a glorified digital token) and use the free phone for everything else. When there's enough adoption and trust in the new phone, non-technical avenues are available to influence these organizations to accept the alternative.

There is one solution to this problem that many people reading this message can contribute to:

Make sure your app has a progressive web app version that has feature parity with the store apps. That way, the app will work on phones like the librephone, and, if Apple or Google decide to kick you off the store, you and your users have some recourse. As a bonus, it’s compatible with open source — users can modify the app and install it without jailbreaks, root or (for now) sideloading.

React Native supports this (and can mostly be bundled with electron for mac/win/linux support).

Are there other stacks people can recommend?

It becomes much harder to force attestation on people if there's a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems.

Indeed, binary blobs are not much of a problem; it's anti-user "security" that has to be attacked. Otherwise we'll end up with user-hostile systems that we can see the source code of but can't modify, in contrast to systems that we can't see the source code of but can modify. The Windows modding scene of the late 90s/early 2000s is a good example of the latter (and I've joked that every power user was a novice reverse-engineer), while Android is turning out to be a good example of the former.

Stallman had a good idea for free (as in freedom) software, but then "missed the forest for the trees" by focusing on the source code.

> What does it matter if you can run a completely free software stack on your phone, if your bank software (or your required government ID, as is looking depressingly likely) requires you to run a Big Tech approved phone OS?

What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state and/or who knows who else? The reality is that we need both free hardware and free software. I can always tell my bank to fuck off and move my accounts to one that gives me freedom to use the mobile OS of my choosing, and if there isn't a single bank on earth willing to do that I can always simply refuse to use my cell phone for banking.

I'd much rather keep the phone I control and trust while limiting myself to only having the options of a desktop PC, a laptop, an ATM, a phone call, a drive thru, and walking into my bank's closest branch when interacting with my bank. Not being able to also stab my finger at a cell phone screen to check my balance isn't really that big of a deal.

Well you're partially right. After all, the "big tech approved phone OS" is actually Linux, so just having a free OS isn't enough to prevent it from being co-opted and turned into a locked-down platform.

But the partially wrong part is, we can make our own platform. PCs let you install and run any software you want, because it's an open platform. If we make an open platform smartphone that can compete on features with the closed behemoths, and that then becomes popular enough, then banks may offer apps on that.

But this is tricky too. Linux already has issues getting official support from corporations. We'd need our open platform to be compatible with the closed ones, so that it's easy for banks to run their apps on our open platform. There are already ways around this, like virtual machines to run Android, or other methods. But the closed behemoths may try and end-run around this, like DRM. So we'll still need to advocate for our rights and compatibility.

I hope all the things you mention never become mandatory some day because I currently use my phone for voice and text only. Sooner than later I plan to get rid of my phone all together. I'm gonna surprise the phone company and get a land line. That means any online service that uses SMS/text to verify me will fail.

Get a big tech second phone. Cheapest available. Just perform the needed tasks and use your Libre phone for everything else.

Does anyone remember having a copy of internet explorer that the bank required (or chrome these days) but using firefox for everything else? Apply that concept to a phone.

The mere fact such phone exist could be enough argument for pushing back, for ex. hurtful legislations.

People tend to see current world as carved in stone, like it is not going to change. It is, still not easy but, much easier to ask government not to mandate Windows/MacOS only program for essential task, because of couple of users of other systems, rather than asking to imagine that in future there might be other systems.

Yeah... Corporations and governments are starting to push remote attestation. There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.

Use the website. I’ve never seen a bank where a mobile app is the only option for remote access. If my bank did that, I’d switch banks.

This was a problem during the early 2000s when Windows and Internet Explorer were utterly dominant. Some banks, government services, and other essential websites used ActiveX controls, preventing access by non-Windows users. I remember during my senior year of high school being unable to fill out a college financial aid application circa late 2004 or early 2005 on my PC running FreeBSD and Firefox; I needed to use Windows and Internet Explorer.

I remember the stagnation of Internet Explorer combined with increased awareness of security exploits in Windows and Internet Explorer led to the rise of Mozilla Firefox and (to a lesser extent) increased marketshare for the Mac. This, combined with the arrival of smartphones around 2007, put pressure on organizations to make their Web sites accessible to a wider range of browsers instead of just IE.

Perhaps if we had a critical mass of people using phones with FOSS software, this would be enough for banks and other organizations to consider people who don’t use Apple/Google products.

The challenge, though, is getting that critical mass. Firefox benefitted from Microsoft’s fumbles in the 2000s. It’s going to be hard for a FOSS project to compete head-on against Apple and Google.

I agree that FSF and similar groups should be focusing efforts on influencing government policy at least as much as on software. The problem is that in practice, you’ll get a bunch of people who are erstwhile free software supporters, shouting back that the FSF should “stay n their lane” and stay out of politics (missing the point that in life, everything is politics).

you have to start somewhere, and with Goggle closing Android to non-approved apps this seems like the right move.

In an emergency, can't you call your bank over the phone? Do you depend on it still if you have a Computer?

Most importantly is to continue supporting web browser access and open web protocols. Then anyone with a web browser and device can use all the apps.

You can replace the banking system. Replacing the banking system does nothing if a single tech company can brick the phones of people using the replacement, or block it from launching.

If the government needs me to get a side phone for ID, I'll cross that bridge. For everyday use, I'm fine with having a "rogue" phone as my primary.

Funny that bank software needs approved phone, but runs absolutely fine in the browser. That to me sounds like collusion - something that regulators should look at. There is absolutely no need for banking app to require "legitimate" Android or other operating system.

seconding this. more compatible with day-to-day life/apps means more adoption which I believe is a snowball effect.,

> What does it matter if you can run a completely free software stack on your phone, if your bank software (or your required government ID, as is looking depressingly likely) requires you to run a Big Tech approved phone OS?

Log in to your bank over the internet, the normal way.

i think the best solution to this would be some sort of docker-project for people to remotely access a device hooked up to a raspberry pi or something at home via adb via https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy as "natively" as possible.

Banking might be the wrong example to choose from here since we discovered with cryptos how to handle money without governments

Banks and national id apps already work on GrapheneOS. Sometimes you just need to msg devs and ask them to use a different OS attestation method - see link 1. This battle is won already.

1.: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

> The two major phone OS companies both stand on the shoulders of IBM PC, openly bootable hardware, and the fantastic software systems nurtured and built on top of these platforms — the BSDs, GNU, Linux, and the long tail of all that run on them. It is very troubling that their own platforms are the antithesis of being openly hackable.

I can kinda see a lineage from the PC to Android, if only by way of Linux being born on the 386. But Apple? They've been doing their own thing since day 1; I can easily imagine a world where IBM never existed and the iPhone is unchanged.

This is the big barrier here, and unfortunately, it is legally impossible to open source.

In most countries, the spectrum that cell phone carriers use is licensed to the carrier, under the condition they only connect devices that are guaranteed to comply with the requirements of using that spectrum. The end user (i.e. the person with the phone) has no license to use the spectrum. So in order to get regulatory certification, basically every modem has to be locked down so that the end user cannot operate it in a way that would violate any rules or regulations for using that spectrum.

So basically, it's illegal to have open source modem firmware. At least, as long as cell phones are operating on spectrum that isn't open for public use.

Ultimately, if you want to open source a modem, you first need to build your own cell phone network.

Not insurmountable, given the availability of srsRAN.

https://www.srsran.com/

I for one am up to the idea of breaking android off Google due to the same reasons of chrome - conflict of interest since Google is an advertising company.

Yep, with DMA sometimes. I've heard this same thing on the Pinephone forums iirc during the early years.

If they wouldn’t have then X years later there would have been first beta release and zero apps on it except for a calculator app, a notes app, a calendar app, and maybe a mail app developed by the core developer team. The post would have definitely reached the top of hn, so that’d be a plus.

Android already is mobile: making it better makes sense. Linux already runs fine on it: termux and things like NOMone desktop combined with allowing virtual memory and keep apps running like some brands (Blackview, Oukitel) allow, you are there a lot of the way. Then Android desktop support (again, many brands have something already but it is now in Android mainline it seems). I use an oukitel rt7 as my main daily driver: it is rooted. It has some quirks and of course is very far from open, but things works, -ish. I would spend far more time on contributing if we had an open choice(or at least working) here that supports the 5g. On other phones/tablets, it is the fingerprint sensors, 3d face camera, but also different 'niche' auxillaries that would get far more attention if you at least can start with something that is (mostly open) and works. If we have coverage for a bunch of devices with everything working, it will be more attractive to work on other/newer ones.

With Linux, you will need, as I have seen on my pine phone, way too much focus on just basic apps which still are not good compared to their android equivalent: spending time there is not spending time on hardware support...

If prior "Linux phone" projects have taught me, it's that "based on desktop Linux" is a great way to have a ton of apps that install just fine, but can't meaningfully be used.

Not even just "requires a mouse/keyboard", but a lot of things of the form "assumes a reasonable screen size", ...

It's the right decision: Android is mostly open source and works well. Not to mention that in real life, right now, people need access to certain apps as a firm requirement.

Have you seen the attempts of past "Linux phones"? Usability, performance and usually battery life were horrible and progress was also slow.

There have been comments about the race to support recent phones. I hope that Fairphone will looked at as a target device. It would be a good cultural fit and they don't have a yearly device cycle which should also help.

It makes a lot of sense to me. There's a huge amount of work that's already been put into the Android ecosystem that can be used in a free software phone.

Trying to build a non-Android Linux phone that is competitive is just not practical at this point. It would require an enormous amount of funding.

Inertia is a hell of a thing.

Seems like a smart decision to me since that's what everything phone related builds to as a lowest common denominator anyway.

App compatibility is a thing, you know.

I like postmarketOS, but it always felt to me more like a pet project than a real OS, for that reason.

yes, but it's probably the quickest path to market with a reasonably certain customer satisfaction.

Doesn't stop you on working from there once that milestone is reached.. I would certainly welcome more alternatives in light of the recently announced changes from do-no-evilG

It's an incredible waste and an amazing example of how useless the FSF is today. Instead of supporting real Linux phones they're focusing on trying to degunk Android even more.

That's really as far as they need to go; if the userland is compatible with Linux, it can use all of the work that KDE and other organizations have put into building mobile interfaces.

These projects have stuff that works, but the lack of firmware for chips that can connect to modern cell infrastructure means that they can't really create an appealing product. The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed, and I hope the FSF makes it farther than everyone else has.

I think you misunderstood what they're planning to do.

Librephone isn't going to be releasing their own OS. It's an effort to systematically replace binary blobs so that existing projects like GrapheneOS and LineageOS are more free.

Yeah there's zero chance this will succeed. They would be much better off lobbying governments to enforce more openness in Android and iOS.

The concept of "outdated" is imposed by big tech itself through artificial restrictions. Apps are forced to update their minimum supported OS versions. Upgrades are stopped after 1 or 2 years. And so on.

Anyone who has replaced Windows 8 or Windows 10 on their 5+ year old machine with a distro like Xubuntu/Lubuntu realizes that "outdated" is often a sales propaganda term, not necessarily a technical term.

Yup, that's pretty bad. But, as an old fart with old eyes, I now use Safari and click the 'reader' version on many sites. Frankly, the web in it's early years was preferable to much of what I see nowadays. But, like I say, I'm an old fart. Heck, I used punch cards throughout my undergraduate days.

There was a time the brazilian government mandated free software in government computers. Lots of people hated it unfortunately. Eventually Microsoft lobbying put an end to it. That was around ten years ago... I wonder if such a thing could ever repeat again.

USB modems exist and work on Linux[0]. The Steam Deck is a Linux computer with a USB port. You could be living this reality today.

[0] https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/usb-4g-lte-advanced-m...

Vita had a WWAN variant. What that means is, hardware wise it's trivial, business wise it's impossible. It's always has been that way. It took Apple under peak Jobs leadership couple years to sell the iPhone globally.

something like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play

https://www.coreboot.org/

But do you trust that it obeys you and not three-letter agencies or hackers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Are you hoping the Free Software Foundation _doesn't_ prioritize Free Software? For people who are okay with random bits of proprietary software doing who-knows-what on their devices there are various alternatives already.

They will comply with the law because they are not making a phone, or any product at all for that matter. This is a reverse engineering initiative.

It will be much easier on the eyes (and perfect IMO) if font size changes from 13 to 16, and all line heights like 1 are fixed to 1.5.

ahahaha too true

but actually these kind of websites are way more informative also

instead of "clean" look where everything is just fluffed up

Not sure, but perhaps it could be somewhat easier to take them seriously if you had actually clicked on the link instead of living in an alternate reality where it's about "planning to create their own phone".

Someone hasn't read the article.