Linux Phones

Marius announced that VoLTE is now working satisfactorily for both Mediatek and Qualcomm. The modifications are already in the image for both Focal and Noble. With that said in order to use them the porter for each device must do the work on that and for Qualcomm the only device we have at the moment is the Fairphone 5. On the Mediatek side, Volla from 22 up are functional. Marius and Alfred have been running it as a daily driver for awhile and have found no major problems.

This is not just voice it is also SMS over VoLTE. AppLee reported some issues with MMS but Marius was surprised that MMS would work at all because it is a different type of protocol. Alfred attempted to test that out live but like most live attempts it didn’t work. Alfred also placed a call though and that did work.

In yet more big news, Marius has now succeeded in getting an eSIM to work. At the moment it functions only in command line but he is working on a UI for it. The fix used the Lpac library. A big shout out to the developers of that because it contains resources which we have used for lots of different things.

Marius confirmed to a questioner that both VoLTE and eSIM will have entries in Settings.

Halium 12 devices upgrade

Alagiralagir had a couple of questions. The first was to ask why all devices can’t be upgraded to Halium 12 so that they can take advantage of VoLTE? Alfred is the porter of the Pixel 3a but he expressed his view that the device has outlived its usefulness. It runs on Halium 9. It is not worth the effort of taking it further and there is not even a guarantee that Halium 12 would unlock VoLTE. There are times when the only way forward is to get a more modern phone and this is one of those times.

The Pixel 3a is not supported in Austria anymore, even if it is running the original Android. Time to let it go.

If we are going to make more use of Mastodon and Matrix we need volunteers to take care of that.

I’m looking for opinions from people about their personal preferences on the best Linux phones available today — both software and the phone hardware to accompany it.

My leading contenders right now are postmarketos running on a used Pixel or sailfishos running on jolla or Sony Xperia.

My priorities:

• commitment to FOSS, no lock-in
• Premium-tier phone hardware (camera, screen, battery)
• performant Android emulation or performant web app integration
• ongoing organization or community support
• few/no dependencies on American companies or products

Subjective and biased opinions are welcome; I’m really trying to get a feel of how the earliest adopters are thinking.

If so what's the feature compatibility like? Can u run android apks through a VM?

Fluffychat is still broken and we are waiting for the Mir updates which it needs, in order for Flutter to be compatible.

We still have groups on Matrix but they are not very much used. A move from telegram could be possible once we have a properly working Matrix client but even then we would need bridging from telegram and with so many groups that would only be practical for a few.

Well apart from a problem with MMS, VoLTE is working pretty well with Mediatek devices. On Qualcomm we are still making progress but not there yet. We need some testing of the beta version for Qualcomm, preferably with feedback from across the world because a standard is very loose and the exact situation is very variable.

In the USA and India 2G and 3G has already been shut down. It will be great to get UT working properly again in those markets.

Samsung make their phones almost impossible to work with. The same applies to Xiaomi and their locked boot loaders.

This is awesome news! Sailfish needs all the support it can get!

This is really cool that this community is picking up attention with linmob.net also mentioning us in a news release.

This is why we need the smaller alternatives to succeed.