Technology

I will pay hard cash money for some devs to bring postmarketos to quality hardware vendors.

I'm all for buying a pinephone, but man are we missing out on the full potential from some genuinely good OEM hardware stuff like razr flip.

Aside from google doing google things, android has been a bloated java pos toy OS for nearly a decade now. It completely wastes the full potential of superior hardware by running everything on a shitty JVM known as the ART that was designed for when devices had <512mb of RAM. A Nintendo 3DS can do better multi process tasking than modern android which regularly kills app threads for no reason other than to screw with you because you dared to switch to a different app for 5 seconds.

Android was supposed to be the big apple killer because of its closeness to a desktop OS with heavy emphasis on widespread features and functionality. Even technically speaking, rooting got you there if you wanted to run whatever straight on the linux environment or swap kernels.

Its nothing but a ripoff iOS clone now. Android 7/8 was probably the peak of development and usability, and even back then people were complaining it didn't have groundbreaking improvements like 6 or lollipop.

Where are all the open source phone OSes? Where are the OS agnostic capable hardware phones? Technically some do exist, but I don't think they have any significant market share. Hope I'm wrong though.

Remember that brief period in the US where, for a fleeting moment, Lina Khan went after a few companies for monopolistic practices?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Malware-ridden apps made it into Google's Play Store, scored 19 million downloads

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/apps_android_malware/

Ok this needs harsh pushback, because phones are affordable, computers are not. There needs to be a massive project dealing with making phones platform agnostic.

How about letting the users decide what to sideload? What the hell?

I hope the EU is ready to also sue Google.

Wasn't Apple sued for not allowing sideloading?

Did some research and here are your options:

• use custom mod (the new restriction only applies to certified devices). You can use microG (/e/, iode, Lineage) or sandboxing (GrapheneOS) to run apps requiring Google services. Google will still try to kill it but my bet is it will still work for at least a couple of years
• Ubuntu Touch - you can buy new devices with it, it can run android apps using waydroid but you will not be able to run any apps requiring google services. It can run native Linux apps. Native UT apps are build using QML. It has a completely new system API so it's closer to Android then native Linux. It's based on Halium which uses the kernel from Android
• PostmarketOS - native Linux running native Linux apps. Can use waydroid. Few supported devices but everything works on PinePhone Pro and few others phones.
• Droidian or similiar - Debian running on Halium. Kind of half way between PostmarketOS and Ubunut Touch. Native Linux but running on Android based kernel

Personally, I will stick with GrapheneOS for now (my Pixel still has at least 6 years of support). When I'm unable to run all the apps I need on it I will switch to two phones setup: stock Android for work/car apps, some Linux phone for everything else. When my Pixel dies I will switch to iPhone.

I'm probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don't seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I've heard) pretty decently: https://furilabs.com/

Biggest drawback is it's based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn't worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.

Collection of different experiences I've variously seen online over the last year or so:

• https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2025/07-20-flx1-actually-usable-linux-phone.gmi
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41839326
• https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1fa1ljn/furilabs_flx1/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1j46f2w/flx1_linux_phone_display_out/
• https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/

I don't own one, myself, so I can't give any personal experience but I've seen it around for a few years now but most people don't seem to even know about it. Maybe there's a reason for that? But none I've ever seen anyone say.