It might be terrible. I'm kind of on the fence about it. The hardware needs to be reliable, the drivers need to be reliable, it needs to be compatible with common carriers. There a few other things. But the software on this device just needs to be passable. I don't need it to be particularly good.
When thinking about the Librem phone, mentally move it out of the iPhone category and into the Raspberry Pi category. Even if it comes out and gets terrible reviews and the software is all half-baked, even if it can't replace my normal phone for most things, I still might be tempted to buy one even just as a secondary device.
This phone is months from shipping and we haven’t even been shown multi touch have we? Is that even a feature being promised?
Ultimately the difference between this and the Raspberry Pin is tangible - $614 to be exact. I know that Purism isn’t out to sell a mainstream phone, but my doubts are seriously strong that they’ll sell enough of these to justify the effort.
I can build anything that’s missing in Linux as long as someone invents the fountain of youth so that I can spent a few thousand engineering years on implementation.
Secondly, there are a lot of things that one can do in an ordinary desktop-Linux environment that are much more complicated in the Android world. On my old Nokia N900, I frequently wrote Python scripts that interacted with the system D-bus to automate things, and I did not have to install a big development environment or download someone else’s solution.
I know I can theoretically compile my own ROM or something to customize the desktop environment, but... bleh. It's time-consuming for me to build things on Linux, but it is more time consuming for me to build things on Android. Android development is just a pain all around.
This on the other hand, isn't just a >$600 phone. It's a >$600 grimoire[0]. Expensive, and cumbersome, but nearly all magic is. There's an almost subconscious brand (for lack of a better word) that devices of this nature fit into. They're trading user-experience for dev-experience, which is not something LineageOS or Android is optimized for.
As to the rest of your criticism, all of your other points seem completely fair. I'm not sure what I would put the odds at of the device succeeding (note, succeeding means finding a stable niche, not beating any other device). And while I can forgive a lot of flaws in software, for the price they're asking the hardware/drivers need to work well.
I'm very much in the "wait and see" camp. But I do see a lot of potential.
I don't disagree that there are some suboptimal things about Android but to bootstrap a new mobile OS platform from almost nothing, and being on-par not even matching Android especially with regards to security (sandboxing, a proper permission model) seems like it would require a dedicated team several years of development time, which Purism doesn't have.
[0]: https://anbox.io/
I just don’t see that happening because I think the demos sort of show this for themselves. It may be fun to develop for but it doesn’t look enjoyable or practical to use. Wait and see we shall!
I agree; I think it will be successful.
> it doesn’t look enjoyable or practical to use
You can say that about any phone (an iPhone, flagship Samsung, etc) that is not in a case. I bet it will be enjoyable and practical once they put it in a case.
You say it doesn't look enjoyable or practical to use, I'm saying 'Duh, it's a prototype not in a case, sitting flat on a table.'
When you said "I agree" then followed up with a statement opposite to what he said, that also felt like a non-sequitur.
If the Librem offers a more upgradable device, then that is already enough for the hacker community. Most of my time is either spent in a web browser, Emacs, or sending SMS. Also, many Android users who eschew Google apps and install LineageOS with F-droid as their app source, would probably find Librem a comfortable enviroment.
I also need to challenge you to look up a video of LineageOS and compare it to these videos. LineageOS would be like going forward 20 years into the future compared to this. This is a very rough tech demo at best, and this thing is supposed to ship this year.
LineageOS is giving you 95% of the privacy and freedom benefits while giving you a nearly infinitely better software library and UI along with it.
As a $100 tech toy phone I can see success but not $650. That’s iPhone money.
> 95% of the privacy and freedom
This phone is for the people who want the other 5%. It's not trying to compete with the iPhone.
> stumble its way through Gnome like these videos are doing.
Odd. I didn't see that at all in those videos.
It’s this software or nothing, essentially. I realize it’s open and that we could theoretically make our own, but phones are still an incredible beast to tame at this point.
This is going to work with basically zero carrier features and won’t even activate on important cellular networks like Verizon.
I don’t expect it to compete with the iPhone, but I have doubts that it will be a stable business for Purism. I guess we will find out.
I do see the stumbling. Have they shown us multi-touch at any point? Did you notice how this is a phone that depends on a control key to copy and paste text?
Every single finger touch screen UX convention that Apple sent down to us from the heavens in 2007 has been bafflingly ignored in this effort.
It’s a great start but this is a phone they’re shipping this year and they can’t even tell us many of the specs.
So does the phone.
> This is going to work with basically zero carrier features
This applies to any phone not bought via the carrier. I haven't bought a phone any different way for 20 years.
> and won’t even activate on important cellular networks like Verizon
That's pretty much a US only problem, and it's because of Verizon, not those phones.
Let's get the big stuff out of the way first and then continue working with Gnome to introduce a long press, etc.
I'm no expert, but this device is a full-fledged computer, not something with a locked-down bootloader. I imagine people smarter than me could install whatever OS they want to on this device.
I’m nervous though because hardware projects can fail so easily. Shipping and iterating on hardware isn’t the same as shipping software. In my opinion it just has to feel a little more “done” than this.
I mean, if "something else" is another Linux/BSD, sure, I'll believe that. I imagine that people can also do the same with the Librem phone though!
I'm stoked to have a phone that I can tinker with like I do my Linux desktop.
> it'll get released with a half baked UI and a barebones list of apps.
Have you even looked into the project?
It's running Gnome, on Linux, all the regular apps are there.
Check out the videos in this link, it's not half-baked:
https://puri.sm/posts/runs-on-the-librem-5-smartphone-week-3...
The software seems good. After all, it is just GNU/Linux/GNOME - all you need to do is get a C compiler and hardware drivers and then it just works. An older video did show major stutter during scrolling but that can probably be mitigated.
What's concerning is the hardware side of things. I don't think many people expected it to actually ship on the original planned release date, but the delay has been getting quite large. All the stuff on their blog is about software running on the dev kit; we have no idea what progress is like on the hardware. Turning it from that bare PCB into a phone is a lot of work.
Their marketing guy also released a video a month or two ago comparing the Librem boot time to that of an old Android phone, complete with OEM crapware. If they have nothing better to do than make such stupid comparisons, then it is hard to believe it isn't vaporware.
There are inexpensive pre-paid plans that use the major cell network towers, and you get the same speeds. I recommend Straight Talk; their plans are very cheap for the data you get, but there might be other cheaper services.
I agree it's taking them a while, but I've never built a phone before, so I am cutting them slack.
I find it easy to believe that it is not vaporware. They have videos of working devices, something that can be replicated in mass, not renders etc. They've shipped dev boards.
Also, the videos are legit for the software, but they are all running on the Dev Kit, not the actual phone hardware, which we haven't seen and have no idea what the progress on is like. So the hardware kinda does look like vaporware. In the link you have, for instance, the best they can do is take a fake circuit board image and fade it into a fake phone image. That's not encouraging.
I don't understand what the problem is exactly. There already exist phones that have the latest apps. I don't think Librem is trying to be a market leader, just build a device that's more open, so to say. The demographic isn't Google or Apple users, it's those who wish more control. They're not going to fix the app gap problem because it's not a real problem, it's a meaningless metric for phone advertisements. These videos are to demonstrate that they are working on filling the mobile usability gaps as well as building a phone that can run Linux software, not just mobile UI software.
As someone who preordered the Librem 5, I know I'm not going to get an operating system with the polish of iOS or Android. I'm willing to live with that; the phone is attractive for other reasons, both practical (easy to hack) and ideological (freedom!). Heck, even if the final product turns out so poorly that I end up never using it at all, I won't be too upset: even if my $600 didn't end up benefiting me personally, at least it went toward a serious attempt at achieving a worthy cause (an open phone).
Still, I would like to try actually using the phone as a daily driver, and for that to be viable, I'll need to be able to access the services I depend on. Luckily, I don't use that many services, and many of the ones I do use mostly have web versions; as much as I hate the experience of using webapps, I should be able to get by with them. But I can think of several that I'll have trouble accessing at all:
- 1Password
- iMessage (I guess I could try to set up the Matrix bridge.)
- Slack? Discord? (Both have desktop web versions, but not sure if they have usable mobile web versions. That said, I have bitlbee set up to connect to Discord already and I know there are bridges for Slack.)
I'm lucky that none of these seem to be hard blockers for me... but other people may not be so lucky.
And, well, if things work but are a poor experience, at some point I'll probably get fed up with it and switch back to my iPhone. Some people are more ideologically committed than I, but many are less. Though I'm not counting on it, I would love if Librem's OS gained momentum and became a sustainable ongoing project, rather than dying off as a prototype like so many prior attempts (webOS, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, etc.). For that to happen, it will need users.
I will probably be using slack still from my laptop which may be unacceptable for your needs. However if Slack’s electron app runs on Linux already it may already work on the Librem 5 on release. Maybe not in fancy phone UI mode but desktop mode?
TLDR; I don’t see apps as a blocker for me personally. I’m willing to give up a certain amount of tether for privacy. I don’t expect this phone to compete with the iPhone or Android devices for market share, nor should it have to compete.