"... None of that is as bad as NO smartphone alternative to Google and Apple, let alone an open and privacy-focused alternative. ..."

I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately not off the shelf hardware is expensive, software support for it (device drivers) is even more expensive if not plain impossible to obtain from manufacturers in the form of open documentation, and all off the shelf phones prevent any open operating system from running on them by design, therefore making a new platform from scratch is the only viable albeit very expensive solution.

I wish Purism, Pine64 and others best luck, however. In the meantime I can only dream of laws that would force hardware manufacturers to release technical data about hardware after either X years or once they declare it obsolete or some time after they stopped selling/supporting it. Just think of the huge decrease in pollution when a startup could take all those Android 2.0+ phones, all those junk iPhone clones from 5-7 years ago, and convert them say into home controllers, portable music players etc. Old phones became junk over time because the manufacturers programmed them to become as such by refusing any kind of repurposing.

> Just think of the huge decrease in pollution when a startup could take all those Android 2.0+ phones...and convert them say into home controllers, portable music players etc.

When it comes to Android 2.0-or-so phones, this is already possible in many cases. Just grab an old CyanogenMod image from the archived version of the site, grab kernel sources from the Lineage OS git repository, and start hacking on support for that phone as part of the postmarketOS project. The real problem is that every single one of those phone models runs on bespoke hardware, there's no standardization like you would find on the PC platform. It's a lot of effort for an unclear gain. A startup is not going to do this, especially when those phones are irredeemably insecure against sophisticated attackers, due to proprietary implementations in the baseband and WiFi/BT radio components.

Up until Android 3 or so I think open source kernel drivers where actually required for most things, so you totally could do this for the older phones.

Unfortunately these phones are incredibly under powered, they come from a time when arguments for bizarre custom OSes like Android actually still made some sense (not much IMO and after the generation that used android 4 it was really all about politics, economics, and control more than a technical argument.) The outdated radios are another issue; even WiFi evolves to the point where old enough devices stop being able to join some networks but the cellular interfaces are particularly bad.

The whole bespoke hardware thing is only an issue when you're updating the kernel (I've heard device tree debugging has gotten much better so maybe this is an opportunity to try and fix that heh), as long as the arm chip is new enough to use the modern calling conventions all of the distribution binaries should just work (I guess some of the earliest phones can't do this like the really ancient freescale SOCs etc. For those you're just stuck building everything yourself but with modern user spaces this really isn't as bad as it sounds.)

> Unfortunately these phones are incredibly under powered, they come from a time when arguments for bizarre custom OSes like Android actually still made some sense

Not much, IMO. As far as compute goes, those old phones were approximately as powerful as a Raspberry Pi 1 board, with plenty of RAM as well (512MB at a bare minimum). And a conventional Linux OS can run just fine on those specs, of course.

(GPU acceleration is actually more important to have, because you can't have a modern mobile UX without it. Even Purism is very possibly going to have issues on that front, BTW. GNOME-Mobile/Phosh is a nice prototype effort, but I do not regard it as genuinely usable just yet.)

There were plenty of Android phones with less than 512MB memory in the beginning. Xperia X10 Mini had 256MB to take one I owned. And that was not because it was a complete freak, the full size X10 had 384MB.

I seem to remember a few phones with 128 meg, but looking at a few at GSM Arena they all have 192MB or more. I have my old Android dev phone (upgraded all the way to Cupcake!), and that has 192MB RAM. I wonder if that still starts.

Sure you can run a Linux based OS in 64-128MB of ram.

The problem is that a lot of apps start misbehaving. Firefox and Libreoffice come to mind. Firefox is really impossible to replace too (IMO) I haven’t been able to log in to gmail from a gtk WebKit browser in years and medium doesn’t even work in them (it of course works in elinks.) You can run Firefox in <1GB of ram but it won’t be nice and it won’t run long.

I absolutely disagree with you about the GPU. As long as you’re not running gnome software graphics are plenty fast.

If I'm not wrong, the fight for the right to repair if it were to succeed would facilitate this.

This doesn't make sense to me. If all those things about the company and its execs are true they are almost certainly not gonna deliver the alternative you are clamoring for. In the meanwhile your money is sitting with them instead of a team that actually might

Except that they are making progress. They've upstreamed some import work to the kernal, they've contributed to phosh and libhandy. They clearly aren't working as fast as they (or many others) would like, but they are working. And not many other people are.

I also support hardware projects like ZeroPhone, Pine Phone, and the Dragonbox Pyra and software projects like Plasma Mobile. When I saw Purism articulate a vision for what a phone could be I had to support them too.

I wish they collaborated and communicated better, and I wish they had made some different decisions regarding the stack, but at the end of the day they are slowly moving the ball forward. But when I gave them $600 I did it partly because they had a vision that I valued and I wanted to signal to others that it is a vision worth investing in.

So I'm disappointed when I hear these reports, but I'm still supporting them because they are part of a very small community doing very important work. And since it's free software, it's not work that's going to waste, it can always be picked up by someone else. That's part of why it's so important.

I've seen third party developers demoing the devkit, from my understanding they really just need to stick it in a plastic shell and it's more or less good to go (outside of some bugs with gtk or video playback or whatever, phone calls and the shell works and that's all I want.)

Meego, Jolla, Puzzlephone, Firefox phone, Ubuntu phone, Librem, etc... Is there really that little demand that it's a nearly impossible task to get any "alternative" phone going?

It's exceedingly difficult to get traction and buy-in. As a freestanding effort, all but impossible. I'm holding out hope that as a side-gig / loss-leader (that is: rather unlike Purism's model, unfortunatley), it might be tractable.

Keep in mind that Microsoft and Facebook failed at this. That former industry giants Nokia and RIM were felled. That Sony Ericson is no longer free-standing. Palm has died.

It's a ruthlessly competitive market with huge winner-take-all dynamics. Apple and Google are the current incumbents. History's lesson is that they will probably fall, but only to be replaced by equally oppressive monopolies. This to me is not progress.

I'm hoping Purism does succeed.

Apple and Google will only be replaced when there is a disruptive innovation in the hardware form factor. Maybe AR goggles or something like that. As long as we stick with flat rectangular mobile devices there's just no room for other major competitors in the market.

Disruption, yes. Form-factor: not so sure.

The first mobile phones ... worked. Barely.

Innovations have come in service coverage, quality, pricing (flat-rate, unlimited calls, is now the norm), early app phones (Palm PDAs making the transition), integration with corporate email (RIM), Web access (from early on, but Apple made the breakthrough), and what really underpins the present mobile devices world: advertising.

It's the fact that Google can haul in about $100 billion a year in ads sales that makes Android viable. Apple is profitable on hardware, but even there, struggles to match in technology (though it's vastly ahead in UI/UX), and has a small fraction of the market of a niche it had created.

Microsoft lacks the ads tie-in, and faces obstacles to positioning itself as sole gatekeeper to its remaining desktop / enterprise software empire (practical, political, legal). Amazon's strength might be in leveraging devices as extensions of its storefront, but that's precisely the aspect of its devices that I found so off-putting. They've all the warmth and personal appeal of a third-tier shopping mall. Though if the company can get that right, and avoid Microsoft's 1990s antitrust experience, they're a considerable competitor.

Facebook's failure may be due to growing distrust of the company and of its second-tier status (after Google) in ads. There's not enough draw to the device, and not enough revenue to support development.

What opportunities this leaves for new entrants is an open question. It also raises the issue of Purism, or any other pure-play device firm's, future. Almost certainly aquisition by some party which is tied to a revenue or related-services or -systems model.

Given the incumbents, my bet would be first Amazon, secondary, if it is truely embracing Linux, Microsoft. Though there might be others. I discount Google or Apple. Facebook is a possibility, though given Purism's focus on freedom and privacy, would be fatal.

Outside the US: most device manufacturers are too strongly wedded to one of the incumbents to make a plausible play as this would imperil their Android or iPhone contracts, which would rule out Samsung, Sony, LG, etc. A non-US telco aquisition, possibly in Europe guided by privacy regimes, could be an option.

On reflection: focus on form factor is almost certainly a red herring. Look to the sustaining business model and positive/negative appeal factors.

Yes, and Amazon.

I'm not sure it's demand so much as extremely high barriers to entry. Android and iOS are both mature and have a lot of features, plus manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have a lot invested into the latest and greatest SoCs and other hardware features. Matching all that right out of the gate and building competitive hardware and an OS is hard, making it difficult to make something that the average consumer will notice.

Tbh, I have more hope in the Pinephone because they aren't trying to be too pure in that they're supporting Android to start but hopefully will allow other OS'es as well.

Doing the whole nine yards (in addition to trying to make the thing blob free) is going to take more than up front investment that other, already established manufacturers don't have to deal with, which is giving them a handicap in a fight they start behind in.

That handicap is also mitigated by a fanatical fanbase who will support a failing company to the end on principle.

You can't say that about most current manufacturers

plus paying for all the software patents

It's nearly impossible to get a "moonshot" phone going that attempts to displace iOS or Android. Most of these projects failed because they went too big. Making a phone is hard enough, but reinventing an entire ecosystem is pretty much impossible.

In my opinion, what Purism and Pine64 are doing is the right approach. Make a low-volume device for an existing operating system, without an additional "platform" layer on top. There are enough privacy and tech enthusiasts to sustain a small-volume manufacturer if you can make a functional device and keep costs down (which admittedly is a difficult problem). It's similar to the current micro-laptops that are popping up, or e-ink tablets. There's not a ton of demand, but they aren't going bankrupt.

Firefox OS at least lives on as KaiOS, more successful market-wise than Mozilla ever was with it.

Fairphone barely (it seems) keeps surviving and might still count somewhat as an "alternative" phone, even if their primary platform is Android.

A new OS is a big task to get to market - non-open contenders have failed too. The combination of an more open phone (which likely comes with compromises) and a new OS just makes the task even harder, and while enthusiastic, I'm not sure the market of people who'd prefer that product is large enough to make it real, sadly.

A modern smartphone phone needs an ecosystem aka apps. Even Microsoft is struggling with an ecosystem for Windows phones, and they sunk billions into them.

“An opensource phone that I can hack on” is a very, very, very niche market that can’t even cover the development costs.

The problem is that it is very difficult for even a medium-sized business to make the economics work for a hardware business based on Free Software. As soon as someone releases a device that even remotely gets traction, just watch: there will seemingly overnight be a dozen knock-offs available both undercutting on price and adding features. Great as a consumer, lousy as a (medium/large) business.

As a result, no one with the resources to readily pull it off wants to do so. Eventually it will happen. Hopefully it will be Purism and/or Pine64 because I'm really fed up with the proprietary offerings.

This is just not a problem in practice. There are literally dozens of knockoffs of the Raspberry Pi (a Free Software-based endeavor if there ever was one!), but none of them with the quality or the support that the original gets.

It's not impossible as long as it can run the apps people use most. In my country I'd guess they are WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram and obviously GMail and Chrome. And a lot of games.

None of those phones looked like it could run them. Furthermore it's pretty sure it won't run the next sensation, whatever it will be.

Made a comment below to this effect, I don't think it's mere demand, there are possibly bigger hurdles to making an appealing product that can rival cheapo mobile phones.

Well said,if only someone throwed money at purism like they did with signal.

Indeed, what good is signal on your phone, when your phone is out of your control?

The same part then says:

> However there are now so many signs that Purism isn't competent enough to be trusted with a phone, much less our privacy, that I cannot in good conscience do business with them.

Do you really want a badly executed Linux phone? If it ends up with major security vulnerabilities, vendor spyware and other nasty stuff, it will only harm the idea of Linux phone itself.

Going completely open takes a lot of money as you need to do the work yourself. Also it seems [0] that a lot of that work would be illegal in most (all?) countries. Starting to work on opening things up (RiscV cpu + everything that is not illegal/possible to open up, so I guess all but ble+wifi+gsm) opened up and then working with the authorities to open up those would be something I would put money into. Long term all this closed stuff in laptops, phones etc will be bad for many reasons.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/36aqdx/what...

I honestly think the LightPhone people have the right idea. They aren’t trying to compete with Google/Apple. They simply made a simple device whose idea is to not be a smartphone at all. It’s basically a feature phone, but far less distracting.