I Give Up on Free Software Phones

Re:I Give Up on Free Software Phones by maratc on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @02:51PM (#36408729)

The meaning of the word "phone" has shifted in the recent years, and your requirements are a good representation of what that word meant in circa 2007; recently however the requirements 1-8 have so little relevance that it's possible to operate a device without satisfying any of them [0]. The new meaning of the word is an expanded version of #9 whereas it's a connected gadget that runs apps from the well-stocked built-in store.

Any newcomer, Linux or not, would immediately face the most obvious problem, which is a complete lack of a well-stocked store.

[0] I sometimes take my smartphone abroad for a combination of offline Google Maps and WiFi hopping.

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Re:I Give Up on Free Software Phones by LorenDB on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @04:13PM (#36409834)

Android devices could push something like https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore or even F-Droid to get a preinstalled store that's not completely evil.

For Linux devices, if you have a powerful enough phone (Pine64, can we please have a really beefy PinePhone?), you could bundle Waydroid + Aurora/F-Droid.

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Re:I Give Up on Free Software Phones by AdamJacobMuller on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @06:57PM (#36411896)

Exactly true.

From the original list, I really don't care at all about 1/2/3 (phone calls) and only care vaguely about SMS.

My requirements are for an excellent browser and an app store with support for messaging platforms (telegram/signal/skype/slack/teams/etc) and email support, everything else is either "extra" or an outright distraction I'd probably be better off without (twitter, reddit, etc).

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Re:I Give Up on Free Software Phones by TRiG_Ireland on Tuesday June 20, 2023 @07:23PM (#36412156)

My phone exists mostly for YouTube, WhatsApp, and providing a wifi hotspot for my desktop computers. (It is irritating that much about the phone itself assumes that the mobile broadband is a fallback, and that I have a separate internet connection to give me wifi. I don't. It sometimes refuses to install updates over mobile broadband, and insists that I find a wifi connection from somewhere, by going out to a café or something.)

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Re:I Give Up on Free Software Phones by moqmar on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @01:22AM (#36414675)

I think that's exactly the point: someone sells something as a phone, but doesn't even have the most basic features every phone since way before 2007 has. Sure, for an actually marketable product, you also need wifi & bluetooth, a good camera, a nice design, a UI/UX people actually want to use, apps for at least a couple common things and probably quite a bit more, but you also have to get the baseline of being a phone right, which at least most of the points are about. You simply can't skip those if you want to sell a "phone".

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Re:I Give Up on Free Software Phones by coldpie on Wednesday June 21, 2023 @09:03AM (#36417934)

> You simply can't skip those if you want to sell a "phone".

I recognize that's true for you, but it's definitely not true for me, and I expect many others, too. I'd honestly be fine if my "phone" dropped the "phone" part entirely. The only purpose of that feature is for spammers to make my phone vibrate a couple times per week. In the very rare (less than once per month) instances I need to actually talk to a human on the device, I'm sure someone could invent an app that allows for that.

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