As a fellow postmarketOS user, it's not fully ready for prime time, though it surely works.

If you need banking apps (not just bank in your browser), native popular messenger apps (Waydroid is there, but it's way from perfect) and stuff like such, postmarketOS and mobile Linux in general are still not ready for you.

If you want to explore the alternative and ready to make some sacrifices in a quest for independence, you should absolutely give it a spin. Many well-supported devices (Pixel 3a, Pocophone F1 etc. etc.) are old and extremely cheap to buy on the secondhand market, and will offer you a decent experience.

Okay, as I'm sure you know, Android is built on Linux, so saying something like Linux wouldn't work on phones is quite an odd statement. And Linux on PC's wasn't always "it just work". It's taken a long time and hard work to get it to where it is. And it's "just" code, there's no reason whatsoever that with a lot of sweat and elbow grease it can be a good user experience (see Sailfish OS). The desire and need for a non-Android OS has been quite low until recently.

I do agree that moving AOSP stewardship to someone else would be for the best and the easiest option for everyone involved (except Google I guess).

Or go Linux phone altogether. For the most part, it all works now!

What are the apps? Chances are, you'll have plenty enough of savvy userbase even without this BS.

A GNOME developer chimes in:

That's a really good start! As a GNOME developer, we outright ban AI contributions altogether due to environmental reasons. I know these are guidelines, but could there be some considerations on mentioning environmental concerns? It should align with KDE Eco.

In which one KDE dev replies:

-1 on my side for mentioning environmental concerns; I don't think it's the LLM contribution policy's job to cover that at all.

Yeah sure! If I ignore every bad thing about something I can absolutely gush about how good that thing is!

Quoting in bad faith, very constructive.

This completely warps the intent of the actual text.

The second quote doesn't even exist.

From an Android developer perspective, this is a big PIA. Most of my apps are open source and distributed outside of the Play Store, to ordinary users who are savvy and motivated enough to check "Unknown sources" but wouldn't know what developer mode or ADB is, never mind a custom rom.

I looked at the requirements, I will have to register EVERY app with Google if I want anyone to be able to install it apart from myself. It's just crazy but it's that or give up.

I thought they changed their minds and were going to allow non-store app installs after a 24 hour wait, because everyone complained. Did they reneg?

Edit: According to the article, no they did not. Fuck Google for this change, but why does this article make it seem llke changing a Developer Mode setting is some scary, dangerous thing? Enabling Developer Mode is literally the very first thing you should do when you get a new phone; it's nothing to fear monger over.

not a perfect solution: but.. SWITCH TO TERMUX

You can't flash microg on top of a ROM with google play services installed by default, even if you remove them

Sure, but that was an entirely different world. 2011 was pre-Snowden leaks and before people ever considered what the modern era's tech giants would be doing. Google's motto was still Don't be evil and very few but the most privacy-conscious people disbelieved them. People had more skepticism of Microslop, but this was before the public had Windows 8, 10, or 11 pushed on them. There wasn't really a market for privacy-friendly mobile OS because the modern, smart mobile OSes had only existed for a few years at that point and the general public had not yet been majorly betrayed by Google, Apple, or M$ at that point.

The modern era of tech has been so terrible that even politically uninvolved and privacy unaware folks are frothing at their mouths about datacenters & surveillance cameras and showing up to city council meetings to actually do something about it.

Still, I don't expect mobile Linux to dominate, even when it's ready. But there are plenty of people who are asking for it, beyond those that you would assume.

Another key difference between Windows Phone failing and the hypothetical chance for mobile Linux to succeed is that Linux has the largest pool of software developers to pull from and an unfathomable amount of software that won't even need to be manually ported to work on phones (some will, but most modern software use portable graphics libraries like GTK, Qt, etc.,).

Contrast that with Windows Phone being a bespoke, locked-down ecosystem with Linux having developer tools that more open, easy to integrate, and better documented than any proprietary walled-garden ever did.

Getting apps for mobile Linux won't be an issue like it was for Windows Phone except for cases like banks and other draconian companies. And those are important exceptions, but those can be overcome just as Linux gaming has. If those companies refuse to build for us, then we will build for ourselves, and they will be forced to cooperate when we become undeniable.

And even if you don't share my optimism for what future mobile Linux adoption might look like, I think we can agree that regardless of mobile Linux's "market success", people are going to build it anyway because people will always build cool stuff just for the love of the game. I just wish large teams like Graphene would consider divesting from AOSP and start putting some effort into mobile Linux in the long term.

They seem quite attached, don't they?

I wish it was as easy, but remember, Microsoft, despite having an actually decent mobile operating system (the people I know who had Windows phones generally liked the UI), could not compete because they were too late to the market.

Yes, and that's why we should put effort into making mobile Linux have those things. A team of talented developers like the ones that GOS has could go a long way toward that.

Yes. But for usability, the biggest thing Android has going for it is nothing technical, it's a ridiculous amount of apps to do literally anything you want and billions of existing users, which means more bugs are found and fixed. The mainline kernel Linux phone ecosystem does not have this and it's a bit of a hurdle.

Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility are two separate companies created from the split of the original Motorola, Inc. in January 2011

Looks like the cellphone company, Motorola Mobility LLC, is currently wholly owned by the, now Chinese company, Lenovo.

Apparently, it may be a different company. Checking on that.

Oh shit. Fr? I'm totally uninformed. I'll look this up but any quick pointers to help?

Wrong Motorola. There are two different companies.

Fuck. Guess I need to seriously reconsider

Though, I recently found out Motorola has license plate reading cameras and supposedly works with ICE. Which is gd gutting to hear.

https://wpde.com/news/local/flock-vs-automated-license-plate-readers-what-are-they-and-who-are-they-for-surveillance-ice-dhs-motorola-federal-government-court-lawsuit-artificial-intelligence-ai

https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/video-security-access-control/license-plate-recognition-camera-systems.html

https://callmc.com/ai-transforming-public-safety-lpr-assist-ai/

Edit: From a reply below, this may be a different company? Looking into it now.

Edit: Looks like the cellphone company, Motorola Mobility LLC, is currently wholly owned by the, now Chinese company, Lenovo. So, certainly appears to be different organizations. Glass someone caught me on that.

I do have a ps5, but I do not have an AMD BC-250. 😭

Yeah. I've actually been using Android since v1.xx