Speaking of, the first waves of the new Jolla phone (with sailfish os) are apparently coming out now. I haven"t seen any posts about it on Lemmy yet, just an unboxing vid on YouTube

I really want Linux phones to catch on, but even watching demos, while they are making progress, it seems like they are still very far behind.

A phone for me (and many others) is more a lifestyle utility than a tech gadget, so reliability and compatibility is paramount. Things need to just work the first time every time for me to trust relying on it for important things.

I still follow the development of some projects and contribute when I can, but it doesn’t look like it’ll be a realistic option (for my use case at least) any time soon.

I got a new phone recently and I was so close to getting a Linux phone, but I chickened out. It seems damn close to being there, but just not reliable enough for me yet. I need a phone that works essentially all the time without question for everything I need. I can accept worse UX, as long as it works.

Or Google Play, for that matter!

(I don't really care because I find the idea of hooking your credit cards to a third party to pay with your phone creepy to begin with, but are there any non-Google-Pay alternatives for GrapheneOS or Linux phones?)

Google claims the google playstore is safe and the only way to avoid malware. Ironically it was like 65-70% of all malware on android came from the playstore.

You still think it's about security while it always has been about control.

What does Google care? They're making money off of it now.

I mean - how many of us are here because we got spiteful and petty over reddit API shit?

Yeah but mobile has no alternative. It's 2 shit options

Because you're not the end user, you're the product.

Google has been reducing the amount of AOSP updates released each year.

For one specific phone? Might be fairly simple and quick for a team that knows what it's doing.

For several or even more popular phones? Here we run into issues. Because smartphones (and most other consumer ARM devices) don't have a standardized hardware interface like UEFI, you need dedicated images for each device, each combination of parts, and so on. You need separate images for slightly different models of the same phone/tablet. Otherwise the different components will not be detected by the OS.

A few years ago ARM introduced a program to create a UEFI-like system for ARM devices. Progress has been painfully slow, at least in the consumer space. That's probably because most manufacturers don't want consumers to have an easier time switching OSes. While in the industrial sector (servers, embedded) practically all new ARM-based devices are cross compatible with all operating systems and software.

https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/systemready-compliance-program

This isn't an issue with ARM itself, but a standard procedure for any new instruction set architecture. We've been through all this with x86 already. Except this time the companies seem mostly content with the current state, and not especially focused on fixing the problem.

Phones don't have standardized hardware interfaces, so they're a lot more painful to develop for. You don't just create a graphics driver, you have to do it for every display.

That being said, there are linux distros for phones, but they are far from the maturity of Android.

You can publish your apps on f-droid.

You can still develop apps for lineage, calyx and graphene without registering your personal details to Google however that would greatly reduce your userbase pool.