The google apps themselves are largely replaceable, but stuff like banking and communication (WhatsApp, Outlook) is where things tend to get problematic. You can run Android apps in Linux, but it might not be the most convenient thing to keep running at all times, and many banking apps will fail as they recognize the device as "insecure".

It's not as convenient as the app.

We should have our stand alone apps should we not?

We should but I'm afraid that ship has sailed and without EU's intervention it's not going to change. I was trying to buy a train ticket recently and the app for local train requires Google account now. It will just keep getting worse and more and more apps will rely on Google services and require play services and google accounts. This will not be solved by open source apps. Legal solution is required.

100% agree that regulatory push is needed. Everything uses an app now and it's not possible to force all the different developers to support deGoogled devices just by user pressure. There's simply not enough of us. EU has to treat it as strategic issue for their US tech sovereignty and start acting.

entirely depends on the phone and the setup you go with, postmarket is kinda more of a platform than a single specific OS, like if fedora made you choose one of their spins.

I've only used it on a pinephone (which isn't exactly the ideal hardware..) and my experience on that was that you could probably survive using it as a fancy feature phone.

I hadn't considered that. I might have to do that myself now that you mention it

Agreed — but from the point of view of a private person, it doesn’t much matter what epithet you need to prefix the word “problem”, it still remains a problem.

From the point of view of a potential phone manufacturer, it also means that whatever you do and no matter how great your product is, very, very few people are ever going to use it at all unless they can use it in whatever they need to do; and that means you will probably fail as a manufacturer.

Ok, you go and tell all the companies to stop using apps.

My car charger? Controlled with an app.

Location of car chargers? In an app.

My bike GPS? Controlled with an app.

My gym entry? An app.

Climbing wall? An app.

You tell all those companies to stop using apps and add control panels to everything, go back to paper maps and RFID entry cards. I'm sure they will do it if you explain to them that there are dozens of users that don't want to register with Google. Dozens!

Most of us don't need apps, but they're extremely convenient.

The point is separating convenience from profit-obsessed CEOs and surveillance-crazy governments.

Nobody needs mobile phones, we had a world without them, we can do it again...

https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-and-run-android-applications

You may want to install F-Droid to get applications graphically. Or use the Play Store if you installed a GAPPS image.

Still depends on Play Store.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_A_8.0_2015_(samsung-gt58)

i pulled it out of the ewaste bin ♻

NFC and battery life are absolutely huge concerns. Cell tower stuff isn’t great either but if you absolutely had to many of us can live without cellular and just do VOIP.

Apps aren’t that big an issue, waydroid is a thing and the appification of the internet is detrimental anyway. Do it in a browser.

For myself I don't consider NFC payments or the few apps that require device integrity auth. Not everyone falls into this category but a good percentage are. We need more modern open hardware. To the larger software point there is a lot of good Foss software out there even for phones. What we need is a open software center like a flathub that makes them easy to find and deploy.

The problem is that most people are passive consumers now, but it's slowly changing. Many of my friends who used to be regular normies having absolutely zero interest in technologies have recently switched to linux or FOSS apps and are now thamsalves FOSS enthusiasts. Heck, even my 80 year old grandma uses DeltaChat now.

Including voicemail, and RCS? Wow I need to check out this ecosystem again, thats exciting!

Android is NOT Linux.

It very much is, by the most basic technical definition of being an operating system based on the operating system kernel called Linux. I am sorry if this upsets Linux fans but this fact is easily verifiable.

Note that when I say Linux I mean only the kernel, i.e. the thing actually called Linux, and not any of the assortment of operating systems built around it (this includes Android) or any Linux-adjacent projects like GNU, systemd, GNOME, wayland, etc. Any operating system that includes those is a Linux operating system if it's built on the kernel called Linux, but only the kernel is a prerequisite for being "Linux."

Regardless it's not an answer to the problem posed by the OP, which is that "Play Store blocks Aurora Store." Anyone using Aurora Store is doing so because they require an app from Google Play Store. Whether they are using a "Linux phone" or not is irrelevant at this point because if they are, they are probably using an Android environment to run proprietary Android apps that come from Google Play Store and require Google Play Services.

This is why I say "Linux phones" are for the most part a red herring in the mobile software freedom discussion. A "Linux phone with Waydroid" is just an Android phone with extra steps. It's not like Wine/Proton which isn't Windows but an entirely independent implementation of Windows API. It's literally just running Android in a container. They would be nice to have at the final step of the freedom ladder after you've already removed yourself from the google ecosystem, but they are not the first step on the ladder.