A nice sentiment but in reality the n900 and n9 were both too slow to use. That's the first thing that would have to be fixed.

That does sound fucking based, but probably can't run android apps as well right?

Dude holy shit, modular emmc AND RAM, AND modem??! This looks sick as hell!!

And the apps that do have lifetime licenses went from $5 to like $80

Blocking basically all ads on your phone is trivially easy.

1. Find "Private DNS" (or something similar) in your settings
2. Set it to dns.adguard-dns.com

And that's really it. There are other ad-blocking dns providers out there, and they all use slightly different block lists. I like adguard because their blocklist is less aggressive than others I've tried, and I'd rather an ad or two get through than for something legitimate to stop working.

You can also set it up as your dns provider in your router to block ads on your entire network. People tend to like to self-host adguard or pihole for that, but as long as you don't care about a dashboard or manual dns entries, using a free dns is as easy as it gets and is very effective. I self-host as a hobby and I still just use adguard's public dns.

It's not like everything (or rather every dev) necessarily wants your money. We're forced to monetize even our hobbies in an attempt to live a worthwhile life. It's a cancerous system infecting everything and everyone.

To develop great FOSS software without the need of monetization is an enormous privilege.

Oh that sucks. It’s par for iOS though.

Yeah, me too. So what if apps were simpler than they are now… that would be nice.

And if you oay, it's not private.

I held onto jailbreaking till the end. I have a iPhone on iOS 17.0 and TrollStore for permanent sideloaded apps. It’s pretty awesome! There hasn’t been anything like a jailbreak or TrollStore since then. I wish I had bought an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0 at launch so I could hold onto this as long as possible. Having a lower end iPhone I’ll probably need an upgrade in the next year or so.

You can get a similar experience to TrollStore by paying for an Apple developer account or a third-party signing service that abuses Apple developer accounts. It seems android users may have to do a similar thing in a few years.

you'll just have to built your own apps too

We are well on our way.

I was confused before I made the switch. So many of the most useful kinds of apps weren't maintained anymore by anyone on the Google Play store. I had this surreal feeling that the app ecosystem was getting worse every year.

And then I installed F-Droid and figured out where all of my favorite app developers went. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Not a big deal, considering that FOSSIFY project offers all the basics you'd need for a degoogled phone: call app, messaging, contacts, calculator, calendar, gallery, etc. F-droid also has a good selection of apps, though most people, me included, will still need whatsapp one way or another. At least that thing doesn't need any of Google's "essential" apps.

Damn such good days. My phone is a trash can these days.

They had to throw out lots of customization options, because Google made a ton of changes to Android/AOSP and it wasn't compatible anymore.

Like, LineageOS is still a more feature-rich and cleaner OS than what comes preinstalled on most phones. But yeah, even relatively simple stuff like setting a system font never got a real replacement.

No idea, if it is still easily possible to implement that. You can fake it by replacing the Roboto font file with a different font, but you get weird font issues in various apps then.

Ubuntu touch is a thing, But the only platform it's running properly on is halium, which is basically an Android core and bootloader that virtualizes the OS.

It works, and it has pretty good battery life, but it's not really Linux on the phone, they're using Android drivers under the hood.

The real Linux distributions that exist that are running on metal don't have all the drivers worked out yet for modem and VOLTE, But those are close, i'm not worried about that, But I am worried about is the average of 6 hours of battery life on a 3500 mah battery. Android has battery life down to a science. Those apps just become snapshots and disappear into the background and restore like nothing happened when you need them again.

I started diving into this one Android started showing their ass a couple of months ago. If you want to use hallium, You might be able to daily drive it if you don't have high expectations, The guy I was following that tested it out so that helium / touch was so lockdown that he couldn't even install unsanctioned apps from the terminal because the VM would brick itself.

I can deal with not running most phone apps, But I really don't feel like moving from one lockdown OS to another just for the hell of it. If Google pulls this s*** I will get out at the first available stop.

I've been hearing about this for 10+ years now. I vaguely remember testing a prototype that could only load an os. That was it

it was almost a thing but the kickstarter failed (despite huge interest). Ubuntu touch is a thing but its not really suitable.

ive looked at that, but its really more an issue of phones not using generic hardware and therefore needing to be entirely reverse-engineered before they can have all of their features used, and by the time thats done they're too old.

Follow pine64 news, they stopped producing new pinephones since they arent in demand enough

If calls/SMS are not 100% then it’s not a phone

Pinephone battery usage (with postmarketOS) is atrocious. I bought one and it's been collecting dust in a drawer ever since the first 3-4 times the battery drained from 100 to 0 within 24 hours on stand-by. :( My fastest wasted 700ish EUR ever.

honestly I just want the same install and use experience as fedora KDE gives me on my laptop. ive installed all kinds of goofy rice-esque stuff but the system itself has been entirely out of my way since install.

Why is this a problem?

https://halium.org/ (not me insinuating you should've just searched for it; I just like to be thorough and give all possible information, even if unneeded)

The very simplified explanation (as far as I understand things) is that it uses an Android kernel to run Linux on so that hardware issues are minimized (the biggest difficulty that Purism and the Pinephones have had and why they've been harangued in terms of what they can do is they're trying to provide open hardware that can work with the pure Linux kernel).

So the plus side is that things work with Android hardware – because you're, ultimately, using the Android kernel – and you can (theoretically) open up the number of devices you can run on exceedingly.

Downside is (I believe) you get Google/Android closed bits running and you're tied to the development of whomever made that modified kernel. All the complaints about not getting kernel upgrades after a while (because you're using a modified kernel, you can't just pull the latest and greatest from upstream and use it) that people have with Android will still apply.

Given the moves Google's making, it's not a deal breaker, for me, but I know it can be for some people so just wanted to give people the heads up.

Thank you, i appreciate the information. I will keep my eye on its development.