The EU is looking for tech independence

Issues of whether or not the EU is actually looking for tech independence aside… I find it remarkable that open source software offers so much potential for breaking free from US-dominated tech giants like Microsoft and Google, for relative pennies, and no one seems to want to pursue it. I imagine a country like France or China could develop versions of Linux (for desktop, mobile, and other applications like spreadsheets or web browsers) that blow away what we currently have for a cost that would be a rounding error of a rounding error in their current state budgets. Not sure why this hasn’t already happened, tbh.

why is there no initiative to get Linux mobile up to speed?

There is. It just lacks a corporate sponsor, so it is going slowly.

Edit: It is also slowed because there is very little fully open source phone hardware, today - and of what there is, very little of it is pocket sized. This means phone OS maintainers have to rely on various hardware vendors cooperating, which is rare.

Also, the owners of the phone towers also probably don't imagine much benefit of having fully independent devices join the networks they maintain. I don't know how much help is needed from phone tower owner conglomerates, but I imagine we don't see enthusiastic support there, either.

I alternate between mobian and postmarketOS every coupla months, to be up to date on the state of it. I have a fast device, lotsa RAM, lotsa fast storage, switch regularly between various UIs (phosh, plasma mobile, etc)

"up to speed" is such a huge, immense, and moving target that I can't fathom the funds and dev efforts needed to get there. e.g. the plasma team has their hands full with bringing desktop plasma up to speed - 6.6 was a gargantuan effort; when you throw the mobile UI in the mix, it makes the goal exponentially farther away.

when you consider that Linux-on-Phones (just had a mental flash of Russ Hanneman saying "Radio-on-Internet") isn't one thing, there's a bunch of dev efforts, some on bare-metal, some halium based and the various UIs (gnome, phosh, plasma mobile, sxmo, etc) that all pull in different directions, solving the same thing independently, wasting time and dev efforts.

so this thing becoming an alternative to an OS that was worked on for close to two decades by the richest people on the planet - that simply isn't on the horizon, becoming an android alternative is pretty far, far away.

now, if you think of this as your linux laptop with a touch interface in your pocket, you're closer to what this thing is and can do.

Thinking of getting a fairphone 3/4. Currently use a dumb phone and a fire tablet I got second hand very cheap.

Same! I got mine preinstalled with my new Fairphone 6

me too, didnt install it myself. but still rlly like it

https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-system

But the problem is not Android itself. It's that google has populated it with tracking, profiling and in general anti-privacy software... Remove that, and you have a decent OS...

Postmarket and Mobian sure do have VoLTE on certain phones. OnePlus 6 for example. The trick is it needs to be abled first before you wipe Android. But I remember someone posting a workaround recently.

Sailfish OS is beautiful and really nice, decent app support

Have you actually used sailfishos? It isn't much better than using an Ubuntu touch device:

• app support is still pretty weak
• no volte
• big, big problems still with using MMS
• SMS problems (still) while data is on
• networking stack is very buggy for android apps (WhatsApp calls are unusable)
• no 5g
• no nfc

If you had a different experience, I'd love to know how you achieved it.

If you turn off RCS a day or two before switching and ensure you message these groups after this is typically negated (at least in my experience) GrapheneOS just put out a way to use RCS on its OS this month which is really nice, I have it on its own profile for RCS and use open bubbles for iMessage/FaceTime and I'm astounded how well it works tbh. But the goal is to slowly harass enough of my frequent contacts to get on signal, so far I'm doing great, my largest hold out being my wife lol

...or rooting the phone, but google comes up with new bs every month to keep you on your toes. the only solution is to force the friend group to get another app.

personly i used rcs for a week, and got like 5 spam messages, so i deleted the google sms app and been using fossify since.

I had this issue on Fossify messaging. When I used native messaging app the problem stopped. Also, it helps if you name the text group. Like I said though, no issues here except with Fossify, and the same thing happened in my Samsung phone so it wasn't Eos that was the issue.

Buy it used. The hardware doesn't call back home.