For anyone reading this, please consider donating to PostmarketOS or Mobian if you have the means, as it will help us escape the Android ecosystem which is getting more and more anti-user due to google controlling it.

It's not just a tech issue. Funding tech dev is great, but there is a political problem.

We need to vote for politicians who get the need for competition and will fight vendor lockin. Who will ensure things that are needed to do stuff isn't done only for the duopoly.

We need to support groups fighting bad politicians and getting into media to inform normal people. Who make legal fights. EFF, OpenRghtGroup, etc.

All of his videos are like that.

The one that sticks with me is Apple Glarse, his renaming of their Glass UI design.

I'm not subscribed but I do watch his videos whenever I stumble on them and they're pretty good. He takes the piss out of Apple and Microsoft equally and regularly dunks on Google as well. I don't think he really centers on Linux very often, if at all, but whatev. Good watch, I recommend [not that my opinion is worth anything]

Cool! I've got the N100, and experience is similar. I'm trying to build up some motivation to use it daily for a while.

Good on you for the development work, and congrats on you accepted pull!

RCS has no documentation on how to be implemented... Thank you for the contribution btw

Nice. Similar, I got the N100 off the bay to give a try. VoLTE now works good in USA with Tello /Tmobile, at least in my area, that was certainly a show stopper for some time, huge win!

Got OpenVPN working, uWolf runnng my NextDNS so can filter/watch the logs, MMS has some issues (only works with wifi disabled, but I think they have a fix coming), no RCS as you mention.

As you say, not quite there, but good progress overall. Hope for continued progress, and love to see the many more posts on it than ever before!

Using a privacy focused Android phone project for now, but long term the real answer is Linux or some other new project to tear away completely from Bigtechs dependency & stranglehold. Thanks for your adding development to the cause!

I haven't tried any of them but from what reviews I've seen, both Sailfish OS and postmarketOS are alllmost there but not quite, and Ubuntu Touch is still primarily for tinkerers and isn't ready for prime time. Part of me wants to say "jfc it's been in development since Unity was The New Thing" but then again, who's even working on it? I really want any one of these to be finished and to succeed, but I think more and more that I'm just going to go back to using a dumbphone for the first time in more than 15 years, even as I post this on GrapheneOS.

Headphone jack crew, unite!

How is that?

Just connect USB-C headphones, or use a USB-C to 3.5mm audio dongle.

The audio jack isn't needed anymore. The only real downsides of USB-C are that you can't charge while listening, less wirelessly, and it's more wear and tear for the port, but that's unlikely to matter.

Headphone jack is ewaste at this point. I know all the people here still cling to them because they brought a pair of $50 earphones 15 years ago. But all wired earphones have been usbc for over a decade and most people have wireless ones.

Yeah, my brain dumb. Edited the original post to say 4.

It's not much choice if only iOS and Android are on offer, so it's great to see alternatives that work. That being said, I'm considering a dumb phone and a small data-enabled Linux tablet.

How do you survive without Google services? Did you have to unlear / switch a lot of stuff? Like gmail?

Motorola announced today a partnership with GrapehenOS. Soon, we will no longer need Google Pixel.

I'm not a heavy phone user, but I have GrapheneOS installed. I think it requires a bit of tech knowledge, but it's cool.

Generally there are no real problems. If you're fine with mostly stock AOSP, you should be fine with GrapheneOS.

If you use Google Pay, you're out of luck. There are alternatives for that depending on where you live though (mostly in Europe, in the US there's no other option AFAIK). Rarely an app won't work, but usually fiddling with some security settings for the app will fix it. Very rarely an app won't work at all because (like Google Wallet) it uses Play Integrity and requires a level that requires Google to certify the OS.

Pretty much the only thing I miss is the ability to do NFC payments.

I've used the PinePhone, it was a fun geeky object to have. Most of my issues where related to the screen-size/format which most apps don't handle well. Yes, apt/yay install does work... but you end up struggling to use it.

PostmarketOS with sxmo was the most usable.

Compared to GrapheneOS or /e/os, it's day and night. You can't compare apples and VHS tapes.

You can run sandboxed google play services which allows you full usage of the vast majority of google play store apps.

It feels just like a regular phone to me. If I handed someone my phone they wouldn't know it was GrapheneOS. The only thing they would fund weird is my launcher (KISS, which is certainly not for everyone) but that was something I installed myself.

One pain point is that my banking apps didn't work out of the box. That was solved by checking an unassuming box in the individual app settings. For some banks it might still not work (mostly for countries that have security key devices, I believe).

I don't have the adaptive battery charge feature that Pixels normally have, where it slows charging in certain conditions, to improve battery longevity. GrapheneOS's version of this is just a simple option to stop charging at 80%.

Probably my camera is less good that stock Pixel, but I can't tell. It seems fine to me

It's Ubuntu preinstalled on Fairphone 4.

I have both pinephones and I don't love either...

but I do love their e-ink notepad and SBCs and pinetime etc. basically everything, just not the phone.

Graphene still requires Android though.

The existence of Graphene obviously tells me that Android is a honeypot, otherwise a trillion dollar company like Google would also harden allocation and memory safety in Android.

You do know those were only Chinese low budget phones rebranded in Spain, right?

Sorta https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mobility

Mobile-specific distros like PostmarketOS function much better in general at the moment.