Title is misleading, they are moving away from google services.
Aww, and I here I was hoping multiple vendors were FINALLY going to contribute to mobile linux.
Year of the Linux phone
Yeah I was going to say there is very little alternative from iOS and Android or its derivatives. There used to be Windows Phones very breifly, but they’re gone now.
Anthing else has to emulate the other OS to run mobile apps.
Nokia also had Meego but an ex-Microsoft exec sabotaged that.
I had a phone that ran on Nokia’s Symbian OS before I got my first android. I kinda miss it.
I actually had a Windows phone around 2011-ish. It had some pretty cool features and was a Nokia.
Dude 2011 was like 6 years ago
arent there mods on the sub to delete clickbait crap like this?
USA is being horrible at the moment, but China has a LOT of convincing to do before I’ll let them deliberately have my data.
Best way remains to raise as high a digital moat against everyone. If you need a smartphone, get a Pixel, install Graphene on it and as few apps as possible.
I would love getting a Pixel but the 100% price premium and no official support is making it hard.
https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
It’s my understanding that the latest model pixels have official support for Graphene. I could be wrong but their FAQ says they do. I’m installing it on mine
I think shegorath meant official support from Google.
PostmarketOS for everyone!
I really want to get to a point I can transition to using this or another mobile Linux distro. My phone is fairly (hehe, it’s a Fairphone) well supported, but my impression is that basic phone features are still not functioning properly making it more of a pocket computer and less of a phone. I still need phone features. As for mobile apps, I don’t have many needs and I think Waydroid will get me far.
So that title is just a straight up lie. They want to use a de-googled Android.
To be honest I was hoping for an alternative OS, competition is always good. But a de-googled Android could possibly be good, but being Chinese I assume instead of Google telemetry you’ll just be replacing it with CCP telemetry.
Indded but as an Australian, if I have to have an anal probe i’d rather it from the CCP as they wont share it with my Government.
I mean judging by the current American government id much rather my data is going to the CCP then the American Government via Google as a proxy.
How about neither?
Would love that if it was an option.
I don’t know to what extent they smuggle data out of the devices, but afaik a de-googlified phone such as Pixel + GrapheneOS gets you close.
Honestly, I think a person in either nation should consider using the opposing nation’s stuff. Harder for the US to backdoor Chinese encryption, or for Chinese to backdoor into an American phone. Play the bastards off each other.
Odds are, that the Trump Regime will use American apps and phones to identify and track targets for ICE traffickers. China probably does the same to Uighurs. The less attack surfaces they have, the better for their respective peoples.
Except that there are credible reports of the CCP running police operations on foreign soil.
But what reason would they have to go after you on foreign soil? Unless you’re like actively causing problems for China they’re not gonna spend the effort to go after you for saying “China bad” on one of their phones. That only matters if you’re in China at which point it’s silencing internal discontent. The much bigger likelihood is the American government seeing you, through data Google gathers, organize against US support of Israel or any other position they start abducting people for and grabbing you off the street for it.
Probably not me. Most of the recorded incidents are against Chinese families that have emigrated.
I complain about the CCP here and there, but not likely enough for any attention to be warranted.
That sounds funny, but In that reality, the government with all its power will find a way in (they probably already have programs (as in departments) for finding their way into other countries tech).
Better to just install a proper de-googled android build (grapheneos, etc) and only use wifi (if data/phone num not needed) for the best odds.
In a couple of years (with more r&d, development and investment) I bet this will change to being use a linux phone.
Apple building backdoors for CCP and sharing any and all data with them: am I a joke to you?
US telemetry == CCP telemetry, I can’t see how CCP will be more damaging to regular person.
I think it’s just that they were saying his won’t end up benefitting us. It’s just changing who is holding the binoculars.
Why bother switching then?
Because, at least for now, the US has the greater power to fuck up our lives with the information gathered.
We are going to move away from Google, by basing our new future on AOSP, which is also primary maintained by Google…I smell another FireOS level product on the horizon. Still Android, but worse.
Before anyone gets too excited, the headline is clickbait. The bigger Chinese phone brands are looking into de-googled Android. They are still going to use Android.
several prominent Chinese smartphone manufacturers, including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus, are exploring the possibility of developing versions of the Android operating system that do not rely on Google Mobile Services.
Chinese laptop makers are also in search of an OS that isn’t Windows. Queue a race to prop Linux with Android support on that side of things.
de-Googled android sounds even better. The story is cooler than the title!
I like your spirit, but I don’t think a Chinese equivalent to Google Play Services would be more desirable
All I want is unified push really. Then you just choose your server or host your own.
Or just Linux. Like furios or phosh, etc.
I wish more apps supported unified push!
I mean they just replace Google with their own Chinese data-mining services so, no, not cool.
No no no, it’s not Chinese data mining.
it’s just socialised data with Chinese characteristics! Much better.
Exactly what happened with Indonesian release of Huawei.
Also, more ads everywhere. Even your lock screen.
de-Googled android sounds even better.
They are already degoogled for the Chinese market. What the Chinese Android variants to not have is a shared replacement for Play Services and a shared app store because everyone is doing their own thing for maps API, payment, …
When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick.”
—Mikhail Bakunin
a duopoly is better than a monopoly but 3 platforms would be better
This is why my next GPU its gotta be Intel
Just read for a second about intel’s history on anti competition practices eg they would ban stores from carrying out amd cpus in my country in Europe
Oh yeah, I’m not saying they’re the good guys at all. But we need a 3rd player on the GPU market.
I run that already with CalyxOS. I dig it.
It also says:
It is currently unknown whether these companies would aim for compatibility with existing Android apps or follow the path of Huawei’s latest HarmonyOS NEXT, which removes Android app support entirely
So, it’s not clear yet.
The US/China decoupling is happening everywhere.
The front line is everywhere, there be no shelter here.
They got you searching for the thin line between entertainment and war.
I live in Asia. I’m European and meet a lot of Chinese tourists. Trying to find a common ground with digital services we both use is impractical to the point where we often can’t connect online.
I thought android in China was already de-googled
Some Chinese phone release outside China also began to de-googled as well. At least that’s the case for Huawei in Indonesia.
So like how Huawei was hyping up their new mobile OS which was really just skinned AOSP?
This was a transitional stage, HarmonyOS Next is running a fully different kernel and runtime
Well there’s that, but I was talking more about how they were selling it when hey first announced it. My point is that with stuff like this, the companies have lied before. I’ll believe it when I see it.
HarmonyOS is not AOSP anymore. It does not run Android apps anymore.
Waydroid is pretty nice, integrating the Android apps as regular apps in the Linux UI.
Waydroid is very close to greatness. My major hope there is Valve contributions to Waydroid for probable Steam Deck integration will make it incredibly seamless. There’s also the Android Translation Layer being developed
https://gitlab.com/android_translation_layer/android_translation_layer
Am I the only one who never got Waydroid to run even basic apps…?
de-googled Android you say?
ISeeThisAsAnAbsoluteWin.jpg
Too bad that what you want in a Google-free Android distro isn’t what the manufacturers want.
KDE connect is already pretty sweet
What about /e/OS?
Haven’t tried it
Linux-mobileOS!
That sounds nice and all but linux still is subject to exploits and the open sourced nature of it makes it an enticing target for state actors to include extremely well made obfuscated exploits. I dont know how to win here, tbh.
“State actors” already have the ability to spy on anyone they want. It’s a whole industry
All you said, is infinitely worse with closed source
deleted by creator
With closed source auditing is not possible.
Microsoft windows must always be assuned to have backdoors and no one will ever find out.
Uhh maybe more likely 15 years ago and also goes for everyone else. Actually, what are you even saying?
We need phones with standard Linux. Without strange “Java only mediator” or something. Just a normal OS.
Android is a pain in the ass.
Exact! And please no bloatware!!
Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L
So you exclusively want ai. Got it.
-Microsoft, probably
Clippie coming right up!
So AOSP
Dude, you get free third party bullshit with every update. What’s not to love?
I don’t believe that they’re likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they’re going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.
Android’s had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren’t doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they’re Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.
That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there – MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.
If the mobile OS space fragments further – like, Android splits into “Google Android” and “China Android” — my guess is that that’ll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.
Is this the year of the Ubuntu Touch Smartphone?
Probably not, but it should be.
Oh dear … Are we gonna be forced to snap on phones too?
is it ready for normies to daily drive?
Seems pretty polished, but I genuinely don’t know. None of my devices support it, so I haven’t had the opportunity to test drive it.
At some point, “normies” are just going to have to break down and learn something.
I think postmarketOS will probably win out on market share for Linux phones, mostly because it can use regular flatpak apps, you don’t have to develop special apps, which i thought you had to do for Ubuntu touch (which I guess is now called ubports). Not sure, someone correct me if I’m wrong about the specially built apps part.
Palm OS was really good, but without a great app store it never stood a chance.
No. I have a second phone with it just to play with.
It’s functional, but rough. App support is lacking, VoLTE doesn’t work still which means on countries like the US which shutdown 2/3G you cannot make or receive calls. The UI is clunky and dated.
I think a lot of these issues would go away pretty quick if it got a lot of attention. But then it’s unlikely to get much attention without that stuff. Vicious cycle. It’s a good base to build on.
thanks for the insight. if you use google voice app on it would that work as a replacement for VoLTE?
There isn’t a Google Voice app. It’s not Android.
You could probably place calls from the browser but not receive them.
I heard of some people setting up IP phone stuff for it, but it doesn’t seem simple.
We need phones with standard Linux.
Already exists. Several iterations are active and work as a daily driver: phone, sms and mobile networking works reliably, apps exist. Just not as many as on Android, and some features are not part of the OS. This is enough for many to declare them “a failure”. That and limited hardware support.
Google has coddled us for way too long, and at what price.
I would love to have a phone that I could just plug into a USB C dock and use as a normal computer. They’ve got plenty of processing power for that now. Every single program I use except for games could run on a phone if it used normal GNU/Linux.
Samsung Dex already does this with Android.
Was about to say that - while it’s sadly proprietary and most FOSS Apps are not well supported, it is a nice showcase. But I don’t think it’s actually used much by people.
Which is kind of sad.
Honestly love Dex, it’s such a smooth transition
Convergence! I think Ubuntu tried to go that way for a while.
I was given an old Chromebook tablet by a friend that wanted to get rid of it, and it just happened to have mainline Linux support. I was able to get postmarketOS running on it, and got gnome shell mobile as the DE. It works, and works well. The apps that support the touch interface and are made to be responsive, etc work really well, and the waydroid integegration works fantastically well. I was able to get android version of jellyfin working, with vlc, and a few other apps I use daily. All this in 4GB of ram, I’m really impressed! This screenshot was running gnome shell I think, I’ve since switch to the ‘mobile’ variant of it, and running system monitor with android vlc and android jellyfin running, zoomed out so you could see all the apps running at once.
Its time for a Linux phone, I put in an order for the 2nd batch of this phone, hopefully they start shipping soon, they supposedly already shipped the first batch to users.
What’s that link got to do with PostmarketOS? It does not look like FuriOS is a version of it?
Good catch, while I guess they’re not using postmarketOS, that’s what was supported on the device i had, and what enabled me to test out the mobile version to gnome shell, and try out the phone app ecosystem. It seems like its ready for prime time, especially since waydroid performs so well, android apps can fill the void for any missing native Linux apps.
Furiphone flx1 looks promising
They have been promising a good Linux phone for forever. Is this one any good? Will support last?
No idea as i haven’t gotten mine yet. They’re still filling the next pre-order batch of production, but from the reviews on their website, it seems as responsive as you’d expect from android, which was a huge problem with Dev phones like the pinephone, they were way too sluggish with terrible battery life.
postmarketOS?
Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.
If you can implement an equivalent to Apple’s Secure Enclave on a device running that, I’ll be interested. I haven’t seen even a device running Android doing that yet though.
Samsung actually added Knox to their Android implementation a few months before iOS added Secure Enclave. I think Qualcomm had some sort of trusted execution environment around that time, too, if I recall correctly. And Google added Trusty to the AOSP two years ago. So it’s already running on Android, and has been for ages.
But I’m not convinced a TEE would be necessary for a device that doesn’t run any third-party native code. Browser tab sandboxing is already pretty robust; I haven’t heard of an escalation exploit being found in ages on any major JavaScript engine, meaning that the risk of data exfiltration or bootloader compromise are extremely remote, and would be much quicker (and less risky!) to patch via browser updates than firmware/OS updates.
The only other reason I know of that you’d need a TEE is for DRM, and I’d be willing to wager most people who would want a FirefoxOS phone would actively prefer not to have that on their device.
Yeah, Meego was really nice.
I worked with it. Just Linux. Rpm was at that moment.
GNU/Linux is about 100x more painful than Android…
How so?
Let me know when there’s a phone with Linux that has a security implementation that matches Apple’s Secure Enclave.
No idea what that is.
Google is kind of being invasive. Kind but kind of.
If it’s not proper linux I don’t care
German brand Volla has phones with Ubuntu Touch. Even allows dual boot with their own degoogled Android OS. Might be worth checking out.
What ever happened to that other OS that was named after a color
Fuschia? That was a Google alternative to Linux that never panned out. It was weird with streams instead of files.
A rumor of plans??! Tell me everything!!!
Gurl let me spill the tea, there’s word floating round in China that some bde powa playas be considering maybe kinda putting something together.
Pretty soon they’re going to pencil in a meeting about possibly arranging a committee to discuss preliminary plans to do a feasibility study.
You probably should’ve led with the fact that this is Chinese phones, not like Samsung and shit.
Samsung has it own OS on some phones.
No they don’t; they killed off Tizen over half a decade ago. All modern Samsung devices run on Android. OneUI is a skin, not an OS.
Is it that long ago already? I thought they had kept it around. Thank you for updating me.
They
allmostly run android with GMS. They do apply their own skin, and sometimes Manufactures try to market it as a seperate OS. For example “NothingOS” in the Nothing phones, which is just stock android with a fancy skin applied.Thanks, I didn’t know about that.
There’s only Samsung, or shit.
Congrats, you sound exactly like some Apple fanboy.
Yes I do like my iPhone! Samsung is not bad, used the Note for many years.
Clearly you didn’t understand the point I was making. I never said you weren’t allowed to like a product.
Clearly, but do I get an Apple fan club t-shirt?
Maybe if you send enough fan mail to Tim Cook
Haha, thanks man. Good chat, you made my day.
I’m not all that keen on Samsung myself, but the ‘and shit’ here is a stand-in for the other makers of android phones for the US market. I’m sure google would be happy to supply a list, but I can’t be fucked to go find it.
I’ve got a Huawei tablet post the play store ban, it was a pain to use.
Huawei is not the Android phone other than Samsung.
It’s pretty much all shit. It’s just “what flavor of shit would you like today?”
It makes sense for Chinese smartphone OEMs to move away from the Google version of Android. In the medium to long term you are setting up yourself for failure if you are reliant on an American company.
Unfortunately, the United States cannot be trusted.
It’s not like China can be trusted either. This is a matter of not relying on your adversary.
Sure, but with China everyone more less knew this. The US has used up the last benefit of the doubt that they had in the past 5 months.
“everyone” yeah, in our bubble maybe. never underestimate the carelessness of the consumer
It’s not like China can be trusted either
What exactly are you talking about? China has at no point in my lifetime exerted economic violence or taken violent policy turns towards harming other economies. They’ve been a reliable trading partner since they opened up to trade in the Deng Xiaoping/Nixon years, and done absolutely nothing remotely comparable to the US tariffs of recent (or economic embargoes to “enemy” countries like Venezuela).
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic here. I hope you are. If not a quick search on Wikipedia would show China’s aggressive behaviour towards its neighbouring countries.
Are you aware that Wikipedia is predominantly edited by western males below 50 years of age using western media as sources for information?
If there was an online encyclopedia predominantly edited by Chinese users using Chinese news sources, would you take it at face value when discussing geopolitically-charged topics about the USA? May I remind you that the US has military bases in Philippines, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea?
Regardless of your opinion on this, if you read my previous comment again, you’ll notice I’m talking about economic violence.
