Technology

de-Googled android sounds even better. The story is cooler than the title!

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.

de-googled Android you say?

ISeeThisAsAnAbsoluteWin.jpg

Waydroid is pretty nice, integrating the Android apps as regular apps in the Linux UI.

I thought android in China was already de-googled

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

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.

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.

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.

https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1/

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.

It’s not like China can be trusted either. This is a matter of not relying on your adversary.

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.

If you're looking at getting a new (used) phone, I would suggest GrapheneOS (the most secure/private de-googled rom afaik).

You need a Pixel phone, the newer you get the longer you will keep getting software updates for the future (if you keep the phone past these many years of support, then I believe switching to a other rom will be required for security patches etc. Each phone is supported until Google stops supporting them I believe). You said you don't care about updates because you can keep it from connecting to the internet, but it's a plus anyways.

If you plan on never touching a google service, GrapheneOS allows for that (nothing google by default), but on the other hand, if you need google play, etc for banking apps or whatnot, they have that covered with Sandboxed Google Services (which you can run solely in another user profile on your phone for added privacy).

Anyways, I think GrapheneOS in a great option & their website has much more info if you'd like to continue hearing about it:

https://grapheneos.org/

p.s. you can check their website for how long different pixels will have continued support before (if) you get one (incase anyone else is reading this).

You have to be careful to get a phone and model supported by one of the projects. Check all compatibility and install instructions before buying a phone. And if you need a manufacturer supplied unlock code, make sure the manufacturer still gives them out . Some will discontinue that service after a few years.

For graphene os you need one of the gogle devices - i've never tried it but i think its the one most people like.

lineageos supports more devices usually older.

I recently got lineageos working on sony experia xa2 - very happy with it. But to get there i had to go try like 6 computers before one of them sucessfully sent the bootloader unlock code over the ADB. For some reason usb is temperamental when doing stuff like that

It is a lot easier on really old stuff like samsung galaxy s3 or s4 if you can tolerate something that old. Maybe you'll lso end upon an old version of lineage.

Once you get the bootloader unlocked it is generally straightforward. but modern phones make that fist part awkward.