This is them trying to strangle Graphene and LineageOs. We desperately need an ecosystem where manufacturers are legally compelled to publish the source code for their drivers and similar so as to make it easier for alternative Oses to exist.
Android will soon become fully closed source. The writing is on the wall.
I think believing any for-profit business would have any morality is the problem. Especially thanks to the post-80s business conjuncture upheld by the relatively democratic governments. It is all about diminishing responsibilities while increasing profits.
Not sure why people downvoted but this is sort of true
Microsoft was absolutely dominating and buying up everything (similar to today's tech giants) and they were literally the most mega corporation ever
Until they got hit by the monopoly lawsuit. That alone scared microsoft so much that it backed off
After the backing off is when Companies like google, heck Apple was directly invested to be saved by microsoft just so that they dont get threatened by the govt as monopoly and amazon.
In a way people mention so why couldn't Microsoft create their own engine but its also the fact that blink/chromium is based on fork of webkit which itself is a fork of KHTML from the kde team but webkit added many features (from what I could tell) and is a really complex software in it of itself
This was created by apple and apple as we know it would not have been able to exist without Microsoft backing off them
My point here is that in previous times, Microsoft was a large curtain blocking any innovation if they wanted but after it was feared by even a threat like monopoly, they took it very seriously and thus we have the cultural innovation in many ways that we have
Now the monopoly question was a genuine question still launched by the government.
Today the landscape is different, Google and these large tech companies would buy things and the meta strategy has become to sell, its a very cynical point of things which really just ends up screwing the customers in the end.
The government doesn't care, it might slap some 1% fine and there is a quote that if crime's punishment becomes only fines, then crime becomes legal and the fines compared to company are so small and they got legal structure so high that they strech it for as much as possible
Overall, the govt.'s being really lobbied by these tech giants and they stiffle tech innovation in the end
In the end all of them are the same, they all kind of want to be a microsoft pre monopoly era.
Govt's lack of understanding of the matters around the world is the reason why tech feels so intrusive. This has real consequences to you and me, now I don't trust the govt will be able to improve if its gets lobbied or corrupted and that's a seperate matter and might take new laws all around the world to prevent such corruption / lobbying but right now, the other best thing is to showcase support by being the minor fraction of the population who supports/donates to open source / msme businesses
I can't help to worry, in all seriousness, that these changes are aligned somehow to the current administrations more authoritarian temperament. Can anyone relieve me of my concerns here?
Is there any good faith read of this that people can lend credence to? The one I could maybe come up with (with their mention of stability) is "we want OSes derived from AOSP to be stable, instead of following main too closely". They mention third party devs working off of stable too... so maybe they're like "instead of dealing with outside contributors messing around with our 'wip' stuff, we'll sign up for integration work".
Almost all device run on the initial android release (QPR0), and never shipped any of quarterly updates. Even less so using _main_ as a baseline so that point is moot.
With android 16 introducing "mid releases" (QPR2), they expect OEMs to start shipping those as well, QCOM already has a QPR2 BSP release, and Samsung is expected to release QPR2 based builds soon.
As far as contributions go, google usually wanted patches to apply to main, I don't think that ever changed.
And even there now that AOSP development is fully closed, it's even easier as partners will likely just upload patches against internal main instead. Less integration work there as well.
There really isn't a good explanation as to why they want to do move code drop cadence, other than they can and want to avoid wasting time releasing QPR1/3 that no OEM ever shipped (expect Pixels that is)
So the source code will be released in a kind of FreeBSD releases? These pieces work together, base things off them, don't mess with (or even see) any WIP stuff.
In other words, the result is still open, but the development process is not.
I don't work on Android, but I suspect it's a whole lot less work for both confidentiality and maintenance to not have to worry about daily/weekly OSS releases. That's probably worth more to the decisionmakers than the value of random contributions from people who aren't already inside the partner tent.
[edit] based on the other comments, I surmise that public pushes were already infrequent.
Android's foundation has been mostly stable for years now, with fairly minor changes between releases. So I guess they just don't want to deal with too many versions to document and support, given that device vendors are generally awful.
Also for a long time they were doing yearly (or longer) release, afaiu it's only the past two years that they switched to quarterly (with the QPR release).
Sure. Development at Google is glacially slow because nobody does any work, and so they're only publishing releases bi-annually because there aren't enough substantive changes to make quarterly releases seem important. This will also allow the teams to move to biannual OKRs instead of quarterly, which lets ICs and line managers do half as much work while giving executives justification for why they need twice as much headcount.
When it comes to large bureaucracies, always assume laziness over malice or strategic competence.
Every attempt since OpenMoko proves the market doesn't care.
And in what concerns the mainstream desktop/laptop market, macOS Linux VMs, WSL, ChromeOS, versus GNU/Linux OEM devices, proves most people doesn't care either what they can get at regular computer stores, otherwise GNU/Linux configurations would not be online only at very specific shops.
Mobile is a massive chicken-and-egg problem. The main purpose of a smartphone these days is to run apps. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone which can't run the apps they need in their day-to-day life. On the other hand, no company is going to write apps for a platform with basically zero users.
OpenMoko & friends are selling devices which basically only run Firefox, and sometimes make calls as well. The only people interested in that are diehard FLOSS enthusiasts, which means they have to use ancient hardware because new stuff doesn't have open drivers, which means that even if you ignore the app ecosystem they compare incredibly poorly to mainstream smartphones. No wonder they keep failing.
Interestingly, the desktop/laptop market is heading the other way. The move to cloud SaaS products means a decent number of people now only need a browser. What's keeping a lot of people on Windows is often literally one or two applications. Valve's push for Proton is the perfect example of this: the Steam Deck is providing a huge incentive to fix those last few bugs keeping a game from running on Linux, and with the way Microsoft is screwing up W11 it is now ironically the gamers who are moving to Linux.
What you are seeing in "regular computer stores" is mostly irrelevant. That market is basically dead. Corporate gets its machines directly from Dell/HP/Lenovo, PC enthusiasts mostly get custom builds, and casual people stick with smartphones and tablets. In-store PC sales is now reduced to a university student's Google Docs machine - and Microsoft is doing a pretty good job bribing the manufacturers to push Windows there.
> Every attempt since OpenMoko proves the market doesn't care.
It's because people like you are constantly repeating this mantra of security nihilism [0], instead of spreading the word about true alternatives existing today, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
And yeah, you can even buy phones with a non-android linux pre-installed, e.g. from pine64. But they come with all kinds of "for early adopters" warning labels. Deservedly so, in my opinion.
Why are all commenters on HN ignoring the only smartphone running an FSF-endorsed [0] operating system, Librem 5, and only list everything else? I just can't get it.
You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS.
Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ...
But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher.
As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work.
The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.
It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers.
Users - there is a broad scope of users. For sustainable eco-system you need also user interest and support of such.
Developers - that sounds funny. I know. But you need enough leverage to get apps or services to be open.
Companies/Software - a modern mobile device takes place in almost any interaction. Commuting, payment, banking, grocery shopping, social messaging, doom scrolling.
Biggest hope for the future is ensuring PWA becomes standardized enough.
That way the OS lock-in could be reduced.
> It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers.
Well, you're right, however badly I don't want to admit it. Google broke that cycle once with Android. I'm sure that Apple would have too, even if they were not the first mover. And there's no question that their wealth and influence had a massive role in it - something an open platform cannot match realistically.
But the current situation is simply untenable anymore. I want out, no matter how many others don't care for it. The open platform has to be just functional enough (including app support, even as PWAs), for us to break free from this duopoly. Just like how Linux and BSDs are on desktops. I'm able to do everything on it from work to netbanking. I would hate it really badly if I was forced to use Windows or MacOS these days.
We need a hardware attestation vendor who isn’t also selling ads on the same device. Something like, I dunno, an identity module which you could maybe insert into the phone?
We never had one on desktop; no real issues. Hardware attestation is primarily in the interest of the vendor, not the user. The user relies on chains of trust. This is how the world works.
Open Harmony? I can't find what I would call authoritative information on how open it is. There's some hedging language about modules being closed source. But it's unclear if that refers to commercial versions of Harmony OS or Open Harmony, or if Open Harmony is open but somehow crippled.
Every time Android gets worse and less open, especially with recent ID verification for APK installs, I think Canonical's 2013 comment on closing Bug #1 ages even more like milk: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
Bug: Microsoft has a majority market share
Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. [...] A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.
Closing comment:
Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.
Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it's important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed.
Ok, so at this point we’re getting iOS kernel source releases more often than AOSP drops? Maybe they should rename to i Open Source at this point because they seem to be doing a better job than Google at this now.
I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image.
One reason, I guess it's not possible because it's a complex OS?
But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers?
It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.
It comes with optional sandboxed Google Play Services and Store, meaning that these run just like any other app, with no special permissions. You can give them only Network access. The Play Store is still the most secure way to download everyday apps, so a lot of GrapheneOS users use Google's Play Store with a burner account in a separate profile, usually the Owner (the main) profile - since you can then disable apps in Owner and install them into other profiles. And the sandboxed google stuff can be used to run proper Google apps without any problem. Even sandboxed Android Auto works.
> I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image.
> It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.
It's not particularly difficult -- see Graphene and Lineage. The main issue is that there are few phones on which to run these custom builds. Ironically, Google Pixels allow to run other operating systems than the one they come with (the bootloader can be unlocked). Other than the Pixel and a couple of Chinese models, you are looking at low-end or ancient hardware. You can't just build a phone without OS and install Linux/Android like you would on a PC.
> But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers?
In part, afaik. On one hand, you have binary blobs that come from Google and you cannot generate yourself. The other part, is that you, as an individual, have no relationships with manufacturers so you have no access to their drivers.
I like the android way of security, where "rooting" your device to install updates is insecure, but using a horrifyingly out-of-date android (because your manufacturer, the only one who can update your device, didn't bother) is secure.
Not to mention, play integrity is being used a some sort of "anti cheats" by bank apps and other essential services. Even some government apps in the EU, essentially forcing you to be spied on by google.
The worse part is that, you can do all of those functionality with a browser on linux (or Android), yet to use them as Android apps on a device without gapps (even if jt's not rooted and with locked bootloader) is not allowed. Make this make sense.
It's the security of the ecosystem, where the interests of app vendors are fundamental: content distributors can count on enforcing DRM, and banks are relying on the camera used for KYC actually being a camera and not a virtual device.
I think you had the wrong idea on security here, the security is for the device manufacturers benefit to obsolete the hardware and force you to buy a new one not for your benefit. All the data is already being shipped off to where the hell ever for building models of you for advertising and more.
Android does have a meaningfully improved security over typical Linux desktop: the segmentation of data between apps. Imagine what would happen if people run all the proprietary crap they do on a typical Linux box. That's multiple spyware apps with full filesystem access.
Unfortunately, Google also uses it to abuse the user by also segmenting the user's access as well, "protecting" apps from the user, which is an abomination.
The whole security of both Android and iOS is a joke at this point. We know now that plenty of apps/games have proxy services built in, allowing the publisher to monetize their users, by selling proxy services to AI companies. If that can happen, with all the "security" those platforms and store supposedly offer, then I fail to see the point.
We're being prevented from installing and updating software on the devices we own, but Google and Apple will happily approve and sign malware in their stores?
Android devices are enraging. ARM in general, why is there never a boot loader?
I have a little Android handheld game device that will allow me to dual boot a Linux from SD quite easily... but why can't I overwrite the existing install? I thought Android was more open and hackable than that.
I've got an Anbernic RG353M, came with a dual boot as you've described. I completely wiped it and only have ROCKNIX on there, a minimal distro based on LibreELEC, I believe. I actually maintained an Android + ROCKNIX dualboot at first, but it breaks the sleep function for some reason, and the ROCKNIX docs for this device say to remove Android, so eventually I did. I didn't actually use the Android side but had kept it around just in case before.
Not all these devices have the same level of support, so do your research on your model before trying to overwrite the install.
Those AI translations are really bad these days... In german it says in the subline "Verwenden Sie das Android-Betriebssystem, um Ihr Gerät mit Strom zu versorgen.", that means: Use Android to power your device with electricity.
Please don't show me your crappy translations any more.
I checked and it's indeed the translation Google Translate gives for "Use the Android operating system to power your device."
Gemini 3 Pro offers "Nutzen Sie die Power von Android für Ihr Gerät." as a modern, tech-savvy alternative, as well as more literal translations that correctly recognize the idiom.
Yeah, I, too, was confused by this translation at first glance... That reminded me of when I had to install M$ Office for work. The download button read "Büro herunterladen" (Büro is the exact german translation of Office)
Android started out as an open ecosystem that is slowly being closed. How much funding would it take to re-create a credible open-source ecosystem for phones?
And since Project Treble you wouldn't even get the drivers, because Android Linux is a pseudo-microkernel now, where drivers run in userspace and talk via Android IPC (Binder) with the kernel, enforced since Android 8.
By GPL, they're only obligated to release an offer that allows costumers to request the source code. They can still keep the source "closed" by default.
From other discussions, it sounds like they are shipping the copyleft source on time, only the permissive/pushover licensed stuff gets delayed source releases.
Android is open source partly because they can fund it from Play Store profits. Google is thinking that their Play Store profits are going to be cut, and they want to make the profit up elsewhere - and importantly, maintain control of the platform. This is their method.
They've already used this playbook in the past with Google Play Services, and even before that when they abandoned all the built-in open source apps (Email, Calendar, etc.).
redirect your efforts into other areas. I'd love a simpler device like https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-7-8-10.1.... to be well supported with a lightweight friendly OS. This is about as root as you can get for those who want root access. You'll have to put in an effort yourselves or you'll forever be using slop devices and software.
This sounds like defeat - essentially retreating into niches that only a handful of enthusiasts will be using, while leaving the mainstream to Google etc.
why is everyone so negative about anything alternative. it won't succeed and all. how do you know? maybe it's not defeat. maybe you'd be better off without any devices.
Aka "We will do less releases because certain OEMs don't want to be seen as outdated as they don't want to spend the resources to rebase even 4 times per year."
That's not clear to me: Will they do fewer releases, or will they have the same quarterly release cadence as now, just with only every second release open source?
AOSP has felt different lately, what’s going on? Not much. ~
More like a change of tone.
Quarterly releases given more emphasis. More precise stability language. Rather than feeling like an afterthought, feature flags are now receiving first-class treatment.
My view.
The isolation of platform work is earlier.
Landing flags are occurring more frequently than ever.
By “Stable,” it appears the Intuit team is suggesting “boring” which is deliberate.
I have been using a simple lens.
The surface of the platform is slow and predictable.
A gated and reversible design.
The OEM risk will be pushed later.
I wonder how other people see it.
Is Android giving off more conservative vibes?
Are flags cutting down on breakage, or just relocating it?
Has your testing strategy changed if you’ve shipped against AOSP?
In a practitioner’s take, not in a press narrative.
Android source code will be released twice per year instead of every quarter.
Great. So now nobody gets bugfixes until after the main vendors get priority access to it. for six months.
There's no way this isn't intentional hostility towards forks.
> There's no way this isn't intentional hostility towards forks.
Of course it is. But it isn't new. This was declared in March last year. We discussed it a lot here. It's only now that it's going into effect.
You guys are getting bugfixes?
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The security fixes will be published normally.
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The writing was on the wall the day they shipped Doze with GPS as an OS feature.
All those years back I started calling it, since I built software for (long-lived) HMI devices that ran on Android
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At this rate, given a few more years Google will announce that they're moving to a "once a century" release model for AOSP.
They'll decrease the frequency by a year every year so they never actually release it again
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This is them trying to strangle Graphene and LineageOs. We desperately need an ecosystem where manufacturers are legally compelled to publish the source code for their drivers and similar so as to make it easier for alternative Oses to exist.
Android will soon become fully closed source. The writing is on the wall.
The founder of GrapheneOS commented on this a few days ago here on HN, and basically said it doesn't impact GrapheneOS.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550366
No, neither of them register as a blip on the usage stats and both have, and will continue having, priority access through OEM partnerships.
The drivers are legally required to be, well not published, but the source sent to anyone who asks.
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We simply can not trust Google. It kind of became the Microsoft of the 1990s now.
Insert: "You were supposed to defeat the Sith, not join them!" meme here...
I think believing any for-profit business would have any morality is the problem. Especially thanks to the post-80s business conjuncture upheld by the relatively democratic governments. It is all about diminishing responsibilities while increasing profits.
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To be really honest yeah.
Not sure why people downvoted but this is sort of true
Microsoft was absolutely dominating and buying up everything (similar to today's tech giants) and they were literally the most mega corporation ever
Until they got hit by the monopoly lawsuit. That alone scared microsoft so much that it backed off
After the backing off is when Companies like google, heck Apple was directly invested to be saved by microsoft just so that they dont get threatened by the govt as monopoly and amazon.
In a way people mention so why couldn't Microsoft create their own engine but its also the fact that blink/chromium is based on fork of webkit which itself is a fork of KHTML from the kde team but webkit added many features (from what I could tell) and is a really complex software in it of itself
This was created by apple and apple as we know it would not have been able to exist without Microsoft backing off them
My point here is that in previous times, Microsoft was a large curtain blocking any innovation if they wanted but after it was feared by even a threat like monopoly, they took it very seriously and thus we have the cultural innovation in many ways that we have
Now the monopoly question was a genuine question still launched by the government.
Today the landscape is different, Google and these large tech companies would buy things and the meta strategy has become to sell, its a very cynical point of things which really just ends up screwing the customers in the end.
The government doesn't care, it might slap some 1% fine and there is a quote that if crime's punishment becomes only fines, then crime becomes legal and the fines compared to company are so small and they got legal structure so high that they strech it for as much as possible
Overall, the govt.'s being really lobbied by these tech giants and they stiffle tech innovation in the end
In the end all of them are the same, they all kind of want to be a microsoft pre monopoly era.
Govt's lack of understanding of the matters around the world is the reason why tech feels so intrusive. This has real consequences to you and me, now I don't trust the govt will be able to improve if its gets lobbied or corrupted and that's a seperate matter and might take new laws all around the world to prevent such corruption / lobbying but right now, the other best thing is to showcase support by being the minor fraction of the population who supports/donates to open source / msme businesses
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I can't help to worry, in all seriousness, that these changes are aligned somehow to the current administrations more authoritarian temperament. Can anyone relieve me of my concerns here?
I feel like that happened when they released chrome.
More like Apple with extra steps and equally less freedom.
Is there any good faith read of this that people can lend credence to? The one I could maybe come up with (with their mention of stability) is "we want OSes derived from AOSP to be stable, instead of following main too closely". They mention third party devs working off of stable too... so maybe they're like "instead of dealing with outside contributors messing around with our 'wip' stuff, we'll sign up for integration work".
Cost, I assume. It’s expensive to do releases, both in CI and release operations costs.
Almost all device run on the initial android release (QPR0), and never shipped any of quarterly updates. Even less so using _main_ as a baseline so that point is moot.
With android 16 introducing "mid releases" (QPR2), they expect OEMs to start shipping those as well, QCOM already has a QPR2 BSP release, and Samsung is expected to release QPR2 based builds soon.
As far as contributions go, google usually wanted patches to apply to main, I don't think that ever changed. And even there now that AOSP development is fully closed, it's even easier as partners will likely just upload patches against internal main instead. Less integration work there as well.
There really isn't a good explanation as to why they want to do move code drop cadence, other than they can and want to avoid wasting time releasing QPR1/3 that no OEM ever shipped (expect Pixels that is)
So the source code will be released in a kind of FreeBSD releases? These pieces work together, base things off them, don't mess with (or even see) any WIP stuff.
In other words, the result is still open, but the development process is not.
I don't work on Android, but I suspect it's a whole lot less work for both confidentiality and maintenance to not have to worry about daily/weekly OSS releases. That's probably worth more to the decisionmakers than the value of random contributions from people who aren't already inside the partner tent.
[edit] based on the other comments, I surmise that public pushes were already infrequent.
> the result is still open, but the development process is not.
Is the source code available at all times? This is a genuine question, I don't know right now.
Android's foundation has been mostly stable for years now, with fairly minor changes between releases. So I guess they just don't want to deal with too many versions to document and support, given that device vendors are generally awful.
Also for a long time they were doing yearly (or longer) release, afaiu it's only the past two years that they switched to quarterly (with the QPR release).
Maybe less fragmentation?
Sure. Development at Google is glacially slow because nobody does any work, and so they're only publishing releases bi-annually because there aren't enough substantive changes to make quarterly releases seem important. This will also allow the teams to move to biannual OKRs instead of quarterly, which lets ICs and line managers do half as much work while giving executives justification for why they need twice as much headcount.
When it comes to large bureaucracies, always assume laziness over malice or strategic competence.
We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong.
Every attempt since OpenMoko proves the market doesn't care.
And in what concerns the mainstream desktop/laptop market, macOS Linux VMs, WSL, ChromeOS, versus GNU/Linux OEM devices, proves most people doesn't care either what they can get at regular computer stores, otherwise GNU/Linux configurations would not be online only at very specific shops.
Mobile is a massive chicken-and-egg problem. The main purpose of a smartphone these days is to run apps. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone which can't run the apps they need in their day-to-day life. On the other hand, no company is going to write apps for a platform with basically zero users.
OpenMoko & friends are selling devices which basically only run Firefox, and sometimes make calls as well. The only people interested in that are diehard FLOSS enthusiasts, which means they have to use ancient hardware because new stuff doesn't have open drivers, which means that even if you ignore the app ecosystem they compare incredibly poorly to mainstream smartphones. No wonder they keep failing.
Interestingly, the desktop/laptop market is heading the other way. The move to cloud SaaS products means a decent number of people now only need a browser. What's keeping a lot of people on Windows is often literally one or two applications. Valve's push for Proton is the perfect example of this: the Steam Deck is providing a huge incentive to fix those last few bugs keeping a game from running on Linux, and with the way Microsoft is screwing up W11 it is now ironically the gamers who are moving to Linux.
What you are seeing in "regular computer stores" is mostly irrelevant. That market is basically dead. Corporate gets its machines directly from Dell/HP/Lenovo, PC enthusiasts mostly get custom builds, and casual people stick with smartphones and tablets. In-store PC sales is now reduced to a university student's Google Docs machine - and Microsoft is doing a pretty good job bribing the manufacturers to push Windows there.
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> Every attempt since OpenMoko proves the market doesn't care.
It's because people like you are constantly repeating this mantra of security nihilism [0], instead of spreading the word about true alternatives existing today, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975
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> We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong.
There is https://postmarketos.org/
Maybe 2026 will be the year of Linux on mobile phone.
The list of devices in the highest support category hints at how likely this is. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
And yeah, you can even buy phones with a non-android linux pre-installed, e.g. from pine64. But they come with all kinds of "for early adopters" warning labels. Deservedly so, in my opinion.
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Why are all commenters on HN ignoring the only smartphone running an FSF-endorsed [0] operating system, Librem 5, and only list everything else? I just can't get it.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25504641
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> Maybe 2026 will be the year of Linux on mobile phone.
Considering the ongoing DRAM and SSD crunch, I won't hold my breath.
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Check out Hackberry Pi devices. Then check out how far Plasma Mobile got, it made insane progress over the last years.
I'm currently working on an OS image for the Hackberry devices, maybe it'll get some traction. [1]
[1] https://github.com/rogueberry
[2] https://github.com/ZitaoTech/HackberryPiCM5
There are some, right? I think I lost track a bit, but one is Sailfish OS. I guess it is super hard for alternative devices/OSs to enter the market.
You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS.
Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ...
But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher.
As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work.
The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.
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Sailfish OS isn't fully FOSS. I believe the UI is still proprietary.
It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers.
Users - there is a broad scope of users. For sustainable eco-system you need also user interest and support of such.
Developers - that sounds funny. I know. But you need enough leverage to get apps or services to be open.
Companies/Software - a modern mobile device takes place in almost any interaction. Commuting, payment, banking, grocery shopping, social messaging, doom scrolling.
Biggest hope for the future is ensuring PWA becomes standardized enough. That way the OS lock-in could be reduced.
> It’s a circle that needs to be broken. It has multiple parties even without device manufacturers.
Well, you're right, however badly I don't want to admit it. Google broke that cycle once with Android. I'm sure that Apple would have too, even if they were not the first mover. And there's no question that their wealth and influence had a massive role in it - something an open platform cannot match realistically.
But the current situation is simply untenable anymore. I want out, no matter how many others don't care for it. The open platform has to be just functional enough (including app support, even as PWAs), for us to break free from this duopoly. Just like how Linux and BSDs are on desktops. I'm able to do everything on it from work to netbanking. I would hate it really badly if I was forced to use Windows or MacOS these days.
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We need a hardware attestation vendor who isn’t also selling ads on the same device. Something like, I dunno, an identity module which you could maybe insert into the phone?
> We need a hardware attestation vendor
We never had one on desktop; no real issues. Hardware attestation is primarily in the interest of the vendor, not the user. The user relies on chains of trust. This is how the world works.
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Open Harmony? I can't find what I would call authoritative information on how open it is. There's some hedging language about modules being closed source. But it's unclear if that refers to commercial versions of Harmony OS or Open Harmony, or if Open Harmony is open but somehow crippled.
It is Linux, isn't it. Jolla phone, etc...
Every time Android gets worse and less open, especially with recent ID verification for APK installs, I think Canonical's 2013 comment on closing Bug #1 ages even more like milk: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
Closing comment:
Ok, so at this point we’re getting iOS kernel source releases more often than AOSP drops? Maybe they should rename to i Open Source at this point because they seem to be doing a better job than Google at this now.
Isn't the kernel tree for AOSP open (so can see changes continuously)?
The development isn't done in the public tree (anymore), you essentially get a git push every 6 months in public.
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I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image.
One reason, I guess it's not possible because it's a complex OS?
But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers?
It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.
GrapheneOS does this just fine.
It comes with optional sandboxed Google Play Services and Store, meaning that these run just like any other app, with no special permissions. You can give them only Network access. The Play Store is still the most secure way to download everyday apps, so a lot of GrapheneOS users use Google's Play Store with a burner account in a separate profile, usually the Owner (the main) profile - since you can then disable apps in Owner and install them into other profiles. And the sandboxed google stuff can be used to run proper Google apps without any problem. Even sandboxed Android Auto works.
> I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image. > It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.
It's not particularly difficult -- see Graphene and Lineage. The main issue is that there are few phones on which to run these custom builds. Ironically, Google Pixels allow to run other operating systems than the one they come with (the bootloader can be unlocked). Other than the Pixel and a couple of Chinese models, you are looking at low-end or ancient hardware. You can't just build a phone without OS and install Linux/Android like you would on a PC.
It's not that difficult, plenty of ROMs exist, and analogues of all the apps exist as well.
> But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers? In part, afaik. On one hand, you have binary blobs that come from Google and you cannot generate yourself. The other part, is that you, as an individual, have no relationships with manufacturers so you have no access to their drivers.
I like the android way of security, where "rooting" your device to install updates is insecure, but using a horrifyingly out-of-date android (because your manufacturer, the only one who can update your device, didn't bother) is secure.
It's because "security" is not a user one, but a security of Google Play Services.
As rooting may tamper the google's telemetry (can we already call it "spying" please).
Not to mention, play integrity is being used a some sort of "anti cheats" by bank apps and other essential services. Even some government apps in the EU, essentially forcing you to be spied on by google.
The worse part is that, you can do all of those functionality with a browser on linux (or Android), yet to use them as Android apps on a device without gapps (even if jt's not rooted and with locked bootloader) is not allowed. Make this make sense.
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There was a time when we did call it spying. Programs that had what we would now call telemetry used to be called spyware.
The term has fallen by the wayside and hardly ever gets used nowadays.
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It's the security of the ecosystem, where the interests of app vendors are fundamental: content distributors can count on enforcing DRM, and banks are relying on the camera used for KYC actually being a camera and not a virtual device.
It's about keeping google's device secure *from* the user.
Just accept being spied on, it’s not as if there are genocidal billionaires out there.
I think you had the wrong idea on security here, the security is for the device manufacturers benefit to obsolete the hardware and force you to buy a new one not for your benefit. All the data is already being shipped off to where the hell ever for building models of you for advertising and more.
Android does have a meaningfully improved security over typical Linux desktop: the segmentation of data between apps. Imagine what would happen if people run all the proprietary crap they do on a typical Linux box. That's multiple spyware apps with full filesystem access.
Unfortunately, Google also uses it to abuse the user by also segmenting the user's access as well, "protecting" apps from the user, which is an abomination.
We have Flatpak/bubblewrap that can accomplish the same sandboxing on the Linux desktop, with no need for clumsy hacks like app-specific user ID's.
And yet, I keep all my important stuff on my Linux laptop and not on my phone. There's maybe a lesson here that security is also about trust.
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The whole security of both Android and iOS is a joke at this point. We know now that plenty of apps/games have proxy services built in, allowing the publisher to monetize their users, by selling proxy services to AI companies. If that can happen, with all the "security" those platforms and store supposedly offer, then I fail to see the point.
We're being prevented from installing and updating software on the devices we own, but Google and Apple will happily approve and sign malware in their stores?
They’re one in the same. You can’t exploit privilege escalation vulnerabilities unless you are vulnerable to them!
Android devices are enraging. ARM in general, why is there never a boot loader?
I have a little Android handheld game device that will allow me to dual boot a Linux from SD quite easily... but why can't I overwrite the existing install? I thought Android was more open and hackable than that.
Well there is a bootloader - on Qualcomm its even UEFI, but you don't have access to it.
https://worthdoingbadly.com/qcomxbl/
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I've got an Anbernic RG353M, came with a dual boot as you've described. I completely wiped it and only have ROCKNIX on there, a minimal distro based on LibreELEC, I believe. I actually maintained an Android + ROCKNIX dualboot at first, but it breaks the sleep function for some reason, and the ROCKNIX docs for this device say to remove Android, so eventually I did. I didn't actually use the Android side but had kept it around just in case before.
Not all these devices have the same level of support, so do your research on your model before trying to overwrite the install.
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Those AI translations are really bad these days... In german it says in the subline "Verwenden Sie das Android-Betriebssystem, um Ihr Gerät mit Strom zu versorgen.", that means: Use Android to power your device with electricity.
Please don't show me your crappy translations any more.
I checked and it's indeed the translation Google Translate gives for "Use the Android operating system to power your device."
Gemini 3 Pro offers "Nutzen Sie die Power von Android für Ihr Gerät." as a modern, tech-savvy alternative, as well as more literal translations that correctly recognize the idiom.
Yeah, I, too, was confused by this translation at first glance... That reminded me of when I had to install M$ Office for work. The download button read "Büro herunterladen" (Büro is the exact german translation of Office)
Android started out as an open ecosystem that is slowly being closed. How much funding would it take to re-create a credible open-source ecosystem for phones?
So here's what I don't get. What's the point of this? Like, what is the downside to Google releasing the source to a version as they ship it?
The only thing left as GPL is the Linux kernel.
And since Project Treble you wouldn't even get the drivers, because Android Linux is a pseudo-microkernel now, where drivers run in userspace and talk via Android IPC (Binder) with the kernel, enforced since Android 8.
Aren't they legally obligated to release the source code of whatever GPL software they ship? ie the version shipped that is
By GPL, they're only obligated to release an offer that allows costumers to request the source code. They can still keep the source "closed" by default.
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This is why most of Android outside of linux kernel is not GPL.
From other discussions, it sounds like they are shipping the copyleft source on time, only the permissive/pushover licensed stuff gets delayed source releases.
This is driven by the EU forcing them to allow alternative payment methods in the Play Store.
They are trying to avoid it, but I doubt the EU will let this stand:
https://www.developer-tech.com/news/google-alters-play-store...
Android is open source partly because they can fund it from Play Store profits. Google is thinking that their Play Store profits are going to be cut, and they want to make the profit up elsewhere - and importantly, maintain control of the platform. This is their method.
They've already used this playbook in the past with Google Play Services, and even before that when they abandoned all the built-in open source apps (Email, Calendar, etc.).
I think eventually we will get to ... Ah this is too hard to open source at all... Come at us with GPL requests..
I thought QPR2 and QPR4 were the only releases anyone cared about regardless.
redirect your efforts into other areas. I'd love a simpler device like https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-7-8-10.1.... to be well supported with a lightweight friendly OS. This is about as root as you can get for those who want root access. You'll have to put in an effort yourselves or you'll forever be using slop devices and software.
This sounds like defeat - essentially retreating into niches that only a handful of enthusiasts will be using, while leaving the mainstream to Google etc.
why is everyone so negative about anything alternative. it won't succeed and all. how do you know? maybe it's not defeat. maybe you'd be better off without any devices.
>ensure platform stability for the ecosystem
Aka "We will do less releases because certain OEMs don't want to be seen as outdated as they don't want to spend the resources to rebase even 4 times per year."
That's not clear to me: Will they do fewer releases, or will they have the same quarterly release cadence as now, just with only every second release open source?
I would assume the Q1 and Q3 quarterly releases are going away altogether.
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Well it does prevent them from shipping things prematurely. I guess.
They can still ship play services and their own apps at a faster cadence.
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android is plagged with planned obsolescence. Don't know if that's going to help.
AOSP has felt different lately, what’s going on? Not much. ~
More like a change of tone.
Quarterly releases given more emphasis. More precise stability language. Rather than feeling like an afterthought, feature flags are now receiving first-class treatment.
My view.
The isolation of platform work is earlier.
Landing flags are occurring more frequently than ever.
By “Stable,” it appears the Intuit team is suggesting “boring” which is deliberate.
I have been using a simple lens.
The surface of the platform is slow and predictable.
A gated and reversible design.
The OEM risk will be pushed later.
I wonder how other people see it.
Is Android giving off more conservative vibes?
Are flags cutting down on breakage, or just relocating it?
Has your testing strategy changed if you’ve shipped against AOSP?
In a practitioner’s take, not in a press narrative.