@Lydie I know, but I’ve also been hearing the same story since 2007 (from the time I bought my first Nokia 770) and not much has changed since then.

There’s always been this chicken-and-egg problem where not enough developers would put efforts in making Linux phones usable unless there’s a phone manufacturer that is also onboard with it, which funds the efforts instead of relying on devs building PostmarketOS or Sailfish workarounds to work with cameras and modems in their spare time, and which ensures that the efforts of the developers aren’t thrown to waste when the next model comes out. Oh, and as long as we can’t tell people that their banking apps or national ID apps will also keep working on a Linux phone.

Librem and Jolla are the closest we’ve come to hardware manufacturers actually invested in a Linux phone, but they’re still too small, rough around the edges and overpriced for the bad hardware that they sell (and that’s the other chicken-and-egg problem, in order to be competitive on pricing you need economies of scale, and you can’t have economies of scale around new products and processes).

I think that a big part of the problem has also been people’s complacency - as long as Android is around, it’s kind-of open-source and I can still install a custom ROM, I’m fine. I feel like that must end and we must start building usable alternatives with more urgency.

@the_codifier I have a positive hunch about the collaboration between Motorola and GrapheneOS. And I think that it’s going to be a win-win.

GrapheneOS needs a reliable hardware partner, without being exposed to the risk that the next version of the Pixel phone will permanently lock the bootloader.

And Motorola needs to carve its own niche, and taking the crown of tinkerability that once belonged to Nexus and Pixel sounds like a good strategy (and they’ve already been making good phones with more-or-less stock Android for a while). According to some back-of-the-envelope estimates ~10-15% of the Pixel users run GrapheneOS - Motorola has identified a reliable niche to penetrate.

But the software side of the equation is still a problem.

I’m honestly not sure of how any future age verification APIs may be implemented on the OS, if and how they will percolate into the AOSP too or will be mostly contained in the Google Play Services and can be sandboxed, how easy it will be to get rid of them, how many Android apps will break if you try to bypass it, and how doable it would be for GrapheneOS to keep maintaining their forked version.

And I’m also not sure of how future modifications to the Android apps ecosystem through the developer verification process will impact also open-source implementations of Android - since in the worst case scenario they will also impact F-Droid.

GrapheneOS+Motorola is probably a good patch for the immediate problems, but probably not one that I’m likely to invest on the long term. For the simple fact that the Android ecosystem in general has become increasingly hostile and it’s trying at all costs to become more like Apple.

@joroingo well iPhones have been bad from day 1.

Android at least found for most of the time a way to strike a balance.

But I knew that it was just a matter of time before the enshittification faction in Google managed to get the upper hand.

It’s just appalling how unprepared we’ve all come to this day, with age verification APIs, external APK limitations and broken download/recovery modes perhaps all coming within this year, and the Linux phones ecosystem still struggling to get together something usable after two decades.