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Comment by pachico | Hacker News Reader

Although possible, I wish installing operative systems in phones was as simple as it is for computers. I'm already hearing experts saying it is the simple but it's not :(

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The main issue is phone vendors not sending their hardware support and other customisations upstream to the Linux kernel, bootloaders and AOSP, but the open source community sometimes does work on this. The second issue is boot security, but some companies allow unlocking and there are a lot of exploits for bootroms and kernels. The third issue is GPL violations and other binary-only hardware support (kernel drivers and userland daemons), but reverse engineering can help there.

It is definitely possible though, I've done it myself in 2012, but I pretty quickly gave up due to the above issues and the bugs I found in the hardware vendor code:

https://bonedaddy.net/pabs3/log/2012/12/03/debian-mobile/

There's a full spectrum of possibilities here.

- Google lets you flash Android from the browser, using WebUSB: https://flash.android.com.

- Most Android phones can be unlocked and flashed with some command line tool.

- With Apple, you're screwed.

With an old enough iPhone bootrom you can install Android using a jailbreak:

https://projectsandcastle.org/

It's easier with some manufacturers than others.

Sony's android devices pioneered being extremely developer friendly, shame that department was closed. It's hopefully unrelated, but someone will interpret this as impact of being developer friendly on your business.

Yep, I wish it was better as well. The situation has improved a little bit though. For example, you can upgrade to newer builds of the same LineageOS version OTA using a built-in updater app.

Now is getting harder even on PCs, for instance Mac and Windows forcing hardware protection prevent anyone form installing other OSes on a machine

/e/ is working on this. https://e.foundation/register-to-test-the-e-os-installer/

Takes practice and ideally having an extra phone that you aren’t scared of bricking although every mistake I made last time was recoverable from and it started to make more sense.

You should consider Librem 5 or PinePhone.

Et voila: https://www.pine64.org/2020/04/02/pinephone-ubports-communit... .

With Treble, it's getting closer to this as one ROM can support many phones

Depends on the phone I guess but I can't say I've ever spent more than 30 minutes following an XDA guide to flash a new Android OS.

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