Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

It's really ironic how having suffered from microsoft monopolistic abuses in the past, they now do the EXACT same thing.

And the worst is that higher management probably convinced themselves they're not.

Yeah, i believe only a trial will make them realize what they've become.

PS: planning on buying a non-google non-apple phone in the future, after having had to buy a new iphone just so that i could install ios 13 and keep working (the old one being perfectly fine btw). Any advice ?

View on HN

The options I know of are the Pinephone and the Librem 5. They're various degrees of open source and secure. They're also slow, lack most software, require constant tinkering, and have terrible battery life. The pragmatic option is to get an Android phone you can install LineageOS on, use the fDroid store, and don't install Google services. This way you can sideload normal apps if you need them.

>Android phone you can install LineageOS on

What would be good candidate phone for that? Is there a phone that is friendly towards hackers in that way?

Looking at the LineageOS downloads page OnePlus has strong support (as a ratio of the number of phones they released to the number of phones that are compatible). Another idea is to check XDA Developers and see which forums are most active.

https://download.lineageos.org/

The OnePlus phones are good and they run on Lineage, but they do bundle google services by default. Of course, you can unlock the bootloader (wasn't too hard on the OP6, or the OPO before that, not sure about newer devices) and flash whatever you want, though, if you want to get rid of google services.

The list of supported devices is here: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/

I just bought a oneplus pro 7 with lineage and microg and i love it !

I'm happy with my Pocophone F1. It's not the only phone with very good ROM/Free software support, but among the cheapest (around 300€, maybe a bit less by now, it should now also be available used).

It has lots of RAM, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, a high-end processor, a large battery and most importantly is very repairable (a screen costs about 20€).

The initial unlocking process is a bit annoying and stupid, but after that it's quite nice. The only thing you could say it really lacks is NFC.

If you intend to flash custom rom on your phone, generally avoid devices with mediatek (or other non-qualcomm) chipsets because they tend to have higher risk of hard-bricking when you messed up which will require sending the phone to a service center to fix.

I guess it depends what you use your phone for, but Mobian[1] on the PinePhone is a surprisingly decent daily driver for me.

1 - https://mobian-project.org

It works for some use cases, I don't mean to imply otherwise. For my use cases... I have more apps installed on my phone than Mobian has in its repository.

> It's really ironic how having suffered from microsoft monopolistic abuses in the past, they now do the EXACT same thing.

It is also extremely concerning how little backlash there is for this behavior, because that is what stopped Microsoft.

> Any advice ?

Last I checked, all Google phones (Pixel, Nexus) can be rooted/flashed in a supported manner. There's irony for you. You can't do anything about the binary blobs for the baseband/radio.

It was a different time man.

How so? I didn't get the chance to experience it.

The government didn't just bend over and let companies do whatever they wanted every single time. They still fought back some of the time.

There are also a lot more people playing the stock market now than before.

If one is a shareholder of a company, that gives incentive to defend them no matter what.

Apple has always been like that: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Of course they will relive their desktop experience because some other environment will at some point be better due to fierce competition. It's kind of their omen that the company with the bitten apple from paradise has to created a walled garden. The difference will be that there is no Steve to rescue them again.

Funny thing is, their first logo was Newton's apple. Imagine the difference.

Well, Newton's life was heavily influenced by an intellectual property battle over the invention of calculus, and he spent his later life hunting and executing counterfeiters, so, maybe appropriate after all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_life_of_Isaac_Newton#Ach...

While I see where you're coming from, I think there's a pretty big difference between software and hardware expandability. Anyone can write software for a Mac and run it, then and now. (Nowadays users need to right click to open apps from unidentified developers, but that's not so onerous.)

One plus runs and android fork and pixels. Both have decent support with non bkoatware images that unlocked for a privacy kernel if you want.

> just so that i could install ios 13

Can you install iOS 13 on a non-Apple phone? If not, why not just stay on iOS 12? What software requires that kind of upgrade and is available on a phone OS other than the iOS/Android duopoly?

If I were to guess, they may need to develop against iOS 13. Or an application they rely on only works on iOS 13 now.

But yeah the problem doesn’t get solved by moving devices.

i had to test the app i was developing for a customer on an iOS 13 device for some technical reasons (i used to not care for my previous apps). And my iphone 6 wouldn't install that version (which is another topic).

As i said, i'm both an iphone user AND mobile professional developer. The first is quite easy to change, but the second will take a bit more time for me to get rid of Apple (or google).

Have you considered SailfishOS? It can be run on a number of devices (including the PinePhone if that interests you): https://jolla.com/sailfishx/

And more info about the PinePhone and it's OS support: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone_Software_Release...

Jolla are selling sailfish for 50 euros and the official support is limited to Sony xperia phones. Personally, i have never paid for my cellphone OS and neither have the vast majority of people out there.

When the instructions involve a bunch of convoluted commands and the terminal, Sailfish doesn't stand a chance. Like, their chances of growing in popularity are literally zero with this model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com