Can I buy a phone that doesn’t use anything from Google or Apple? | Hacker News Reader

Can I buy a phone that doesn’t use anything from Google or Apple?

theguardian.com

Article mentions Librem, KaiOS and Jolla but fails to mention PinePhone which is (IMO) the most promising echo system so far.

Also, there's PostMarketOS which is Google/Apple free, though you'd have to buy a Googled device and install it yourself (and ... it's not remotely close to being usable day-to-day last I heard)

Why is Pinephone the most promising ecosystem? In fact more than half of its users run Phosh written by Purism for Librem 5. There are no paid developers for Pinephone.

Because it is affordable, and more importantly, because it shipped. I'm thankful for the open source work the folks at Purism have put out, but the reality of the situation is that I can drop $800 and wait a few months on a Librem, or I can drop $150 and wait a few weeks on a Pinephone. If I splurge and spend $50 more ($200), I even end up with a Pinephone with more RAM than the Librem.

The only real wins for the Librem are aesthetics (it's pretty), an ever so slightly higher clock speed on the ARM64 cores, and a GPU that is historically better supported by open source software. The final point is of less and less concern every day now that Mali is seeing open source support.

I bought a Pinephone PostmarketOS Edition. I'm going to be honest, at worst it is e-waste, at best a toy. You wouldn't really use it as a phone. Its too slow, too flaky, feature lacking.

Pinephone is a very raw product lacking basic functionality that would be essential in modern phone - encryption at rest is one. One day, it might turn into a usable product, but there are many, many years from this being something you would actually want to carry. It feels less useful than the first iphones a decade ago.

That being said, I would strongly support people buying these devices and building the ecosystem. We need alternatives.

The reality is today you have no escape from the big players if you want a modern usable phone device. Maybe in n years.

I bought a pinephone which I immediately flashed with Arch Linux. It definitely is not a workhorse of productivity as we used to but I did not buy pinephone to be one. I wanted a phone I can use for making calls and sending texts, and maybe taking photos. And the one that does not spy on me. I have plans to run podman on it and use it for things like firefox or thunderbird but that's not critical. I am happy to have a phone that does not constantly draw my attention :)

And on a side note Arch community is soooo briliant, they even helped me on New Year's Eve when I had spare time to play with the phone. It's kind of response that brings back some nice memories :)

The Pinephone is a development platform, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that Pinephone (or Librem for that matter) is anywhere near ready for daily use by most folks.

That said, when it comes to open mobile platforms, I think my assertion that the Pinephone is the most promising platform still stands -- they're the most successful at getting today's "state of the art" in open dev platforms into the hands of developers, even if that "state of the art" has a woefully out of date SoC.

Because there is absolutely no way I will be dropping $800 for a phone that has half the features of an Android device with a mature ecosystem. Raspberry Pi made many things possible because of its cost. The fact is that not many makers (or just dabblers) will spend a lot of money on e-waste.

It's not so simple. Which Android phone has convergence, killswitches, will be updated forever and has other 3 innovations [0]?

[0] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

> echo system

Unintentionally funny typo. Aren't we trying to avoid that?

DYAC. It was indeed unintentional.

Hopefully there is no echo chamber; I was intending to write "ecosystem" in case it's not clear.

https://e.foundation/

Article mentions them as an ASOP derived effort. So not entirely free of Google.

not free of technological direction for sure, but free of Google services. The article highlights both topics.

I think /e/ is a good shot at starting from friendly defaults today and not alienating users. But as the article rightly concludes: the web+app economies on top of the operating systems are data fueled too.

Google is a top 10 contributor to the Linux kernel. By your definition, Linux is not "entirely free of Google" either.

e/OS removes any Google dependencies or contact with Google services. The objective being to eliminate any Google knowledge of, contact with or control over the operation of the device.

This is about as "Google free" as it gets.

This post was made using a Moto G4 Play running e/OS.

> Google is a top 10 contributor to the Linux kernel. By your definition, Linux is not "entirely free of Google" either.

Google does not decide how Linux kernel development proceeds, so it's not comparable.

> This is about as "Google free" as it gets.

No, it's not. Have a look at https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 and https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/.

> In general, the problem with Linux on smartphones looks much like its problem on PCs. Many and various groups enjoy developing new versions of the operating system, which are all more or less doomed from birth. None of them have the skills, the interests or the money to create viable platforms that include the hardware, apps, services, packaging, marketing, advertising, distribution and support on the sort of scale needed to sustain a real product. Without those, they are unlikely to attract much interest beyond hobbyists and enthusiasts.

And this is why no matter what they will keep failing.

Yes, there are plenty of Chinese phones that the blogger can buy.

While technically true, I feel that the argument here is that it's hard to buy a phone that doesn't needlessly track everything you do. When you buy a Chinese smartphone, all you're doing is replacing Google/Apple with a Chinese company that still does all that.

Yes, but you would not care about the information the Chinese government collects about you. Neither do they, unless you start doing political business with them. Very unlikely.

That's very shortsighted.

You may not, but who knows about your friends, family, coworkers, etc.

Even if you didn't have ties to China, or know anyone who does, foreign agents can still use that data against you in your home country if they decide they need you to do something (maybe you don't work on classified stuff, but you're a janitor that has access, or one of a million other possibilities).

Lots of spying isn't done by foreign adversaries, it's done by the locals they recruit either via money/gifts, thrill, blackmail, etc.

"Google free" means phone without Android OS.

GrapheneOS anyone? Have not tried it myself. But it looks very promising.

Wouldn't waste my time with anything besides it, or Calyx.

Lineage etc break the Android OSP security model.

GrapheneOS is AOSP, not lineage based.

It has the full android security model, even allowing a locked bootloader, plus several extras like a hardened `malloc`. Don't know what you're getting at with that.

(2019)

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