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Comment by meitham | Hacker News Reader

I was grumpy Android user at the time FirefoxOS came out. To me it was the dream phone that will get me away from Google tracking so I bought a Flame device as my only phone. This meant I had to convince everyone in my family and network to move away from apps unsupported on my new open device, so moved to Signal instead of WhatsApp for example. I was very disappointed to see the project killed by Mozilla but still went ahead and got a Banana phone with KaiOS, only to discover it has as many trackers as Google but without much of the usable features!

This was the straw for me that broke my faith in open phones and went full iPhone since.

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I moved countries last year and used the new phone number as an opportunity to get a banana phone. It doesn't have Signal, its Whatsapp doesn't support being connected to the webapp, its T9 implementation is absolutely horrific, and its 4G reception was very poor. After six months the 4G stopped working altogether and I reluctantly moved to a cheap Android phone by Motorola.

I wanted to be a believer, but it just…wasn't it for me.

This is the saddest story I've read in a while. Especially the ending.

Frankly, this is the same as my story. Except the open platform in that case was Android - or at least it was the open platform when I started using it, 13 years ago.

After some point it started declining constantly, and I just had enough so I switched.

Indeed my journey of disappointments has too started with Android. I must say my experience outside phones (laptops, desktops and servers) are very positive with combinations of BSD and Linux and I hope it remains the same.

Mobile is a tragedy with no cheerful endings.

You either get your privacy heavily violated, get yourself protected in a costly walled garden or get yourself stranded in a high maintenance, low guarantees software universe for a device that has ever increasing importance in daily life.

The best semi-open phone experience you can get is a Pixel with CalyxOS or GrapheneOS. Everything will work because its built on android, but with full privacy and better security.

Not GP, but I looked into that option. The problem to me seems that most popular apps depend on Google Play Services in some way. So your options are (a) use microG (which seems pretty janky), or (b) install the real Play Services, which puts you back at square one.

Or c) use alternatives to those most popular apps.

Also, "seems pretty janky" is quite the shallow dismissal.

Re: alternatives -- see this comment chain a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33103321

Re: jank -- per the official microG wiki [1], most of the functionality is only partially implemented and/or has bugs. I don't see how it's shallow to consider that as janky.

[1] https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status

I use MicroG daily, and never faced issue with apps it all. Everything works

Clayx ships with MicroG and almost every app works with no problems.

GrapheneOS has a GMS install option, but it installs it as a non root service, so you are still going much more private than stock Android.

Not everything, as I understand it - some apps (such as Google Wallet and some banking apps) rely on Google's SafetyNet API and won't work on those systems.

It's a shame because it's probably only a handful of apps but it's the ones that are important to me.

Calyx has a hack around SafetyNet, but it breaks often

I guess it was too early to get rid of the Google tracking. Now the situation is significantly better: it is possible to daily drive Librem 5 or Pinephone, as many people report (me included).

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