off topic me using android 2015
I remember when I was younger is rooted phone and installed freedom apk. This app was awesome and allowed you to buy stuff from Google Play for free.
AOSP
Android Open Source Project
look inside
not open source
mfw
As gross as Google’s endless enshittification is, I blame the consumers for most of it. People vote with their wallets and they’ve been voting for the locked up walled garden crap option for the past two decades, especially in the US, where there is literally a culture of “ew, you have a green message bubble!” and chasing a status symbol is way more important than things like actual ownership over your devices, digital freedom and customization. And funnily enough, Google’s hardware sales have started increasing steadily since they’ve started copying Apple’s shitty model.
Ah yes, the consumers having no real practical alternative between apple and android means they support all the bullshit Google is forcing onto android /s
How do you propose I vote with my wallet when using something like grapheneOS requires buying a pixel?
GraphineOS is the epitome of paying against your values then using foss without giving back.
Murena sells phones with e/os already installed, and there seems to be others too where you can buy a phone: iodé , jolla, pine64, pureos,
I spent $500 on a Murena only for the thing to brick a month later because the cord or whatever connecting the rechargable battery to the rest of the phone somehow split off. Would’ve been open to shipping the thing back to them for a repair/replacement since a local shop was unable to do so, but they use UPS for shipping and there was no way in hell I was going to deal with the absolute mess it was to receive the phone to begin with a second time.
By not using GrapheneOS obviously.
Also GrapheneOS is about security not about privacy or freedom. So GrapheneOS is just not really part of the discussion here.
You’re not disproving my point that there is no feasible way for me as a consumer to have a functional device without begrudgingly supporting either apple or android in their walled garden bullshit. No amount of “voting with my wallet” will fix this without a proper alternative
It kinda depends on what you define as “functional” though. Because depending on that it is definitely feasible to vote with your wallet.
In my case for example, I use a fairphone with lineageos and microg. This means I have to live with some minor inconveniences around banking and such. But, for me, this is a functional device and I can do everything I want to do with it.
they court the nerds with cool tech, then ditch them whenever their shit takes off and the nerds are an irrelevant minority.
Pfft… We’re the ones who are just going to find the exploit in the new walled garden anyway. #GreenJailbreak
Tale as old as time.
No. No it’s not that. The politics of silicon valley are turning fast, and not in good directions.
Iam still sad not having titanium backup with root on my current phone :(
Try Neo Backup.
It’s worked pretty well for me in the past.
I’m gonna carry around my steam deck and add a USB camera module, a GPS module, and add some meshtastic radios modules, and I’m gonna daily drive it as the ultimate all-in-one device, and Mr. Google Pichai can’t stop me! xD
good idea however if you ever feel like needing a phone again… i have one word for you:GrapheneOS
Only for Google Pixels
I mean, if google is on track to ban sideloading, there’s not doubt they will also ban bootloader unlocking.
Though graphene is shopping for phone OEMs rn, hopefully there’ll be a graphenephone soonish.
Isn’t GrapheneOS just another android os?
Reminds me of old cell-phone service options. Free hours, rollover and prepay/pay-as-you-go/contractless etc.
Not sure how pricing/value actually compares, but it does seem like if you want a phone now for emergencies you’re going to get fleeced (also required data package). Unless maybe you buy a flip-phone or something. A fiber provider in my area even still charges $40 for a land-line (no idea if it’s VoIP).
you don’t have TrackPhone being sold at Walmart where you are?
In my country all you say is kinds the norm… wtf is up with telcos in wherever are you from?
wtf is up with telcos in wherever are you from?
Oh you know, they are given free reign because 🇺🇸
Internet pricing/speed isn’t great either.
My country has some of the best internet in the world now that I think of it… just didn’t realize none of that was that common elsewere, here you can go to a corner store, as in they sell groceries, and buy a sim card for 1usd, then activate it, and put money on it with cash at that same grocery store, or pay fully online, not so long ago, you didn’t even needed an ID to activate those.
Its all fun and games when your bork a custom rom, force flash a stock rom and delete your EFS directory (the one with the IMEI)
Ah good times, now that phone is just my OBS controller.
I had matching Nexus 5 and Nexus 7, I was in modding heaven. God I miss my Nexus 7…
I had a nexus 7. Great little device. Sad that Google is fucking shit up. It’s what they do best sadly
It’s happening, I’m finally getting nostalgic from tech memes. The days on xda forums and IRC. Thankfully IRC is still alive. Xda seems to be dying to telegram and Google’s enshittification
Mmm yes incomplete ROMs with a ton of self-congratulatory posting
ROMS have (almost) always been incomplete works. They have always been sideprojects, by tech enthusiasts that wanted to learn. They just happen to share those projects to any who would be interested, with no warranty.
iOS jailbreaking used to be incredible too.
I guess it might still be for those who slipped into the “window” to do it, but I have no clue what Cydia looks like these days.
Cydia is practically dead, replaced by Sileo or Zebra, and most tweaks are paid now.
I miss when people did stuff for a hobby or for fun. Literally everything wants your money these days it seems.
And if you oay, it’s not private.
I held onto jailbreaking till the end. I have a iPhone on iOS 17.0 and TrollStore for permanent sideloaded apps. It’s pretty awesome! There hasn’t been anything like a jailbreak or TrollStore since then. I wish I had bought an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.0 at launch so I could hold onto this as long as possible. Having a lower end iPhone I’ll probably need an upgrade in the next year or so.
You can get a similar experience to TrollStore by paying for an Apple developer account or a third-party signing service that abuses Apple developer accounts. It seems android users may have to do a similar thing in a few years.
It’s not like everything (or rather every dev) necessarily wants your money. We’re forced to monetize even our hobbies in an attempt to live a worthwhile life. It’s a cancerous system infecting everything and everyone.
To develop great FOSS software without the need of monetization is an enormous privilege.
Doesn’t help that Apple wants €100/year + a supported Mac (average €100/year for the hw upgrade treadmill)
No, you’re absolutely right.
I am more angry at the system than at the hobbyists. I apologize for coming off like that.
everybody could use more money. gotta be turning more and more of your life into a hustle for capital’s insatiable maw.
so now we pay for mods.
Because the default commercial software is trash.
Oh that sucks. It’s par for iOS though.
Yeah, me too. So what if apps were simpler than they are now… that would be nice.
would be nice
Omay, but, and hear me out on this: what if we added microtransactions to your email app and keyboard app?
It truly was a great time when the scene was really bumping. Maybe one day we’ll pendulum swing back to something along that peak jailbreak scene.
Maybe…
I feel like iPhones had a sweet spot between the 4 and the… I dunno. A few generations after that? Where jailbreaking was rampant and incredible, and the phones are basically like the 16 now.
Then Android had a ‘sweet spot’ after that. Their quality and UI fluidity really caught up, to the point where my old Razer Phone 9 still feels faster than an iPhone 16.
After that… well, I dunno where to go :(. Feels like both platforms are locking down.
i cant wait for mobile Linux to be ready, I will switch in a heartbeat.
Saw someone else mention sailfish! There is also PostmarketOS I’ve recently seen footage of it running on a OnePlus phone and it looks way more stable than I’d expected!!
Edit= apparently just 2 oneplus phones and sparse other phones are supported, and stability varies per device =/ you can check here to see if your phone’s supported!
It won’t happen due to voice over lte.
Why is this a problem?
Sailfish exists: https://sailfishos.org/
Wasn’t Ubuntu phone a thing?
Ubuntu touch is a thing, But the only platform it’s running properly on is halium, which is basically an Android core and bootloader that virtualizes the OS.
It works, and it has pretty good battery life, but it’s not really Linux on the phone, they’re using Android drivers under the hood.
The real Linux distributions that exist that are running on metal don’t have all the drivers worked out yet for modem and VOLTE, But those are close, i’m not worried about that, But I am worried about is the average of 6 hours of battery life on a 3500 mah battery. Android has battery life down to a science. Those apps just become snapshots and disappear into the background and restore like nothing happened when you need them again.
I started diving into this one Android started showing their ass a couple of months ago. If you want to use hallium, You might be able to daily drive it if you don’t have high expectations, The guy I was following that tested it out so that helium / touch was so lockdown that he couldn’t even install unsanctioned apps from the terminal because the VM would brick itself.
I can deal with not running most phone apps, But I really don’t feel like moving from one lockdown OS to another just for the hell of it. If Google pulls this s*** I will get out at the first available stop.
I’ve been hearing about this for 10+ years now. I vaguely remember testing a prototype that could only load an os. That was it
Pinephone exists now, you can buy it today. It runs Linux.
Calls/SMS do work although are not 100% so if you absolutely need these to be reliable you could get a brick phone for like £15 to cover that and then use the Pinephone as a pocket computer. I used it as my only phone for a couple of years and it was mostly fine, now it doesn’t have a SIM in it and its perfect as a pocket PC.
If calls/SMS are not 100% then it’s not a phone
That is where the dumb phone comes in which only deals with calls/SMS.
If you have to buy a dumb phone for your smartphone then you did not buy a smartphone, is my point
If you can’t even install software on it then its not an overly smartphone.
Pinephone battery usage (with postmarketOS) is atrocious. I bought one and it’s been collecting dust in a drawer ever since the first 3-4 times the battery drained from 100 to 0 within 24 hours on stand-by. :( My fastest wasted 700ish EUR ever.
Permanently connect it to a power bank?
- great use case for a mobile device /s
- lithium ion batteries are really nothing to feel comfortable around
- wasting energy is wasting energy
So - no, it’s now expensive electronic scrap, sadly. While my shiftphone easily lasts 24 hours with regular use and 3+ days on standby.
deleted by creator
wasn’t paying attention - my bad.
How so much? Mine was about £200 after delivery and import taxes. Still my most expensive phone but the best computer I have ever put in my pocket.
Shame that calls/SMS are not perfect, but I have since for a dumb phone for that so the SIM sits in that instead.
it’s been 3 years or so but I may have bought a pinephone pro because the simple one was out of stock? Plus convergence package, plus shipping, plus outrageous money transfer fees - German banks are basically thieves when it comes to international transfers outside the EU.
Follow pine64 news, they stopped producing new pinephones since they arent in demand enough
I thought that was just the pro?
the pro was discontinued but the base model is only going to be produced for another 2 years. Hopefully they release a next generation model but if they are toning down upper end models then I’m not convinced.
Mine has postmarketOS on it, probably should update sometime.
One thing I would like is decent offline maps with good performance, don’t even care of it supports GPS or not. Pinephone has no SIM in it these days and that sits in a CatB40.
Are they stopping development though? Stopping production when there is an abundance of stock to sell already is just normal business.
It wasn’t due to surplus, they said in the release that it was a didn’t sell enough units(the pro). And the current pinephone is only going to be produced another 2 or so years, they havent mentioned any plans that I saw of a model after that.
I’ve been looking to switch as well… But it’s hard to find a supported device. Dammit, I want Mobian so bad…
CyanogenMod, how I loved thee
Is LineageOS not good? I thought that was forked from Cyanogen?
They had to throw out lots of customization options, because Google made a ton of changes to Android/AOSP and it wasn’t compatible anymore.
Like, LineageOS is still a more feature-rich and cleaner OS than what comes preinstalled on most phones. But yeah, even relatively simple stuff like setting a system font never got a real replacement.
No idea, if it is still easily possible to implement that. You can fake it by replacing the Roboto font file with a different font, but you get weird font issues in various apps then.
The golden age of custom ROMs was truly a technological Renaissance. Magical time.
Damn such good days. My phone is a trash can these days.
I am in dire need of a true Linux Phone
the oligarchy is already set, we won’t get a grassroots competitor to apple/google at this point without shenanigans. android is open but the entire ecosystem around it is closed.
all sorts of bureaucracy and interaction with corporations and governments are now requiring squeamish proprietary apps that will not work at the mere hint of something they arbitrarily (or maliciously?) dislike.
Really gotta get rid of those.
Bring back the Nokia N900!
A nice sentiment but in reality the n900 and n9 were both too slow to use. That’s the first thing that would have to be fixed.
I did alright with mine. I figure a modern one would have modern hardware in it. People forget how dire the performance on the first couple of iPhone generations was, too. The N900’s contemporary was the iPhone 3GS, I think, which was an objectively terrible device in every metric except sales.
Oh, and the N900’s inbuilt phone dialer was also kind of ass. But I found its performance more than acceptable, and it could run full fat Firefox including the Flash plugin, which was still a big deal at the time, whereas its competitors could barely render a web page.
Hmm I didn’t use early (or later) iphones, so idk. In that era I had a Nokia N63 (sort of a Blackberry knockoff) which was really nice. I had an N900 but rarely used it. Later I got an N9 and used it mostly because my N63 crapped out. But the N9 was also near unusable. I finally broke down and got an Android phone in 2017 or so (Moto G4, cheap and obsolete even then) and it was lightning fast by comparison.
The phone running FuriOS seems neat.
I would eat my foot for this
I would eat their foot for this
I just like eating feet
Monoco would too! Owowowow
Look at this: https://liberux.net/
Dude holy shit, modular emmc AND RAM, AND modem??! This looks sick as hell!!
Well, the market is really very small. There’s also the PinePhone Pro (which is discontinued) and Librem 5, Volla Phone, Mudita Kompakt. But, of couse, that whasn’t Ipone 16 pro max.
That does sound fucking based, but probably can’t run android apps as well right?
LiberuxOS contain jailed Android I think. Bit if not you can install Waydroid.
In any case, this is the other side of freedom. For some reason, people want corporations to provide them with convenient functions and applications for free and not take anything as a substitute. It doesn’t happen that way, communism hasn’t arrived. Either convenience under the wing of corporations, or freedom in all its wild splendor.
UPD: Freedom systems will never even become popular and convenient if everyone chooses the convenience of corporate systems.
I was really rooting for Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS. Sadly barely any manufacturers offered it stock, so classic henn and egg problem.
I remember this “don’t be evil” slogan. But what was it from?
It was Google’s.
wheeze
