These include Sailfish OS, postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, Mobian, etc. They never gained a significant market share/adoption.
Most people just want their phone to work. iPhones are as popular as they are because they restrict options, not open things up.
Laughs in Ubuntu Touch
Cries in Ubuntu Touch
Fuck Canonical.
Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Operating systems are niche nerd stuff. Your average iPhone user doesn’t know what iOS is. Most Android users don’t know they’re Android users - “I have a Samsung” or, worse, “this is my iPhone” (it clearly is not).
The market for alternative mobile OSes is basically software developers and tech/privacy nerds. It’s not an enormous market and it’s full of customers that see through the usual profit-generating enshittification that plays well in the mass market. There’s not that many of us and we’re fickle bitches.
I worked at “Big Box Orange Counter Retail” for many years. Us nerds, us who actively choose linux, know how to build computers, hell even know what a terminal is, are the vast minority. I installed drivers for people. I uninstalled malware. I upgraded ram. All normal. What’s also normal? Showing them how to log into their email. Showing them how to open an application. Showing them how to use a file browser. This is all mystical shit to them. Us at black tie computer repair in big box were made fun of by computer nerds because “har har just install linux”, “har har why pay them 130 dollars just do it yourself”. Bruh, the vast majority of people don’t know what a browser is.
It can feel like the opposite. Lemmy and Mastodon are heavily tech related, Reddit was too, and we build ourselves into echo chambers where we assume everyone has a specific level, but we are a teeny tiny fraction.
Linux was ~1% of the Steam survey for decades. That’s 1% of PC gamers, PC users who have Steam installed. It was a tiny fraction of a fraction. We’re now at 5%, which is great, but that’s still a tiny fraction of total users across all desktops. On top of that, a huge chunk is thanks to Valve for pre-installing a linux distro and going with that as the default. Us who installed Linux as a primary PC and game on it are a very tiny percentage.
Then, to add mobile operating systems into the mix, the percentage is even smaller. We are a part of a part of a percent on mobile. It’s why things like locking down Android doesn’t concern them. They know we’ll switch, they don’t care. We’re an edge case to them, a rounding error. What they can say is that 99.999% of people are now locked in.
- The OS needs to support X device the person is using
- People need to know how to flash the OS(Graphene has made this SO easy, but still)
- People have to want to flash a different OS
I remember flashing Android on my HTC HD2 20 years ago. I’m a super geek for this stuff. I’ve been wanting to flash Graphene on my pixel but…I need my phone every day. I can’t have a phone out of commission to try and find a way to install all the apps I need. With Graphene I can resort to just installing the Play Store but…I’d rather not use the Play Store at all if I’m already de-Google’ing.
I’d love to have a Linux phone, not android, but I haven’t seen a solid alternative yet. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Hardware drivers is a big problem in the mobile market. Reverse engineering drivers for every possible piece of hardware is too much work. We really need hardware manufacturers to want to open source their drivers so that open source OSes can work on a broad range of hardware.
We don’t need to want them to. They will need to be forced into it.
(Which most don’t want, because they make money by selling your data)
Really it’s a question of history. When computers first started getting popular in the 90s, it wasn’t standard for them to be sold with an operating system. You had to buy that on top - or use Linux, and even for that you generally ordered floppies, since the internet was just emerging back then. Just look at some of the old Windows ads - there’s no talk about an OS shipped with your computer, you’re supposed to order floppies and then install it. Windows wasn’t the de facto standard, yet, either, so hardware companies needed a way to ensure that their customers were able to install whichever OS they wanted to. So they created standards, and those standards live onto this day, providing Linux with a comparatively simple platform to operate on.
Smartphones only started becoming a thing in the early 2000’s. And by then, it was normal for a computer to be shipped with an operating system, and people had become used to just sticking with what their computer came with. Add to that that smartphones were not built on x86 chips (which is still what powers the vast majority of desktops and laptops), so new operating systems had to be built anyway, so there was not much of any incentive to create some universal standard that can be used by other operating systems. In the meantime, Apple has shown how lucrative it can be to completely lock your customers on your platform, and Google has taken note and followed suit. So now, it’s not just “can the OS run on my device” (which is enough of a clusterfuck in and of itself) and “will the apps I need run on this OS”, but “will the apps I need refuse to run because my phone doesn’t 100% look like Apple or Google want it to”.
Yes, it’s pretty frustrating. If not infuriating.
Because people buy consumer electronics to use for their intended purpose and not for tinkering. Look around your home. Your clothes could fit better, your couch could be comfier, your locks could be more secure, your coffee brewer could make better coffee. Most anything from could be improved by taking it apart and redoing it. Why are you not?
Before I learned how to solve rubik’s cubes, I just took them apart and re assembled them
xD
You could do that with electronics…
Its $1000 lego 👀
3 whole Lego sets of LEGO!
Inertia.
Because Google pays everyone to remain a monopoly. The trick is that they have to make more selling your data to a third party. Thus enshitification.
Average people need their phone service to work…
I tried using LineageOS on a motorola phone and I get zero data…
So… Yeah… I doubt the average person has time for troubleshooting this shit…
Also those phones require specific devices, you cant just flash random linux into your current phone.
Now look up “carrier whitelisting”
so yeah… good luck trying to get a carrier to allow you to use an “unapproved” device on their network…
I tried using LineageOS on a motorola phone and I get zero data…
This happened to me when i switched too. I had to do a bunch of troubleshooting and eventually had to open a support case with my carrier, which got escalated to tier 3 before someone knew what was wrong.
I had to manually enter the APN settings for my network because the ones it pulled when it checked in were completely wrong.
No normal person is going to fuck around enough to get that to work. They’ll just upgrade their device to whatever the latest model is.
Oh wow maybe I just had more luck in my internet searches, but I found the manual APN input as a solution a long time ago on like XDA forums I wanna say?
I think part of my problem there was I was on a small, then-independant carrier, so that information was not published anywhere publicly.
The carrier has since been bought up by one of the big 3 here and at that point documentation got a lot better, but all the perks they had evaporated.
I was looking forward to getting Ubuntu touch on my phone, I hunted down a decent phone within my price range and installed it on to it. I knew straight away I didn’t like it.
But, hopefully they’ll keep moving forward with it, and I’ll look at it again in the future. I love the idea of it, it just wasn’t for me in its current form back then.
Which of those are daily drive-able? I suspect the answer to that also answers your question.
The pain is how many things need special smartphone “apps” now. Can a Linux phone handle, for example, an app used for public transit? If so, how reliably and how much effort is needed to make it work? If not, what are the options for people without smartphones and do you want to deal with it? Some things have easy replacements but other things might not.
Theres a metric ton of Linux devices that are handhelds (like retrogames, music players, etc…etc…). But phones are a special beast.
The drivers are almost ALWAYS binary blobs. If you are a dev and want to make your own OS its not too hard to get the OS on the device…but calls and other such functionalities are difficult without at least some help from the hardware manufacturer. Thats one of the reasons theres a lot of OSes that support phones like the fairphone, because of their open specs.
Ive been part of some Linux ports of tablets and they have a lot of the same parts. Its the special hardware that almost always gets you. Most are just not worth the trouble. Def when you can get a really cheap EXP32 and make an ebook reader. Or a small raspberry pi and make a retro game console. Or make a VERY cheap VOIP phone with a couple of parts like the PaxoPhone. But most people use their phones as the everything device. And if you are not a multi-billion company, its hard to get manufacturers to listen to you.
I don’t know of any that iterated on usability enough times to compete with Android. It’s also very hard to get power management right on the weird proprietary hardware that almost all phones use. We’re in a crap situation because the modern worldwide web demands a huge and ever-increasing amount of compute power from the browser, so phones always have to use bleeding edge hardware to get decent battery runtime.
I think of giving up and switching to a small laptop, but then it’s a backpack device instead of pocket sized.
