Link: https://www.wired.com/story/best-android-alternatives/

Interesting article from a generalist magazine. According to it:

• Best Preinstalled Phone: Fairphone 6 With /e/OS
• Best for Pixel Phones: GrapheneOS
• Best for Non-Pixel Phones: /e/OS
• For the DIY Tinkerer: LineageOS

All of them unfortunately based on and rely upon Android.

I have a Fairphone 6 with /e/os and it was great until I found out it has no RCS support, and every time someone with real Android or iOS sends a group text you get nothing and they don’t know you didn’t get it. For it to be workable you have to go around begging your friend to turn off RCS on their end and good luck with that.

Honestly Graphene is the only one that I'd trust unless you're not going to add any Google play services at all with Lineage, and I'm including micro G on that too.

Sailfish OS is beautiful and really nice, decent app support, but kind of a pain in the USA, postmarketos shows strong promise, but doesn't have VOLTE support yet which makes it a dealbreaker for me personally. I know a lot of folks love UBports, it never really was something I enjoyed. I'm really hoping to use Sailfish in the USA someday

If you turn off RCS a day or two before switching and ensure you message these groups after this is typically negated (at least in my experience) GrapheneOS just put out a way to use RCS on its OS this month which is really nice, I have it on its own profile for RCS and use open bubbles for iMessage/FaceTime and I'm astounded how well it works tbh. But the goal is to slowly harass enough of my frequent contacts to get on signal, so far I'm doing great, my largest hold out being my wife lol

This post's headline (not Wired's) is a tad misleading. Even the Android without Google Services still comes from Google originally.

Buy it used. The hardware doesn't call back home.

Do you have a link to information for this?

I tried using Graphene in September when they said they got it working but the best I got was a day before I had to jump through hoops to get it connected again.

If they fixed it this month I'd love to jump in and try again.

Postmarket and Mobian sure do have VoLTE on certain phones. OnePlus 6 for example. The trick is it needs to be abled first before you wipe Android. But I remember someone posting a workaround recently.

Sailfish OS is beautiful and really nice, decent app support

Have you actually used sailfishos? It isn't much better than using an Ubuntu touch device:

• app support is still pretty weak
• no volte
• big, big problems still with using MMS
• SMS problems (still) while data is on
• networking stack is very buggy for android apps (WhatsApp calls are unusable)
• no 5g
• no nfc

If you had a different experience, I'd love to know how you achieved it.

You haven't yet heard of the baseband modem thing? There is some debate about whether the baseband hardware has phone-home functionality on most major brands.

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026021200

Top of the change log

To toggle the switch go to settings, apps, Google Play services sandboxed, play services special permissions and toggle the only available switch for icc

I have not gotten it to work for calls but I'm prejudiced, I loved Maemo and Meego and have really only poked around the OS without a SIM connected because I couldn't use it for calls in the US

Do you have a link? I have a small army of OnePlus 6Ts literally just for playing with Linux OS on them. I'd love to try this workaround, if you don't have the link readily available no sweat I'll look about

P.s. new to my knowledge fedora is running on the 6T albeit very slowly compared to postmarket and mobian

https://liliputing.com/fedora-pocketblue-remix-is-an-atomic-linux-distro-for-mobile-devices-phones-and-tablets/

There's info here:

https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues/1878

As well as: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada)#VoLTE

And possibly: https://www.reddit.com/r/oneplus/comments/1aebdxz/unlock_volte_in_australia_oneplus_5_6_7_8_9/

I've had my fairphone for a couple of weeks now and am loving it!

But the problem is not Android itself. It's that google has populated it with tracking, profiling and in general anti-privacy software... Remove that, and you have a decent OS...

It was mentioned in the article to be tested next.
If you're interested in it: https://sailfishos.org/

Reading the problems here with the pure Linux platforms, why is there no initiative to get Linux mobile up to speed? The EU at least is looking for tech independence, funding should be possible.

GrapheneOS technically on paper supports RCS but I cant get it working and afaik most people can't get it working either (I think its more RCS works on GOS for some people with very specific carriers)

I alternate between mobian and postmarketOS every coupla months, to be up to date on the state of it. I have a fast device, lotsa RAM, lotsa fast storage, switch regularly between various UIs (phosh, plasma mobile, etc)

"up to speed" is such a huge, immense, and moving target that I can't fathom the funds and dev efforts needed to get there. e.g. the plasma team has their hands full with bringing desktop plasma up to speed - 6.6 was a gargantuan effort; when you throw the mobile UI in the mix, it makes the goal exponentially farther away.

when you consider that Linux-on-Phones (just had a mental flash of Russ Hanneman saying "Radio-on-Internet") isn't one thing, there's a bunch of dev efforts, some on bare-metal, some halium based and the various UIs (gnome, phosh, plasma mobile, sxmo, etc) that all pull in different directions, solving the same thing independently, wasting time and dev efforts.

so this thing becoming an alternative to an OS that was worked on for close to two decades by the richest people on the planet - that simply isn't on the horizon, becoming an android alternative is pretty far, far away.

now, if you think of this as your linux laptop with a touch interface in your pocket, you're closer to what this thing is and can do.

really glad to see someone finally making a distinction between pixels and the rest, had about enough with the graphene/pixel pushers. also didn't know eOS (not typing up them slashes) has a web installer, albeit only for a handful of models; hopefully that will expand. eOS to lineageOS would be like ubuntu to debian, making the thing more useable for a newb and every stride in this direction helps.

It doesn’t feel so far fetched to me. People are always complaining about the same 3 technical things: VolTE, call quality and security model. Surely that’s doable? And app support, but that’s the usual networks effects problem that’s also manageable.

As to the different Linux variants, the idea probably would be to develop a canonical model with interoperability standards somehow.

Android uses the Linux kernel, maybe some parts can be migrated or used for guidance, at least. Probably not necessary.

I‘d not be intimidated by the years and money that has been poured into iOS and Android. The years are incidental, this is just the time that the companies have existed and correlates weakly with the time you‘d need to develop from scratch nowadays. They have thrown away a lot of code and years of work in the process and are likely also carrying a lot of legacy code which they‘d happily rewrite if they could start over. AI is also accelerating development. There’s also something cultural there, US tends to fund lavishly, maybe we figure out how to develop more efficiently and perhaps decentralizedly, prioritizing standards and interoperability over monopolies.

I am extremely happy with my Fairphone 6 with e/os!

I installed myself with the web installer, and it was super easy.

Same! I got mine preinstalled with my new Fairphone 6

As long as Google allows that to happen, which is the problem.

I'm telling you how things are, you're listing things you wished to be true. and that list will get accomplished by deus-ex-machinas, what's the big deal... install it on a loose device you got and try using it for a day or two.

you don't see what the big deal is? you're in a UX that was tweaked and polished for decades, and you do it almost subconsciously, whilst walking, dodging pedestrians, doing other shit, etc. this thing is in its infancy and pretty far from usable by even tech people for everyday shit, let alone normies.

the apps aren't handling the vertical UI gracefully or at all. like, plasma's settings UI doesn't collapse the categories so you can't interact with it. Gnome's toggle switches dropdowns only recently started reacting to touch. OSKs are now at least somewhat usable but still nothing compared to android keyboards. none of the navigation gestures you got muscle memory for work here. that's just the system's UI, before you even attempt to run apps that don't know that 300% zoomed-in, vertical UI is a thing.

the stuff you mention are so far off on the things-to-fix list, might as well not be on it.

this is a glorious platform and I love using it; but people expecting this to be a replacement for android is bordering on delusion, no such thing exists nor is it really in the works.

They just released an update this month that has it working, I mean time will tell if it continues too but they specifically put a new permission in for this issue

The EU is looking for tech independence

Issues of whether or not the EU is actually looking for tech independence aside… I find it remarkable that open source software offers so much potential for breaking free from US-dominated tech giants like Microsoft and Google, for relative pennies, and no one seems to want to pursue it. I imagine a country like France or China could develop versions of Linux (for desktop, mobile, and other applications like spreadsheets or web browsers) that blow away what we currently have for a cost that would be a rounding error of a rounding error in their current state budgets. Not sure why this hasn’t already happened, tbh.

why is there no initiative to get Linux mobile up to speed?

There is. It just lacks a corporate sponsor, so it is going slowly.

Edit: It is also slowed because there is very little fully open source phone hardware, today - and of what there is, very little of it is pocket sized. This means phone OS maintainers have to rely on various hardware vendors cooperating, which is rare.

Also, the owners of the phone towers also probably don't imagine much benefit of having fully independent devices join the networks they maintain. I don't know how much help is needed from phone tower owner conglomerates, but I imagine we don't see enthusiastic support there, either.

„UX that was tweaked and polished for decades“, cool, now we know the optimal UX and can develop the first version with it. No need to spend 2 decades again investigating, tweaking, refining, optimizing for hardware that doesn’t exist anymore, and adapting to marketing cycles to get here.

The „is“ situation is not simply extrapolatable, because now you‘ve an increased interest in technological independence. These projects have been limited to a very fringe community of tech enthusiasts and funders, which explains their state.

And the issues on a technical level shouldn’t be too major, Linux is a well proven platform, that works perfectly well on desktop, and embedded devices, and the mobile projects already exist and kind of work. With enough funding and incentive, you could probably fix all the major problems in a year or so.

Support.

Governments or any Organisation chooses either windows or Apple because there is a Support system in place they can rely and Shit on if Shit goes sideways.

Corporate sponsorship for GPL FOSS os will be difficult for mobile devices as they don't see value in return. They will probably go for MIT or BSD system in future

We should have now enough interest on a political level, which can well replace or create new incentive structures for the corporate sponsorship. There are also some EU phones that come with Ubuntu Touch, or Sailfish, like Jolla and Volla phone and a couple others using Android variants (e.g Fairphone) which could cooperate too. The argument with the phone towers is not familiar to me, how exactly do they benefit from the current monopolies?

Seems like they have been just sleeping on it.

Maybe its an ATT issue but I use GOS and it doesn't work

me too, didnt install it myself. but still rlly like it

...or rooting the phone, but google comes up with new bs every month to keep you on your toes. the only solution is to force the friend group to get another app.

personly i used rcs for a week, and got like 5 spam messages, so i deleted the google sms app and been using fossify since.

You do have to specifically turn it on

https://grapheneos.org/releases#2026021200

Top of the change log

To toggle the switch go to settings, apps, Google Play services sandboxed, play services special permissions and toggle the only available switch for icc

Don't disagree in that point. The problem is, that phone companies don't want to support anything really... so until an open source project in that regard, is accepted by the major phone companies, we would have a hard time switching... And since they are paid and bribed by the ones in majority, like Google and Apple, that won't likely happen, unless there's some good politicians doing their gd dmn job...

Woah, it works now :3

No disagreement.

Pretty fucking cool right?

is it though? messages are now going through google

It is also slowed because there is very little fully open source phone hardware, today - and of what there is, very little of it is pocket sized.

What I don't understand is why, if Pixels can be unlocked and locked back up again - which is part of why Graphene only works on Pixels - why don't more alternative OSs target Pixels? Ubuntu Touch, for example, only supports the 3a. I have a 9 so I can run Graphene, but I'd love to be able to put some flavour of Linux on it.

I mean I only use RCS with android users and open bubbles for iMessage, but the majority of my shit goes through signal

if Pixels can be unlocked and locked back up again - which is part of why Graphene only works on Pixels - why don't more alternative OSs target Pixels?

I don't know, but my guess is it is just a resource challenge. Since Ubuntu isn't leveraging Android at the lowest level, they probably have to write hardware drivers for every supported phone.

I thought the debate is about the baseband software having ancient unfixed vulnerabilities that can give wide access to the phone for network operator systems

https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-system

I know, but I chose to support a local business and bought it in a shop in person and they only had the stock one.

But I do donate to Murena every month to support their development.