I had one device who died after a couple of weeks: suddenly it refused to switch on. So I found the real source of pain from Pinephone project: the assistance. I sent a detailed report about the hardware failure and they sent me a message about how properly recharge the phone , something like : "you need the power supply, insert the plug in the 220V socket, insert the USB-c cable, etc", demonstrating that they didn't read my message at all. After some further rounds of nonsense instructions, that , anyway, I followed giving them feedback about the results, I asked for a replacement. At that point, they started to waste time, another department apparently stepped in. After my complaints, they asked me to send the device back without acknowledgment of receipt, via ordinary post service, in the USA (I'm in Europe and I received the phone from Asia), sending to an anonymous p.o. box. I told them that it was unacceptable because in that way I took all the shipment risks not having any proof that I sent the device nor that the parcel in case of problems. Luckily, I found a post service with proof of shipment, so I had at least a receipt proving I sent the device back. At the end, they refused to send me a replacement, starting to negotiate the amount of the refund, because they wasted so many time I risked to not be able to ask Paypal intervention, I asked Paypal to step in receiving a full refund.
On the initial response, in case it's the Pro that can be explained by a known hardware issue that manifests as an apparently bricked device if the battery gets drained and regardless of charger it takes several hours to bring it back to life[0].
Even so, that does not excuse the rest of the story and hopefully they can improve. A friend of mine also had some frustration with communicating with their customer service (which appeared outsourced or incompetent).
Hi, I'm am a pro. I have laboratory equipment and I did the needed checks before opening the RMA. As explained to the service the problem was elsewhere. It's exactly the opposite, IMHO, they treat me as an idiot consumer that wasn't able to recharge a phone. I think they don't realize that this kind of device often is purchased by people different from the average consumer, so yes, I had same impression of your friend. Moreover, I tried to access their on-line form to request the RMA: the only browser at time able to access and send properly the request was Opera. I tested, Safari, Firefox, Chromium: only Opera was able to do the job.
Your story sounds bad, but I would bear in mind, that they are not professionals for handling consumer cases.
They are mainly linux smartphone hackers. If I would buy a device, I would consider it a donation if something goes wrong and not expect something to be able to work with. But that part should probably be made clearer. I also cannot say they are fully to blame, I found their website clear enough that there is no real quality control or support. But if I would have believed certain internet enthusiasts, I would be sad because of broken promises regarding stability. At least basic working functionality by now would have been nice.
Still, things are maybe getting there.
"It's incredible... how much the PinePhone experience improved in the meantime"
Moreover, if you are producing a device for open source developers, people working for free , giving their free time to contribute to create a valid product, you can't spit on them when they have problem with the hardware they are contributing to develop, IMHO. At the end, I paid the phone, the shipment, custom duties, VAT, the shipment costs back in USA (why USA ???), a lot of my time, for nothing. So I felt was better to stop, spending my time elsewhere.
It is not about what you do, it is how you do it, and in particular what expectations you set.
If you sell it like a regular product, without saying clearly up front that it is not supported, then people will legitimately not like you.
IF you are just selling a kit without support, SAY SO. Then the people you want will come buy it, and if you did well on the parts that you claim to do well, you'd have happy customers (modulo the few Kens & Karens who expect everything for nothing).
I'm an hacker and I gave up with that platform after that experience because if you can't guarantee reasonable assistance quality , a basic replacement service if the device is defective and a procedure for RMAs in reasonable times, I feel is better to employ my time elsewhere. Two months asking a replacement and obtaining nothing, two months : we aren't talking about a service from hacker to hackers as it should be.
> I would consider it a donation
I'm also donating my time, for that reason I don't feel their behavior is justifiable.
> a lack of notifications, something I as a "my phone is in silent mode, no it does not even vibrate, I mean it when I say silent"
> when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata)
> I remember attempting to bring the factory image up-to-date around the date devices shipped and ending up with it in a state where at least the GUI wouldn't come up after all
> writing an update in gedit, running Firefox with ~20 tabs for hours would have been plainly impossible without multiple reboots and likely some unfortunate data loss in the meantime
If this blog post is trying to convince me never to get a PinePhone, it's doing an excellent job.
Author here. The blog post is not meant as a discouragement, but as a report. It does not help anyone if people get a PinePhone (or other Linux Phone) with the expectation that it's just going to work like their big-platform-high-volume smartphone, and then cry a river because mobile Linux is not as refined.
Maybe I should have highlighted the personal success stories I have had more (contributing to mobile-config-firefox, evaluating tons of apps, creating issues and seeing them getting fixed) - but I really don't like bragging.
I trust my regular followers (blog, videos, social media) to somewhat know my tone by now (I've been writing over a hundred blog posts over the past two years), and it’s them I wrote this for.
I don’t really know how to make it clearer in the limited time I can justify for low-content-value posts like this – and I did not intend for this to land on the hn front page. My best idea is that I could add a caveat box is reading "Hey, i don't like to brag, it's been fun, so read it it more positively than it's written, but don't ignore the negatives fully.", but that would be super weird.
I have a day job that I have to attend now, so I can really only change anything once the attention has moved on to something different.
Nobody's complaining about the author or blog here? If anything, I'm quite grateful to them for documenting all the warts, and making it really clear that the PinePhone is not an option for us casuals in the process.
> Or just allow and trust the readers to make their own conclusions.
Cant do that religions exists where people believe in God without any evidence, and people exist who believe in Govt & democracy, so that says it all really.
Still, the "Conclusions" section isn't that encouraging either:
> My hardware has held up well, [...], I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). [...]
> I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can't really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64's return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications. Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper "Linux knowledge" necessary if you don't have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own [...]"
...so, to sum up, if you want a nerdy toy to tinker with, get a PinePhone. If you want something that works "out of the box", go look somewhere else.
I agree with your summary. I enjoy PinePhone and Mobile Linux a lot, but if someone hates tinkering (or has no time for it) and wants a seamless experience, they should just get a different device.
That said, it does not have to be a lot of work for basic functionality these days in my experience - e.g. postmarketOS 22.06 is a solid base.
Thanks for the reply and for the work you put into Mobile Linux! I enjoy (a moderate amount of) tinkering and use Linux on both my work and home PCs, but my requirements for a phone are a bit more demanding - a phone has to be a device which I can depend on to work e.g. when I get a call, if I forget to charge it overnight, when I need to quickly scan a QR code to access some website on the go etc. So I'm afraid I'm not in the market for a Linux phone right now, but I hope (thanks to people like you) it will get to that level one day...
You might consider getting a refurbished Google Pixel and put in your choice of GrapheneOS or Calyx. For someone like you it may be a good compromise, and maybe at some point you get a side Linux phone to eventually transition towards.
With some differences (better in some way, worse in others), it feels at a similar stage to desktop Linux on commodity hardware ca 2000~2005.
Both GNOME and KDE seem surprisingly serious with their mobile efforts but unless you're happy with a mostly console experience it's probably at least another year or two until basic apps like e-mail are in place for non-enthusiast non-tinker users.
As for distros, I am yet try try Mobian but other than that postmarket is the most reliable experience right now so far (Danct Arch may be catching up though :))
The more I interact with both Android and iOS - the less I want to live in that world. I'm tired of products changing underneath me because
"our metrics indicate that [insert ui change here] creates a 1.7% increase in user conversion from unpaid to paid seats"
or
"our metrics indicate that [feature] is heavily used by our most active paying customers, but most new subscribers don't use it at all - we need to push [feature] in their face so they become very active paying customers like the current users of [feature]!"
or
"Do you want to hear about all our products? I know you paid for no ads, but we're not showing you an ad - just a promotion that lets you know that there's a new product that we've just released. Also - Did I mention that our partners have also released a new product that we'll be promoting to you in just a moment! Isn't that great! Also - these aren't ads."
And it's EVERYWHERE in those ecosystems, even in the companies that aren't blatantly disregarding your privacy for their own profit by just directly selling your data wholesale to the highest bidder.
So at least for me, I really REALLY want something open source and usable in the phone sized device space.
---
All that said - I have a pinephone, and it isn't there yet for me. But it's tantalizingly close.
Well, I on the other hand was convinced, that I want one, as soon as it is stable and out of alpha.
I am just getting sceptical, if that ever will happen. I know that I am also not helping for it to happen, but sorry, I had my share of weird linux driver issues.
I've been using it for a few years now (across 2 laptops and a tower). For basic usage, it works pretty great. So terminal + internet + basic programs. KDE is wonderful by default and easy to customize (not a NixOS thing). For more specific stuff it can take some elbow grease (packaging software, playing games, more exotic system config). Between the nixpkgs issue tracker and the official docs/wiki, it's pretty easy to figure things out.
And my computer is infinitely hackable and idiotproof at the same time. That's helped me learn a lot of Linux stuff by doing fearlessly.
And this isn't to mention how nice it is that all 3 of my machines' full config is in a monorepo, with shared config abstracted into Nix modules.
I get notifications on mine just fine, even with suspend.
Dino generates notifications when I get messages, mutt rings the terminal bell when I get email (if I cared I could pretty easily have it generate a toast notification too.) If you treat the thing like a desktop rather than a phone then most of the software will "just work" occasionally needing a small amount of glue to deal with things like the suspend/wake cycle to save battery life while still allowing for notifications etc.
The Pinephone is very much the "just install gentoo" of phones. Most people who actually use it are going to have radically different configurations and experiences.
It is indeed great at putting off tons of end users. I have no idea why anyone would expect anything beyond useable for a Linux Phone if these mountains of issues are being revealed to the end user.
Five to seven hours of idle battery life is basically competing with the Steam Deck on who empties the battery quicker. This is before I have mentioned the ghost town of apps that you can't show to anyone if one asks: 'Does it have Instagram?'
Another reason why this device was dead before it has even arrived.
Author here. I'm sorry for being blunt, but good grief, comments like yours make me want to stop blogging!
You did not read the full paragraph nor the paragraph after the one you quoted, right? (If you took the time and read them, I really should stop.)
Also, yes, there's no Instagram client I know of (and thus none is listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org), but Facebook properties and a privacy-adjacent, nerdy developer crowd somehow don't go well together.
I have been using a Pinephone as my daily driver for the better part of two years.
Here is my wishlist for hardware changes to the Pinephone:
1. Fix the emmc so that it runs fast. There is a known issue with the emmc that it runs at half its max speed. It can be trivially fixed in hardware (and Pine64 even recommends a solder based hardware mod) but Pine64 keeps selling phones with slow EMMC. This would solve some (though not all) of the perceived slowness of the Pinephone.
2. Usable hardware kill switches. You will notice that the article doesn't even mention the hardware switches for the camera/microphone/WiFi/BT/cellular. This is because the switches are A) under the back cover and B) too small to flip with a finger (requiring a toothpick or similar). Purism got this right by making the switches usable.
3. Add a "diffusor" to the LED notification light so that it is more visible from all angles and doesn't make an obvious spot on the ceiling in a dark room.
The software bugs are numerous and I would not yet recommend a Pinphone to anybody who doesn't enjoy using the command-line on a phone.
Also, Pine64 for years has listed replacement battery in their store but they have listed it as Out of Stock. As batteries are the part of a phone that must be replaced every couple of years and because it can be dangerous to use batteries of ill repute, Pine64 should actually sell replacement batteries.
Regarding 2.: I asked about that for the PinePhone Pro, and I was told that changing the case is super expensive, as it requires new molds. From what I've heard elsewhere, PINE64 reused another companies case design (and molds) for the PinePhone, and that (duh, it was just some regular phone design) did not have kill switches.
Regarding replacement batteries: There are some brands that make okay/fine replacement batteries, I am quite happy with the one I've written about in another comment on here. But yes: They should be available in a perfect world, but given current global supply chain problems, it's understandable that they are not at all times.
Unfortunately shipping li-ion batteries is not easy as well. IIRC, this is actually one explicit reason Pine64 is making an EU store, so it is easier to ship things like li-ion batteries to folks.
My wife recently bought me a Pinephone Pro as a present. I liked the idea, but in practice I still haven't managed to use it because I'm stuck with basic problems.
E.g., the battery wouldn't charge in the phone. I bought an external charger, and this seems fine, but ideally I'd like a backup battery so that I can charge one while I use the other. But pine64 batteries have been out of stock for ages.
Their wiki says "The supplied battery is meant to be compatible with Samsung part number EB-BJ700BBC / BBE / CBE from the 2015 J7 phone": I bought the CBE one, but it's such a tight fit that I'm terrified of using it in case it explodes or something. I have no idea where to get a proper pine battery from. And the forums are not exactly flooding with activity when I asked my question (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16851)
Beyond that, a lot of the stuff that is supposed to work on Pinephone, turns out doesn't work in the Pinephone Pro. In particular, the multiboot sd-card demo (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11347&pid=77027#...), which I was really keen to try, because I found the 'stock' distribution that came with the phone pretty ugly and useless (to my needs, anyway). I had the Jolla phone in the past, and I was very happy with it, so I may try to install Sailfish when I get the time to figure out 'if' it's possible, and if so how ...
But for now the pinephone pro is just sitting there, waiting for a compatible battery to show up, and me to find the energy to experiment with a compatible OS, before I'm even going to use the phone for anything even remotely productive. I'm gutted.
It's this one [1]. I have used it with the PinePhone for a long time, and it fits and works with the PinePhone Pro in my superficial impromptu testing - I have not yet checked whether it's able to drive the PPP at full load. This could be relevant as I vaguely recall the batteries of PP and PPP are different with regard to their coulomb spec.
the pinephone pro is definitely still thoroughly in the bringing up phase. for people just wanting to play around with it/actively use it, and not intending to develop it, the regular PP is the better option. They do make this pretty clear on their store page for it, to their credit.
> That said, the accessories seem to be plagued by hardware bugs
I received the Pinephone Keyboard a little more than a week ago. Ordered it because I thought it would revive my motivation to use the Pinephone, because it would turn it into a cool mini linux laptop.
However, since receiving it, I wasn't able to get it working. According to the community the pins don't always make a connection to the phone and you have to shim it, while risking to break something. The keyboard charges the phone and all the required drivers are installed, but typing just wont work.
Overall I still really like the idea of the Pinephone. But since receiving it in 2020 and recently receiving the keyboard I had to spend 90% of the time using it for debugging, fixing, reinstalling OS after breaking upgrades etc. and am now at a point where I just don't care about this device anymore. Because during the 10% when I can actually use it, it is just way to slow.
I of course knew what I was getting into and know that it's still in a dev phase.
My favourite OS to use is DanctNIX with SXMO, btw.
I bought a PinePhone along with the keyboard case to muck around on as well.
Initially, I got no response from the keyboard so I started reading up about it. The first think I found is that when you've got the phone attached to the keyboard, you mustn't use the phone socket for charging as it can fry the electronics (something about the charger chip in the keyboard, I believe) - only use the keyboard socket for charging when connected.
Then, after worrying about whether I'd fried a brand new device, I discovered that after a software update, the keyboard suddenly started working. However, the top row of keys weren't working well and required a stern press for them to activate, so I hit the forums again looking for a solution. Some people were making shims for the top row of keys, but then I found a post going into detail as to why the keys had trouble activating. Apparently, the rubber doesn't have enough room to squish down, so an easy solution (if you have a dremel) is to remove the top row keycaps and remove a mm of material from the top edge of each keys (the side nearest the hinge). Took me about ten minutes and now they work perfectly.
Still haven't found a good use case for it though as the screen is short and wide so not great for terminal hacking.
I had this problem, it would charge and detect the keyboard was there (on screen keyboard wouldn't appear, but keyboard didn't input anything), It was down to the clip around the pins not being clipped in, so it was effectively pushing the case away from the pins. I had to give it quite a squeeze for it to pop in.
Although to be honest, after using mine for a month I gave up for various reasons such as upgrades breaking things.
I have to say that I never found a use case for it.
I remember that I hated the OS it came with. I think it was some flavor of Ubuntu that did not let you install software in any normal way. If I remember correctly, I did not even manage to get vim running.
After some reading up on mobile Linux distros, I switched to Mobian, which I generally liked.
But then I noticed that the phone wakes up and turns on the screen at random intervals. And quite often. Never found a solution to fix this. The web is full of reports about it:
I watched the development around it for a while and contributed some details about the issue. Checked back every few weeks and did not see any progress. Then forgot about the phone at some point.
I have a Pine64 board from an ancient Kickstarter. Some parts of it like video decoding have never worked. There was at one point something vaguely in the shape of a driver that was supposed to support it appeared in an undocumented zip file but I never managed to get it to work. Requests for specs so the community could write their own driver fell on deaf ears. I decided never to buy another Pine product again, and I have not regretted that decision.
This is a problem Android, which is also Linux-based, has already solved. You can wake up a process (on a power efficient core, if available) without waking up the screen.
One problematic issue I can see the Pinephone have in regards to this is that there's no unified push service that works for all apps. Google has forced everyone on Android to use their push service and it's terribly restrictive for application development but over the years this has also solved a lot of battery life issues. Apps holding open connections of their own just to see if there are any notifications is fine on desktops but it's a challenge open platforms will need to solve somehow.
> One problematic issue I can see the Pinephone have in regards to this is that there's no unified push service that works for all apps
I won't reveal exactly where this is happening because the software is still in a proof-of-concept stage, but KDE folks are working on a 'unified push service' right now.
> One problematic issue I can see the Pinephone have in regards to this is that there's no unified push service that works for all apps.
I don't think that's the problem. It would not be that hard to have system-wide settings to control which applications can apply for background updates.
My (limited) understanding is that the difficulty resides in hardware support for sleep/low-power and the many different implementations from every hardware vendor. Note that it's also a problem on desktops/laptops (with S3 and related techs) even on Windows using official firmware/drivers.
I wonder if running Mozilla's autopush[1] and making web push a standard across apps would help solve this?
This would let you run your own push server (or use someone else's), configure it system wide on your device, and all apps would be able to use it automatically with their services.
Free Software needs time. This is a first step and a good one. Much progress is already visible. It will get better over time, because nearly every programmer knows deep inside that a really free phone is really needed. Every personal effort to help bring it to work makes perfect sense. Insofar this is an incredible important device and works.
Can you use whatsapp on a pinephone? I know there's web whatsapp but you need to sign into that with a native app.
Honestly the browser, google maps (which works in the browser), whatsapp, SMS, phone calls, alarm, stop watch, camera... that's really about all I use on a phone. If I can find a linux device to switch that does that, I'll switch in a heartbeat. Phones are the least pleasant part of my "digital life" because of their toy operating systems.
Maybe look in to sailfish os. It has android app support and so far (almost 3 years) whatsapp has worked for me without issues. Don't know about google maps, haven't tried it but I did install microg and got my bank app to work on it.
The phone runs Linux, and on Linux you can run Anbox/Waydroid to run Android apps. I don't know how well WhatsApp works on Anbox, but theoretically it should be possible.
From what I've read online the SoC is quite slow compared to most modern smart phones so your mileage may vary. Sadly, the mobile phone market is as closed down as ever, making it very challenging to get any kind of open source system to get calls or texts. There's a reason they shoved an external chip in there!
If you want an open, somewhat limited but usable smartphone experience, check out Sailfish. They've been in the mobile phone market for years and their original base in Android makes the OS compatible with quite a few devices with decent SoCs.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
> Personally, I'm waiting for the day you can hack PostmarketOS onto a phone and just use it as a phone, but that's not going to happen any time soon on closed hardware.
For a select few devices, my personal favorite being the Xiaomi Poco F1 [0], [1] (despite afaik needing Windows to unlock its bootloader), this is already true. Sure, that's not "every phone", but at least one relatively available and nice (for the price) phone.
Megapixels (the most popular PinePhone camera app) can scan QR codes (but it's obviously limited by the overall quality of PinePhones camera hardware).
It’s a pity we are not at a level where open(-like) phones are a thing. I have been looking from time to time for one that pretty much works out of the box, but all the stories are not painting a pretty picture.
What’s the showstopper into bringing an open phone to a general audience? (Aka open box, turn on, type in credentials and done.)
In the meantime I hope my ancient iPhone keeps working.
The OS is just not ready at all, many apps are missing. Many things dont work or simply suck like the camera, and also the hardware is very slow and very out of date compared to maistream.
I think in general Open hardware is a very distant thing, and not very well invested in, as manufactures don't see any positives for them in it.
The best daily driveable "open"(as in OS and Kernel) and privacy focused experience would be with a Google Pixel and CalyxOS / GrapheneOS.
be aware, you might face issues with SafetyNet, other than that its perfect.
Possibly the general audience isn't interested in the benefits of an open phone. I remember a HN comment where a phone manufacturer said making relationships with suppliers was almost impossible without a decent sized market segment.
Maybe with the right positioning and marketing, e.g. playing the privacy or sustainability (repairability) angle, I could see more people being interested. Anecdotally, I've seen the things like the Fairphone have reasonable interest and adoption from non-tech friends and acquaintances.
That's precisely why the PinePhone matters. One might criticize PINE64's approach of "throwing hardware over the wall and hoping that the community magically comes together and makes the software side work", but without PINE64 the situation would be even worse.
Is also true of computers generally. If you want a computer that really supports Linux (or whatever OS you want), you have to support the vendors that are doing the work.
> What’s the showstopper into bringing an open phone to a general audience?
The biggest showstopper is Open phones can't seem to do what all of their closed competition can do. If an Open phone can't reliably make calls, send texts, get on WiFi, or run apps people want there's no demand for them.
Even the cheapest Android phone has millions of person-hours sunk into its hardware and software implementations. There's no need to drop down to a command line to get some component to work right. If it truly sucks you can return it and at worst you're out under $100.
Until an Open phone can get to at least the capability of a cheap Android phone you can buy at a drug store no one is going to want them, especially for the price premium of their low volume production.
I've been using a PinePhone for about 18 months, since the battery life on my OpenMoko was abysmal (fair enough, considering I'd been using it for over 10 years!)
I'm running the default Manjaro + Phosh it came with, and upgrading through pacman. The phone functionality works fine (calls, SMS, phone book, etc.). One annoyance is that menus in Firefox don't display correctly, which makes addons like uBlock less useful :(
I've also been using the hardware keyboard, which extends the battery life comfortably, and makes it much easier to do long-form writing (due to the physical keyboard itself, and not having an on-screen keyboard wasting space). Unfortunately the keyboard battery no longer seems to be working; I'm not sure if it's due to a kernel update, or a hardware problem (I may have fried the charging circuitry by plugging it in wrong!)
HW is kinda fine, if you don't try to overstress it. Here it's running some optimized software via a convergence dock on an external monitor (1920x1080):
Hi Megi! Thank you for your great work to make the PinePhone so much better than it was when I got it!
(I was going to add a people "I want to thank for their hard work"-section to the post, but lacked the time to do it thoroughly and make sure I would not forget a major contributor, and therefore dropped that.)
The Firefox video there seems pretty misleading from my personal experience. I got a pinephone a couple of years ago with the intention of doing a little bit of development for it, and using it mostly as a handheld web browser and signal client. Even without plugging into an external monitor I found Firefox unusable for most my needs. With essentially any extensions it would grind to a halt. I don’t run a lot of extensions, but Firefox without ublock origin is essentially worthless to me, and with ublock origin enabled it would take Firefox tens of seconds to start, and several seconds to load a new tab. Scrolling on sites with a lot of images- especially infini-scrolling sites like Twitter was nearly impossible.
I really want to like the pine phone, but whether the fault is hardware or software the result is that it’s just not there for performance in my experience.
I’m hopeful that between the pine phone pro and a bit more time to optimize software it could be one day, but it seems a while off.
Incidentally I have basically the same complaint about the pinebook pro. It’s not unusable, but a very small amount of extra power would take it from being a secondary laptop I only pick up for fun to a real viable daily driver when paired with a powerful desktop.
Firefox performance is better with GPU disabled (on Xorg with noaccel), to reduce RAM bandwidth requirements. Which leaves out most of the fancy wayland compositors.
Yes, opening a badly optimized website, like youtube or twitter is slow. Thankfully there are alternatives like twitter -> nitter, etc.
I find that kind of argument for EU regulation quite depressing. So, just because other vendors aren't capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on, the EU should force competitors to open up their hardware to those vendors?
Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being.
This way, Linux on smartphones would still remain a very niche proposition for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Regular consumers probably wouldn't flash their expensive Apple or Samsung phones just to run Linux on them.
Without a vendor selling a complete product, alternative smartphone operating systems will largely remain a pipe dream.
As a counter-argument, i don't understand how it's even legal to sell hardware without the proper manual and schematics.
If you're worried about competition, hardware specs is what fuels competition, both for hardware manufacturers (so clients can make an informed decision about what they buy) and for software vendors (so clients have a choice).
Just imagine if you bought a house and the schematics were under an NDA you have no access to. You would have to contract a specific company to perform any repairs/adjustments, and said company could proclaim your house EOL any day and stop providing support for the many cracks and leaks its bad designs created in the first place. That would be a nightmare situation, don't you agree? Why is the equivalent supposed to be acceptable when it comes to phones?
> Unfortunately, this seems to be a common line of thinking, not least within the EU corridors of power themselves: Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being.
Then why haven't "vendors [..] capable of producing decent hardware to run Linux on" sprung up in the unfettered entrepreneurial utopias of Shenzhen or SV?
This has nothing to do with Europe's (very real) difficulties in establishing a local tech industry. The OP wished for the EU to enforce the opening of phone hardware because he does not see any path for this to happen organically anywhere, and the EU happens to be the only entity that might be both capable and willing to knock down technological moats.
> Because it's a hell of a task, regardless if the outcome will be open or closed.
Disclaimer: i'm no hardware engineer
I believe this is utterly false. There is a strong distinction between selling open hardware (the real stuff, not just open board design) and selling closed hardware.
If all you care about is board schematics, it's not hard to buy various chips and assemble them into functioning hardware. It's then often (though not always) possible to use the various binary firmware and drivers provided by the vendors for a certain platform (say Android device tree, or Windows driver) and make the hardware usable under a specific system.
Now, if you're trying to do real open hardware and have 100% schematics available, good luck: it's technically possible to acquire an open hardware micro-controller/CPU (though you have to look for it), but then you need open hardware GPU and network card and i don't think that even exists (at least not fulfilling our 2022 feature expectations).
These problems are detailed in various sources. My two favorites are an article about Lenovo hardware support in HaikuOS and a recent talk about operating systems design for interfacing with hardware:
> There is a strong distinction between selling open hardware
Correct. The entire supply chain evolved for proprietary stuff. There are NDAs and roadblocks everywhere.
Most chip vendors are very happy to assist close phone manufacturers in implementing drivers, optimize battery usage etc. and do not cooperate with any open source effort.
Apple is actually did a really great job opening up (the bootloader of) their recent M1 laptops, in a safe manner (according to marcan himself). It is not an accident that the Asahi project can develop so fast.
> Instead of nurturing competition and their own tech industry or create an environment where such an industry can thrive, they somehow try to regulate it into being
Fair and efficient markets don't exist in a vacuum.
In a free-for-all, everyone would be insider trading, stealing, and defrauding.
Integrated, non-modular technology platforms are not competitive marketplaces. You cannot introduce a competitor to the Apple App store or iOS because it's a monopolistic integrated platform.
Society has to continually keep creating laws that turn non-marketplaces into marketplaces. Just as it has always done.
According to Adam Smith himself, competition only works in well-defined markets. Creating a phone, as it stands today require being a hardware vendor yourself, or ordering in such high quantities that hardware vendors would actually care about you, while simultaneously you are a huge software vendor who simultaneously managed to capture enough users to make it worthwhile for third-parties to target the platform.
Remember, not even Microsoft managed to pull it off and not for lack of money or try. There is simply an inherent local minima/maxima for these 2 platforms.
How do we expect a third competitor to show up? It’s like expecting a 4 years old girl to compete with heavy-weight MMA champions. The rules around a market are the only reason capitalism could work, otherwise we would only have paper-clip machines sacrificing everything for profit.
IMO it's more of a question about e-waste and sustainability. the moment a vendor stops providing updates, they should have to open the hardware to be flashed with other operating systems
Put us to live with pigs and in less than a week we would be fine.
Give us a PinePhone and we would be ok in a week or two. It would become "the new normal". In the end, you can take photos, run apps, develop shit, make calls, send text messages.
It's just like switching between Android and iPhone and back again. Something that many of us have done at least once.
Am I downplaying the PinePhone? Not at all. I'm just saying that its not a big deal one way or the other. If you used it, I'm sure you would be fine.
For many people, having to switch from iMessage is keeping them on iOS and would not even consider Android.
Having no WhatsApp, no Spotify, no banking app, no Apple Pay or NFC payments, no Widevine so no Netflix and so on is making using Linux on the phone very difficult for both Android and iOS users unless they REALLY want to
This is a device for early adopters and enthusiasts. That crowd will have a secondary device that does all those things, and use the PinePhone as their main pocket computer.
So until things improve and there are more alternatives to what you mentioned, this won't be a mainstream device. And that's fine. We should celebrate where we are today compared to a few years ago.
(I could go into bridging WhatsApp over Matrix, or using WhatsApp Web, but I realize that that's most likely too painful for most. Also, Waydroid makes lots of things work, but the side-effects on battery life made it seem impractical to me, to be honest.)
As I understand it mobile OS’s have to wake up as little as possible and then race to sleep, because with everything lit up the battery drains quickly. They batch work from different processes together to avoid waking up hardware. For example, background network operations from different processes are grouped together to avoid turning on the modem too often. iOS is better at this than android (at the expense of developer flexibility), and android is better at it than more obscure mobile OS’s.
Some are doing it better, some are doing it worse. There are Pinephone supporting distributions that use suspend to RAM aggressively, using autosleep and wakelocks, and all this Linux stuff Android uses too. You're just assuming somthing that's not true in your question.
What do you mean by battery life? That's just usually a function of temperature, number of charge cycles, not overharging, etc. And the battery will last you for a long time. Ceratinly for a few years.
Then, that's a function of device's power consumption, which is a function of many factors, which includes user behavior, too. It only makes to sense to talk about it with a particular usage in mind and not in general.
You can have Pinephone suspended for 7 days if you like, under certain circumstances. Or you can drain it 2.5h if you mean to compile Gentoo on it. And completely different SW optimizations would come into play depending on the scenario.
"Battery life" usually means how long will battery last, before you need to replace it.
Typical use for me is to touch my phone (not pp) once every 20 days to put it on the charger and don't toy with it or call at all, just receive an odd SMS or two for 2fa bank access.
If you'll play a game, it will matter whether the game consumes 30% or 290% of CPU time. It will matter if you use the phone mostly indoor, or outdoor, because backlight is a major power sink. It will matter if you need wifi or mobile internet, or whether your usecase is mostly uploading or downloading data, how much screen on time you'll want,...
It's nonsensical to ask for how long will phone run on a single charge without specifying what you'll be doing with it, because it can be anywhere between 7 days and 2-3 hours.
One thing I wonder about is can the popular apps be made legally in an open source way, do you have to get the companies to make a Linux app for PP/PPP. This is with regard to get mass adoption.
That's why interoperability regulations is important. Who cares if an online service supports a specific platforms if it has open APIs? If the specs are there and the service can't by law prevent 3rd-party clients, it'll be easy to make a native client.
Is the Pro worth it? I like the idea and I own the og, but it is painfully slow. At this point I just check on the progress each month and put it back in the drawer :/
It is way faster. Has 6 cores, can run VS Code for example. But officially the cameras don't work yet. Although megous has it recording video.
I do the same thing, put the batteries in, update them (run both Mobian/Phosh and Manjaro/KDE Plasma Mobile). Then turn them back off. I have a TMobile number for it but the pro also has this sleep/wake issue. Where it will not wake up after a while. It's more apparent with the plasma Mobile than Phosh.
I think it's worth it with regard to saving money, supposedly the price will bump up. But as far a s a daily driver/main phone I still use an Android.
The external display detect/reliability is buggy still too as in, plug it in, nope, plug it in, nope... There it's working. That kind of thing.
Author here: I am daily driving a Purism Librem 5 currently (in order to write a proper review about it).
I have carried the PinePhone as a secondary device for a long time before, and I tried it as a main phone for a week twice (late 2020, April 2021) - things were too crashy for me back then (and the slowness admittedly annoyed me, too).
Many people do though. Personally, I've been using a Librem 5 as my daily driver for more than two years now and couldn't be happier despite of some quirks.
I find it interesting how much people's feeling of safety has become dependent on their access to a personal smartphone. I didn't even get a regular cell phone until high school, but I never felt like I was in danger. Now, even though everyone around me has a smartphone on their person, even I feel slightly uneasy when I don't have my own phone in my pocket.
Arguably the killer app is that you can plug it into a display (using a convergence dock or directly, if the display supports USB-C) and that you can run your beloved Linux distribution of choice and make it your own thing.
Battery life is also comparable to an older phone since we've got CRUST - not much "screen on" time, but it should last you a day.
i bought one with a keyboard case, and I love it. the software definitely still has some rough edges, and I wouldn't try to use it as a phone yet, but as a little pocket computer it's kind of awesome. and it's full linux, you can install apache on it, you can compile stuff, you can use vim, whatever you want. GUI applications that haven't been mobile optimized aren't always perfect, but often surprisingly usable (especially with the keyboard) - e.g. i like to use mednaffen to play emulated games on the train on it, and it works pretty darn well for something that isn't even supposed to work at all at that resolution.
Unfortunately I felt like this written TO someone who has owned a PinePhone for 2+ years and studies it's niche jargon. Is the author the author's target reader?
I got one, never managed to get the phone to call. 4g wasn’t working either. I think I managed to receive a text at some point. I was disappointed to say the least.
There is something inherently wrong with that that you can not install a linux on basically any phone on the market that could work with linux with a bit of good will. I think we need truly open hardware and someone with money willing to stand against "status quo" of industry, like Elon Musk did with cars.
"I think we need truly open hardware and someone with money willing to stand against "status quo" of industry, like Elon Musk did with cars."
I- huh? Open hardware? Elon Musk?
I can only find a vague legalese pledge that doesn't seem to be very attractive for real world use according to many, and I know that Tesla is starting to really enjoy being an Apple-like company with such hits like proprietary chargers.
I'm also seeing no Teslas are listed on the supported page for projects like openpilot.
What we need is general opinion to be against such closed ecosystems run by industrialists with world records for wealth concentration. Not dreams of Captain Save A Pleb.
Well, the only thing i meant is that Elon stood against industry with elecrtic car idea. If not him I think not a single major car manufacturer would go for electric by now. And to be clear - agree with everything you've said, or almost everything - not dreaming of cpt. save anyone :)
