Don’t say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.
A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.
I don’t want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that’s a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don’t care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.
I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.
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You’d have to be able to run Android apps.
I was thinking I would just run android apps.
I have a feeling those budget phones around that price are sold at a loss and gain the money from selling user data. So I doubt it’d get down to that price
Probably not what you meant, but you can buy a Nexus 5x on eBay for $200 and flash Ubuntu’s mobile is to it.
PinePhone is $150. The more appealing option long term will be getting Linux running well on old Android phones though, as they are available used for $100 or less and have better specs. Often better specs than even the $400 PinePhone Pro, which is the most powerful designed-for-Linux phone I know of.
I’m typing this on a OnePlus 6T running postmarketOS. I paid somewhere around $125 for this phone, with box and accessories and in very good condition. It has an 8 core processor, 6GB RAM, Vulkan-capable Adreno 630 GPU, better WiFi/Bluetooth than either PinePhone, much better battery life, and a very nice OLED screen.
It’s not all perfect yet though. It doesn’t support VoLTE yet in Linux, so you have to force 2G mode to be able to receive calls and texts. Call audio is sometimes missing. No camera support. No USB host mode support. Sensors are WIP, but I’m testing the merge request for them and rotation works.
I ran a PinePhone and then a Pro for a year each. I think I prefer the OnePlus 6T experience. If they get the modem issue figured out it will be an amazing option.
I think that I would be a close to ideal candidate for a Linux phone, because I use my phone for so few things.
That being said, the few things I do use it for are absolutely essential for me, as in I must have them to function throughout the day, and I am not interested in having multiple devices I need to carry to do them. Those are as follows:
- A quality OSM map/nav app.
- A Discord app.
- A Matrix client and an XMPP app.
- A fast browser.
- A quality media player.
Most those have something on a Linux phone, but they are either slow, buggy, of missing features, at least as far as I know.
There are other issues too though, so far Linux phones seem to be slow and buggy from the reviews I’ve seen.
But the ecosystem is a bigger issue. One of the nice things about being on an unlocked android phone running GraphenOS or Lineage is that you not only have access to most of the official Android app ecosystem, but also to the thousands of apps in the unofficial fdroid ecosystem and naked APK ecosystem.
So you get overall so much more than just Android, which is already a lot.
Switching to a Linux phone severely limits you on that ecosystem, because many desktop Linux apps won’t run at all on a Linux phone OS.
Another user here pointed out the similarity to Microsoft’s Windows phones that they tried to enter the market with years ago.
I had two of them, and honestly, I absolutely loved them. The hardware was sleek and powerful, everything that made Windows 8 suck on desktop was actually awesome on mobile. The only issue was, MS didn’t deliver on the app ecosystem. There were a few dozen popular apps that were ported over from Android, and many of those were buggy or had limited features. That killed the phones hardcore. Who wants to use a phone that looks nice and runs fast, but only has a few apps that you need?
Would you buy a super powerful and sexy gaming computer that could only play 10-20% of your game library?
Personally, I would prefer to see the teams that are developing Linux phone OSes stop working on those projects and switch over to fully custom and FOSS Android versions. Similar to what we have now with different companies’ Android versions. But instead of the main differences being icon themes and bloatware, make them more varied like distros.
KDE Android, Ubuntu Android, Arch Droid, etc.
Have them focus on making their Android distros fast and feature-full. People could then have android powered tablets and car consoles that are compatible with Linux and other unofficial versions of Android.
I would love to have a KDE Android phone that is 100% integrated with a custom KDE Android car console. It would be a FOSS version of Android Auto. Imagine being able to remotely transfer files from my Linux PC to my car, both running KDE connect. Syncing them together to update my OSM custom maps. I could install Finamp on my car’s console and stream my Jellyfin music to it while navigating using Magic Earth or OSMand on a nice big screen.
I can keep dreaming…
The pinephone is cheap
RAM is pretty bad thought :(
3GB, everything else is upto the mark
Your expectations around price are unrealistic unfortunately.
And you can use a terminal with stock Android. Although you’ll probably need to root it to do anything useful.
Before the rise of Android and ios I’d have said it was possible, but the goal posts have shifted pretty far. Unless something backed by a corporate entity or government rises Up, it’s a no. A chromeos type thing for smartphone is not going to happen for mass market, because there is already Android.
Discounting Android, the last mile of what a smartphone is capable of can not be accomplished in Foss manner, without end to end verified OS images and some kind of secure enclave for banking and “security” features, carriers and banks are not going to get on board any more. Convenience features like DRM video streaming, casting also probably are not achievable either
We do banking with general purpose computers. How do you figure banking will be a sticking point?
Things like androidpay/apple pay type functions require a chain of security checks, on Android it’s levels of safety net. some banking apps require similar
Ive been on Graphene OS for a few months now and can confirm that banking apps work, but Google Wallet does not. One of my banking apps required me to toggle off hardened malloc in favor of Android’s standard malloc though, which definitely had me raising an eyebrow.
Unless people pay for the hardware and software development to happen, Linux phones will never be as feature complete as Android or iPhones, so people will not buy as many, so the prices will not go down.
Also, I gotta disagree reeeeaaal hard with the sentiment in the comments here that Android is Linux since you can slap a terminal on it. Excuse me, but where’s the GNU?
Excuse me, but where’s the GNU?
