this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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Guys, work on improving Linux phone instead. Google is taking Android away from you and it just isn’t worth arguing with them about it. Let them hang themselves. Build a better alternative.
Platform is not the issue, apps are. Even on a Linux phone you will have to run android apps and you will have to install them from somewhere. And for most apps Play Store is the only place where apps are uploaded.
Nobody needs apps. We had a world without them before. We can do it again.
Most of us don't need apps, but they're extremely convenient.
The point is separating convenience from profit-obsessed CEOs and surveillance-crazy governments.
PWA. Done
Ok, you go and tell all the companies to stop using apps.
My car charger? Controlled with an app.
Location of car chargers? In an app.
My bike GPS? Controlled with an app.
My gym entry? An app.
Climbing wall? An app.
You tell all those companies to stop using apps and add control panels to everything, go back to paper maps and RFID entry cards. I'm sure they will do it if you explain to them that there are dozens of users that don't want to register with Google. Dozens!
I don’t need to. I just use something else. This sounds like a you problem.
it sounds like you chose to patronize places that force you to use an app -- there are alternatives that don't require apps.
they're sometimes inconvenient AF, but convenience is literally the reason why we're brining climate change down upon us and how the epstein class has so much control over us.
I guess you're right. I will buy a gasoline car so I don't have to use apps to charge it and I will drive to a gym in a different town couple times a week so I don't have to use an app to enter it. This will sure help climate change.
Are you suggesting there are no charging stations out there that can be used without an app? I have been driving electric for 13 years and know you are absolutely full of shit. Sit down.
Have you been driving electric in Spain? Or do you think EV infrastructure is the same in the whole world? Ignorant clown.
I've said this before, there should be a way to make VPN-Style VM that on the spot/on the fly emulates Android and is tricked into thinking your phone is a certain model gives it all bullshit details or is fuckin' stupid enough you pay 1$ a year for a service plan that has a bunch of burner androids and you connect to one and your graphene is temporarily using an emulator that is also live connected to the device (like live booting from USB) to use said device's verified details to trick the android servers into giving you permission to use the apps through graphene on the emulator.
Idk but at that point you're better off having a burner android to reverse engineer the apps you want for graphene.
You could spin up an android VM on your home server and sort of pocket-Citrix that.
The endless challenge is that a phone needs to talk to the phone network. The radio manufacturers are deeply in bed with the surveillance state and they are absolutely opposed to free communication. Which means they will never allow a cell phone radio to work with free software.
That part works fine
Including voicemail, and RCS? Wow I need to check out this ecosystem again, thats exciting!
I dont even need a phone that can make calls anymore, i guess there's a lot of sms TFA
Calling is something that works in e.g. Postmarket OS. The trickier parts are NFC payments, lack of apps. So it comes with huge drawbacks. Some apps can even require that your device is verified by google and you have no way of hijacking it.
Proprietary camera software is also a huge thing. Software can do so much thing and you pay for the software also, not just the hardware but you lose the software when you install something other than the factory default.
And battery optimization is very young in desktop grade linux OSes, you won't get that good battery life as with android.
For myself I don't consider NFC payments or the few apps that require device integrity auth. Not everyone falls into this category but a good percentage are. We need more modern open hardware. To the larger software point there is a lot of good Foss software out there even for phones. What we need is a open software center like a flathub that makes them easy to find and deploy.
NFC and battery life are absolutely huge concerns. Cell tower stuff isn’t great either but if you absolutely had to many of us can live without cellular and just do VOIP.
Apps aren’t that big an issue, waydroid is a thing and the appification of the internet is detrimental anyway. Do it in a browser.
If we can get enough people to use Linux phones though, they'll be pressured to allow them. However, most people won't use Linux phones as their daily driver because of that. So it's unfortunately a circle...
The problem is that most people are passive consumers now, but it's slowly changing. Many of my friends who used to be regular normies having absolutely zero interest in technologies have recently switched to linux or FOSS apps and are now thamsalves FOSS enthusiasts. Heck, even my 80 year old grandma uses DeltaChat now.
AI chatbots eliminate 78% of the pain in the ass associated with getting a distro working in the real world. I'm off of win11 and on Mint. It wasn't plug and play and permissions and ownership pisses me off to no end, but it's working, Bottles is working, it looks great, and isn't spying on me or constantly trying to sell me shit. My SO just last night said something shitty about how nobody uses Linux and I'm not special. My response was to say that pretty much every computer that isn't a personal computer uses linux, and Microsoft has gone to absurdity in terms of restriction, spyware, and ads.
Congrats on beginning your Linux journey!
You wish it’d be that easy. Building a phone isn’t the difficult part; building an ecosystem around is a huge task.
Where I live, you are almost forced to own either an Android or an iPhone, otherwise it’s tough luck getting banking, secure net identification, way to interact with the government agencies, bus or train tickets, etc.
That’s not a tech problem, that’s a regulation problem. If I am required to have something to use a service, private or public provided, that service needs to provide what I need to use it. I’m not buying my bank an interface to me. I’m not buying my employer a way to log in. I’m not paying for someone else’s problems.
Agreed — but from the point of view of a private person, it doesn’t much matter what epithet you need to prefix the word “problem”, it still remains a problem.
From the point of view of a potential phone manufacturer, it also means that whatever you do and no matter how great your product is, very, very few people are ever going to use it at all unless they can use it in whatever they need to do; and that means you will probably fail as a manufacturer.
chucked postmarket os on an old shitbox tablet and its great 👍🏻
looking forward to a spyware free future.
Which tablet is it? I'm considering buying something used and cheap to test pm os out.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_A_8.0_2015_(samsung-gt58)
i pulled it out of the ewaste bin ♻
Oh it's from 2015. How's your experience with it? Is it powerful enough to watch youtube for example?
Disregarding the fact that Android phones are Linux phones, a so-called Linux phone will have exactly the same problems as a degoogled AOSP phone will, plus a bunch more
If you depend on proprietary google-dependent android apps then switching to a so-called Linux phone won't help you because you will still need those apps, and if you're willing to forego those apps and become "FOSSed up" then there is a vibrant free software ecosystem for AOSP-type operating systems.
Android forked a lot of code off Linux back in the day, but it’s very much its own thing. It was developed under totally different design pressures with different goals and solved problems a different way.
Android is NOT Linux. It could be argued it’s a descendant of Linux though.
It very much is, by the most basic technical definition of being an operating system based on the operating system kernel called Linux. I am sorry if this upsets Linux fans but this fact is easily verifiable.
Note that when I say Linux I mean only the kernel, i.e. the thing actually called Linux, and not any of the assortment of operating systems built around it (this includes Android) or any Linux-adjacent projects like GNU, systemd, GNOME, wayland, etc. Any operating system that includes those is a Linux operating system if it's built on the kernel called Linux, but only the kernel is a prerequisite for being "Linux."
Regardless it's not an answer to the problem posed by the OP, which is that "Play Store blocks Aurora Store." Anyone using Aurora Store is doing so because they require an app from Google Play Store. Whether they are using a "Linux phone" or not is irrelevant at this point because if they are, they are probably using an Android environment to run proprietary Android apps that come from Google Play Store and require Google Play Services.
This is why I say "Linux phones" are for the most part a red herring in the mobile software freedom discussion. A "Linux phone with Waydroid" is just an Android phone with extra steps. It's not like Wine/Proton which isn't Windows but an entirely independent implementation of Windows API. It's literally just running Android in a container. They would be nice to have at the final step of the freedom ladder after you've already removed yourself from the google ecosystem, but they are not the first step on the ladder.
no, the andorid kernel is no more a linux kernel than a linux kernel is a unix kernel. thats like saying macos is BSD.