Its always good to try!
Switching my fairphone to e/os today
The short term is forked android. The long term is a Linux distribution, new or otherwise. It doesn’t seem reasonable to assume that the proprietary blobs in Android will get reverse engineered.
The Free Software Foundation is actively working on this (reverse-engineering Android proprietary blobs, see Librephone project). It hasn’t even been a year yet since they began, but I’m rooting for them.
That will definitely be the focus. If Europe people can mandate making Android and Apple Ecosystems be opened to having real GNU/Linux or anything else they want to be able to be put on it then that would make huge changes to getting that to happen
Ya. Short term Motorola for Graphene, long term any that support postmarketos
EU petition?
Fairphone do work with Ubuntu Touch.
Wait really? Ooo I have to check that out. Thanks!
Really? I have PostmarketOS on my Fairphone. No audio and really slow WiFi. This is unusable.
I remember the GrapheneOS team saying that they won’t bring their OS to Fairphone, because the Fairphones don’t bring hardware support for security measures the GrapheneOS team doesn’t want to compromise on.
Definitely feels like a supply chain issue on parts for Fairphone to have this position. Hopefully Fairphone, GrapheneOS, and hardware venders can work this out on a later model.
Take anything the lead dev of GrapheneOS says with a grain of salt. He’s a little… Um, special.
While his perceptions of other people’s motives and meanings may be suspect, his technical analysis seems pretty spot on.
Honestly if I had to deal with degooglers and Linux fanboys as much as he did I’d probably go batshit insane. Kudos to him
His technical chops are without question. However he has been so over the top obnoxious to MANY other leaders in the privacy space. He really hurts his own cause by refusing to acknowledge there are other threat models that can be solved with other answers.
Let’s call a spade a spade: He is a raging asshole with severe clinical paranoia. I’m literally certain that if he saw this post he’d accuse me of being a shill for calyxos and to never fucking again interact with any grapheneos account. Both have happened to me before (Hence I refuse to ever interact with his troupe again, even though I use graphene and agree with the vast majority of its technical decisions; I have also stopped actively recommending it to anyone, the social media experience is simply way too attrocious).
Agree, he’s a bit paranoid and delusional. I think that may speak to his psychological profile. Who designs an impenetrable OS except someone who is a little paranoid?
A Fairphone with GrapheneOS would be the tops
Sure would be the toppiest of tops!
We can encourage them to work together in their official communication channels too!
Would be good for both of them on every level. GrapheneOS learning to make their own phones, and Fairphone learning to make an OS while both being partnered
Edit: Be the change you want to see everybody!! Flood the gates with what we want!
Afaik Fairphone is not interested in implementing some security features that GrapheneOS people consider a deal breaker
I wonder why they don’t want to, its not really in Fairphones to not do that
They are talking about specific hardware features. Which would of course be great, but you can imagine how they are not exactly at the toppiest toppy top of Fairphone’s priorities, when they are still struggling to be taken seriously by your mainstream Android buyer.
Consider that every hardware features is extra hard for Fairphone, on account of their very specific commitments to materials sourcing, labor practices, and longer term support.
They are a company with a lot of very complicated demands, for a still very low volume of sold devices. They need to pick their battles, and clearly being blessed by the church of Graphene can’t be that high a priority.
Graphene already has a partnership with Motorola now so the assumption is some time (I’ve seen 2027 speculated) we may get a Graphene Phone from Motorola. Mixed feelings about them partnering with a company like that but we’ll see how it goes. I still keep thinking about finally getting a secondhand pixel 10 so I can switch to Graphene from apple.
I would recommend it. Very worth it overall (As a user of a similar Pixel phone)
What are your use cases?
GrapheneOS doesn’t like Fairphone very much it seems…
what led you to this conclusion?
Hmmm, maybe something like this: https://www.androidauthority.com/fairphone-murena-software-response-grapheneos-claims-3579637/
They are just saying that e/OS has delays of important updates that lag. Which the fairphine team then pretty much confirmed.
Am I a dick for pointing out factual information? Are they? When it comes to something like security and privacy there should be no compromises. The truth should be heard.
Isn’t /e/os (murena) a seperate company from fairphone?
Yes, and I don’t know if it could even be classed as a collaboration. They just buy them and resell them with different firmware, basically?
I assume some part of acceptance is required for that in practice, but it isn’t like Fairphone ever advertised them as an official option (as far as I can tell or saw).
Well, Fairphone sells phones with e/OS preinstalled on their website so at the very least they like each other
So instead of seeing an opportunity to do the same, they burned bridges with one of the only companies not locking down their OS?
Security wise Fairphone isn’t up to GOS standards, so a collaboration wasn’t on the table either way.
If said standards are reasonable is a difficult thing to say. A few years ago I would’ve said that a normal person doesn’t need to be concerned that the police tries to break into their phone, but with the current state of things and the increasing rise of fascism, I’m not so certain anymore.
the graphene people never fail to stir pot. lol
they not wrong, but there’s better ways to inform other people.
Their gripe seems more to do with eOS, but they kinda couple them together. Hardware-wise fairphone is only deficient in its security chip. I do agree with GrapheneOS in criticisms of eOS’s philosophy and security and privacy goals. The founder of eOS is a prick.
GrapheOS doesn’t like anyone. I don’t even think they should be treated as part of open phone community. They are hostile to everything that they didn’t make.
They are hostile to those who dont genuinely care about privacy and security like fairphone and murena who also spend time spreading hate and disinformation about grapheneos and the devs and owner
I all for spreading hate of graphene os devs* but I don’t think Fairphone is doing anything like that. Any proof?
*Just kidding. I think they are toxic but and their opinions on many topics should be ignored but there’s no need to hate anyone.
Fairphones are scams
In what way(s)? There are a lot of things I like about it from the research I did. I only didn’t get one because of e/OS and the battery life.
I wish we have more choice for linux phone
Hardware should be software agnostic
Exactly. This was less important before the internet got ubiquitous, but nowadays, when manufacturers can screw you remotely, it’s very important.
This kind of vertical integration, where a single entity controls both hardware and software shouldn’t exist.
It was very disappointing to find out that GOS was incompatible with every phone brand but one. It is coherent with the Zeitgeist: why care about security and privacy when users will dump all their information in Google and Facebook?
That’s borderline with the purity fallacy: that one should not deserve privacy and security because of one or more bad practice.
I believe not so many people give away “everything”, and many more probably don’t realize how much they give.
There are many reasons one would keep a FB account, or a Google account around. That does not mean that person abandoned all rights on privacy and even less on security.
And how would you recommend a soft transition if you’re in a all-or-nothing approach? One day on Google, FB, what’s not, and in an instant: new device, new OS, drop everything at once? Nearly no one will do that.
The reason GOS does not support more devices is not because of where other brands vs privacy and security, it’s a pure hardware requirements they don’t meet. If the Motorola devices are a commercial success, most likely other phone makers will be interested.
the Motorola devices are a commercial success, most likely other phone makers will be interested.
That’s not going to happen because Samsung earns more selling private data than selling phones
That’s not how hardware works, like at all. I agree with the spirit of what you’re asking for but you can’t just wave a magic wand and put any software on any hardware.
The problem is that even if somebody out there is willing to go to the work of making device drives, bootloaders and OS releases for the hardware, it still can’t happen because the information about how to talk to the hardware isn’t open, same thing for the bootloader and even if those things are reverse engineered often even the ability to install an OS there is locked down on the hardware.
As you correctly say, the dream of any software just running anywhere isn’t possible because that’s not how hardware works, but the current situation is not one were what’s blocking it isn’t just the natural architectural structure of hardware, it’s one where the hardware makers have purposefully and to quite an extreme level locked down their hardware so that even if people are willing to do the work of doing what it takes to run an OS there, they can’t because necessary info to use the hardware isn’t available and the hardware is even locked down against OS installations for those who don’t have the necessary cryptographic keys.
And I encourage everyone to write to banks and other service providers to provide apks directly or through F-Droid
For F-Droid and for Accrescent too. Both would be amazing love this!! Added that suggestion to my latest post post on [email protected] about things people want
Here’s the link to the post:
We might be able to get them to provide APKs with some luck and finesse, but I unfortunately don’t see them publishing to F-Droid. F-Droid actually builds your APK from source themselves, and I don’t see banks giving up the source any time soon.
Actually, as I’m thinking about it, that may be true for F-Droid’s main repo, but I know other repos exist, so maybe they could host their own that you would just add to your F-Droid’s repo list?
Fairphone? perhaps. Samsung? hell naw. Samsung heavily benefits from the spyware it builds into One UI and 99% of its user base do not care about the spyware.
But I do hope hope that Fairphone begins to embrace Linux support.Per GOS: Samsung has almost all hardware requirements to support GOS except… they purposely cripple their device upon installation of a third party OS. One can only suspect they indeed make money with their spyware stack!
What is the bottleneck holding Fairphone back from supporting Linux fully?
Qualcomm
Has anyone heard word if Moto is still planning on rolling out flagship phones with e/OS by 2027 still?
I heard Graphene. They’re doing e/OS as well?
Hope not fuck e/OS
I mean both could exist.
I prefer graphene as well but e/OS could still improve and surprise us all in the future
That could be true if e/os actually cared about privacy and security
Samsung? They will not give a shit it huge corp
If there’s enough pushback, they’ll eventually either do it or they’ll die.
The vast majority of users don’t care about these things, though
It 👏 should 👏 be 👏 the 👏 law 👏 .
I don’t know how they managed to sneak locking a system to a single boot loader. And what about Qualcomm chips? They have a hypervisor OS, you say? A small operating system that can read all your memory? Updated as firmware?
Great, forcibly open source that system as well and tell them once and for all that they can fuck off. No, you don’t get to control another persons property - you disgusting goblin.
Either that, or ban the sale of such devices permanently across Europe.
That too! I covered that in another of my recent posts on the Europe community on here
That is a big thing Europe can at least make happen and in Asian/African/Latin countries too.
I like your addition though that is all facts!! Let’s keep pushing countries to make that happen.
To make them undo what Google is trying to do currently and what Apple does for long time to have all those devices be fully changeable for the OS
Needs to become a movement everywhere!!! Just as StooKillingGames, and the KeepAndroidOpen movements
We need a catchy name for it
Can you give me some reading on this? I am happy to make noise about an issue once I understand it.
There’s a lot of writing and history behind open source, open firmware and even open hardware, but the BIGGEST thing you can focus on is the transition from PCs to smartphones around the 2000s.
We went from you installing whatever boot loader and operating system that could run on your device, to a locked down boot loader that would only load the vendors operating system.
They hide behind security through obscurity, but it’s been debunked. The boot loader and even firmwares of devices have in certain cases been found to be gushing gashes of CVEs and bad coding - but only through decompilation and reverse engineering. In fact, after the 5 year warranty of your device is up, you should consider the security of your device highly suspect.
The true purpose for an exclusive locked down boot loader is to maintain operating system monopoly, force uninstallable apps/services on a user, to then be able to track & canvas the user to sell on the data brokerage market - not to mention planned obsolescence, because if you can’t freely modify and update your firmware and/or boatloader, you could secure it for more than 5 years.
For a more balanced take and to see “both sides”, read this
Other than that, the LibreBoot mailing list will help you to unearth the hypocrisy and lies fed to us by hardware vendors.
Free the firmware, free the bootloader, free the operating system, free the drivers, free the software - and then the user can decide wether or not they want to run commercial software on top of all this.
Anything else is subservience.
Thanks for this, I am interested in the philosophy around FOSS, I am tech illiterate basically and like foss because I trust it more than US tech.
It would be nice to buy a phone that officially support GrapheneOS. I dont want to thinker with phones. I can image it is going to be the same experience as going from Windows to Linux. Things would actually work in a good way as a user wants to instead of locked down requirements.
GrapheneOS has partnered with Motorola and were supposed to see phones that come with GOS sometime in 2027
