postmarketOS Blog

I've run Replicant (as an exercise, not for serious privacy/security requirements), but I don't really recommend Replicant.

Replicant drawbacks include:

* Starved for developer time (e.g., low device support, slow/no updates for known exploits, question of how many eyeballs seeing changes, no current semi-secure way to browse Web).

* Only kinda barely minimally almost works.

* The supported hardware devices are not only few and old, but have fundamental security weaknesses in hardware.

* Android is a huge code base, and, going forward, to some degree you're at the mercy of whatever the developer decides to do with it.

* You're trying to adopt a platform that was, to some extent, designed around surveillance of the user. You can disable a lot of snooping, but you would design it very differently if privacy&security were goals.

Librem5 is sorta an option, if you can afford it, though they still use closed hardware black boxes. (Also, even when two black boxes are "isolated", and you think you control the communication channel, you don't necessarily.)

It's too bad that FirefoxOS didn't work out. The Gecko layer and up could've been moved to a purer Linux stack (ditching the Android build tree monstrosity), and to more trustworthy hardware.

Personally, I'm hoping we go back to the original Linux emphasis on mainline kernel, maintainable open drivers, blob-free. The closest effort I've seen is PostmarketOS [1], but it's still in an early state, and it could also be a…

The implications for the ROM community would be amazing. Reading this, the implication is that the LineageOS project can make a single build that would work on all Android devices that have 1) Treble support and 2) an unlocked bootloader. In the text it is in fact implied that Google themselves make such a 'single' AOSP build/system partition that the device needs to be able to run to pass Google Play certification.

It would no longer mean device specific builds and hoping your device is supported. No longer would it mean that you would have to tactically buy popularish Snapdragon devices to have a chance of some aftermarket support after the vendor inevitably leaves you. You would be able to run Lineage on (Exynos-based) Samsung and Huawei phones, which is either impossible or too much trouble to worth the effort at the moment.

Hell, in theory alternate non Android-based, OSes like PostmarketOS [1] could write their OS to be compatible with the Android HAL and work with that. Stuff like this would have likely made Canonical's life in running Ubuntu on Android devices much easier too.

Vendors could make a system partition with their latest skin version and distribute it to all their devices, instead of only their flagship ones, meaning feature updates can be deployed in a much broader way than is done now. Driver updates will likely still be an issue, but security fixes that pertain to the Android base can still be deployed.

I really, really hope the implications here…

Except Microsoft officially stopped supporting Windows XP in 2014[1], and they had already extended support much longer than they had wanted to because XP was so long-lived and customers pushed back against having to upgrade to Vista. Vista support completely ended last year, and mainstream support for 7 ended in 2015, and 8.1 last month[2]. If you upgraded that decade-old computer to a secure OS then it will almost certainly run terribly. It's fine to run Photoshop 7 on an old PC that's not connected to the internet, but how realistic or useful is that?

Under the old desktop upgrade model it's easier to run an unmaintained OS, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Edit: Obviously running a lightweight linux distro is an option for the more technically minded, and it would be great to see projects like https://www.postmarketos.org become more widespread for extending the life of tablet and phone hardware.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/14223/windows-xp-end-of-support

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?alpha=Windows%208

Hi. I have a Google Pixel 3a running PostmarketOS https://postmarketos.org/ and it holds up pretty well. My phone lost 20% today with light usage and will maybe lose 60% if I scroll social media a lot.

I was actually surprised it is this good. I reinstalled recently and before the reinstall I had much worse battery life (Maybe 8 hours with normal usage). I think it was because of Syncthing running in the background.

It is also possible to use s2idle suspend which will improve the battery life even more but you will not be able to receive calls during suspend (though that may also be fixed in the future)

Edit: A sibling post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40602632) points to a Mastodon thread that says it runs postmarketOS, a Linux distro for phones: https://postmarketos.org/

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(Original post) Not the website owner, but isn't an (Android) phone just a small Linux computer? There are a bunch of web server apps (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=web%20server&c=apps) or you can root it and run whatever software you want on it?

In my mind it's not so different than running a web server off a Raspberry Pi or similar.

Break free from Android... by installing Android? I'm not sure it's really breaking free when the first task to do is intall Google Play Services so your banking app works.

Sounds like we can't actually breaking free from Android and iOS. Maybe with Linux like the Fedora Atomic for mobile devices? https://github.com/pocketblue/pocketblue Or PostmarketOS? https://postmarketos.org/

Even then banking would probably only work through the browser... Sad state of the world really.