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I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers

I personally think that the effort to create open source phones is the single most important technology project going on out there. We have open source browsers, we have open source social apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of complaining and legal coercion, to one of choices and markets.

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
Next on the line is the open source electric vehicle.
Freak_NL 6y ago
Except that it won't break the app-store duopoly. At what point will WhatsApp or even Signal consider providing a web-app, or even an open API for others to built clients against? Not doing this is a policy choice, not a technical one. Will banks offer something that doesn't require authentication via an app? Governments? App here meaning: Android or IOS. One solution might be to provide a sandbox for Android apps, but you would still be locked into Google's app-store and require accepting their terms of use. And while your OS might be open and not user-hostile, all the apps everyone uses will still be the same. I want a phone like this, but I don't see it changing the duopoly.
- padraic7a 6y ago
  Signal has given some, probably very little, support to the Ubuntu Touch port now known as Axolotl. https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl I'm sure that if it grew in popularity they might be inclined to support it further.
  - Freak_NL 6y ago
    Wouldn't that mean you could use Signal without their client app? I though that was explicitly forbidden by OWS?
    - mpol 6y ago
      Sure. I use Whisperfish on Sailfish OS for Signal conversations. I hear the developer is quite positive about the support he gets from Signal about getting it up to speed. There was that famous blog post, I think in 2016, where they said they won't support third-party clients, but they got so much flac over it, they might have reconsidered. Also, there is in the EU a Digital Markets Act being worked on. That will mean some networks that play a big part in society will need to allow third-party clients. https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
- linmob 6y ago
  IMHO, it does not have to change the duopoly, as long as it creates sustainable options for those who want to escape that duopoly. In that way it‘s already a success.
  - 7357 6y ago
    It's more likely to happen with platforms such as this than without.
  - amelius 6y ago
    The point was: if it doesn't change the duopoly then who will write apps for the open platform? Not banks. Not governments. They will keep on developing only for Android and iOS. And people with a pinephone will have a great phone with a great OS, but with a shitty selection of apps.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      I already use Linux with my bank and when I'm interacting with my government. And unlike on Android, the barrier of entry for me to write apps and set up quick solutions to problems is much lower. I don't need to run my code on a completely separate environment with no overlap. Emulation is going to be easier. I don't need to install Eclipse or whatever the heck Android devs tolerate now. That's part of the point of using Linux -- not creating an ecosystem from scratch. Virtually all of my computing outside of my phone is already done on Linux devices, and the setup works for day-to-day computing. Support is good enough for me. What makes you think Pinephone going to have worse support than my current Linux desktop? My hope with Pinephone is that a decent influx of Linux phone users will improve the quality of desktop software on Linux as well, since it forces devs to stop ignoring touch screens and to start thinking about responsive design. Ideally, the desktop versions of many apps should scale on interfaces like this without needing to be rewritten. But regardless, I'm still not particularly worried that my bank website is going to stop working.
      - amelius 6y ago
        To take one example: the interaction with your bank goes through a web-browser, I suppose? You probably need a special device for 2FA? In most bank apps, you can simply log in using a PIN-code and do things like check your balance, make small wire transfers, and make payments in stores through NFC. Doing these things in a web-browser on a mobile phone with a separate 2FA device is much more cumbersome. (I use Linux exclusively on the desktop so I know what you are talking about, but it just isn't going to work on a phone in the same way).
- wwarner 6y ago
  I'll agree, and add that it's not clear that people really want privacy. Not that we've been given a choice, but the very first thing that the major players are going to say is that people want the all knowing experience that Google and FB provide.
- zepto 6y ago
  There is no reason it can’t break the ‘duopoly’. It clearly isn’t going to do so overnight or in a year or two. But it easily could over the 5-10 year timeline. A distributed App Store plus an experience that is more attuned to the needs of users than iOS or Android can accomplish that. To solve the ‘bank’ problem all it needs to do is provide a really solid PWA story. What it shouldn’t do is provide Android compatibility.
  - aroman 6y ago
    > plus an experience that is more attuned to the needs of users than iOS or Android can accomplish that. Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android? I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone. To be clear, I think it’d be great if they did, but I think you’re massively understating the difficulty of challenging iOS and Android. Many companies have tried before - Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, and failed.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      > I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone. AFAIK every single change in tech starts from such people.
      - aroman 6y ago
        Sure, they start there but they eventually expand beyond that initial core group to the wider population. I’m saying that in this case, I don’t think it will expand beyond that initial group. Why would non-idealists use this phone when the alternative they already have in their pocket and know how to use can do everything the PinePhone can do?
        zepto 6y ago
        > Why would non-idealists use this phone when the alternative they already have in their pocket and know how to use can do everything the PinePhone can do? Nobody expects them to. People will use it when it does something the alternative they already have cannot do. Using the term ‘idealists’ is perjorative but more importantly, it implies confusion about why people buy this phone. The people who buy the phone today do so because it allows them to do things which the alternatives cannot. I.e. the purchase is pragmatic. This is the precise opposite of idealism.
- amelius 6y ago
  If banks and governments keep writing apps only for the duopoly, then there is the argument that the duopoly becomes a public utility and should be opened up. This view would also protect FOSS projects that emulate the iOS environment (e.g. Wine but for iOS)
- mannerheim 6y ago
  Isn't the Signal client GPL? Seems you could fork or write your own client.
  - Freak_NL 6y ago
    OWS doesn't allow third-party clients.
    - mannerheim 6y ago
      From a quick search, it looks like this is something they certainly don't like, but it doesn't seem like something they can stop either.
    - hiq 6y ago
      In practice they don't run after them, see signal-cli.
- Krisjohn 6y ago
  > At what point will WhatsApp or even Signal consider providing a web-app I have Telegram on my Pine Phone and it works great. It also runs a proper version of Firefox (even if it does identify itself as running on Android.)
Luker88 6y ago
Last month they even managed to fully open parts of the modem, and do calls without the closed blob for the firmware! https://twitter.com/biktorgj/status/1357217053745250304 https://twitter.com/biktorgj/status/1357217053745250304 (edit: caveat: they might not be able to actually ship the firmware since laws on this are very strict basically everywhere) The app store(s) is a bit of a problem, but in time it might be solved. Not a big problem for me.... But I'd also like to see android compatibility. Multiple banks now basically require you to have an android app. Unfortunately that might also require better specs, since sideloading an entire android might take significant RAM :( Still, kudos to pine64 devs for the openness of all of their projects! IMHO even the raspy is not as open, even if it might have better benchs
- swiley 6y ago
  I hope the pinephone never has app stores. The "work with the community to merge your software into the repo" model is much better for things that actually help people. Apple's AppStore is best for extracting money from people while siloing their data.
  - viro 6y ago
    This is so divorced from reality I don't know where to start. There is effectively no difference between "apt install widget-a" and installing it from a "App Store" other than the App Store option lets the dev feed his family if he needs to to. at least from a user stand point.
    - swiley 6y ago
      Now many individual app developers are feeding their family with app store installs vs the individual OSS developers doing the same?
    - jascii 6y ago
      One could argue that it is exactly this financial incentive that causes all the mislabeled useless apps on the app stores.
viro 6y ago
I must really like down votes because "single most important technology project going on out there" is quite the stretch. Hell, I would argue that over the last year during a pandemic doordash was more important(feeding people while letting them be socially distanced). People on this site like overestimate the avg. persons concern with privacy. the hardware toggles are cool tho.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  You commit same error you accuse others off. DoorDash mostly solved problems for a small part of reasonably wealthy people, mostly without families, living in big cities, that don’t cook. You overestimate how your lifestyle isn’t representative of the world.
  - viro 6y ago
    my lifestyle is middle class in the midwest. Why do you think a $1.99-$5.99 is a luxury?
    - justapassenger 6y ago
      There’s more to the world than USA, for a start. And more than just middle class.
      - mrtranscendence 6y ago
        The world absolutely doesn't begin and end with middle class in the USA. But you're just wrong to say "DoorDash mostly solved problems for a small part of reasonably wealthy people, mostly without families, living in big cities". There were times it or a competitor were a godsend for my not-quite-middle-class sister, with five children to feed, who lives in a small city a half hour from Cincinnati.
        justapassenger 6y ago
        It’s not exclusively for middle class, sure, but that’s their main target market. It has other users, and it’s great if it’s solving their problems as well. I’m not diminishing their impact (although I question lots of their business practices). But it’s not the most important tech, by a huge huge margin.
mindcrime 6y ago
is the single most important technology project I'm not 100% sure I'd rank this as #1 on my list, but if not, it'd probably be at least #2 or #3. Open source phones (and tablets) are something I've been dreaming about and looking forward to for a very long time, and I'm happy this is finally starting to come to fruition.
- sarabad2021 6y ago
  Not from a personal point of view but from a global humanitarian point of view, mobile phones are how most people interact with the internet, technology, and the rest of the world. That should make it #1 on everybody's list. Right now 99.9999% of smartphones are closed source and closed hardware that is controlled by mega corps that don't have your best interests at heart.
  - troyvit 6y ago
    You really put this well. I want this for convenience and to flip the bird to "the man" but globally smartphones are so much more important as a way for people to be connected. It's the only choice they have for doing it.
whitepaint 6y ago
Couldn't agree more. I really REALLY want to replace my Android smartphone. I want to own it the way I do my laptop running Linux.
dheera 6y ago
Isn't AOSP fully open source? What is the point of the PinePhone over an Android phone running pure AOSP?
- megous 6y ago
  The point is that it's not Android, so you can run whatever you can make run on mainline Linux on PinePhone, with fully supported kernel always available in uptodate state, and without any Android abstractions that may or may not limit what you can do.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Even AOSP hardcodes some reliance on Google servers. It is open source, but not independent of this dominant corporation as many privacy advocates would like.
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  You're still relying on closed source drivers for the vast majority of devices using AOSP, that's pretty far from "fully open source".
NationalPark 6y ago
Hm, I'd say the mRNA COVID vaccines are probably a more important technology project at the moment. Realistically, most people don't actually care about the ideological purity of their phone, and the ones who do certainly don't have the time to personally audit the source of every dependency they install. So it's not exactly solving any practical problems, even more so since any internet connected device is at the mercy of our shared BGP systems and to a lesser extent DNS. Like it or not, you're part of a community and you can't solve every social problem with technology (or markets, for that matter)!
- troyvit 6y ago
  The fact that they made these vaccines so quickly and (apparently) so well is a testament to what humans can do when we put a ton of try-hard into something. That said, if we didn't have vaccines and people just kept on dying, it would definitely suck, but we would still have surveillance capitalism monitoring the most intimate aspects of our lives. Once we finally came out of the other side of Covid, even without a vaccine, we would still have google and apple and microsoft and facebook monitoring our every choice and monetizing it. Maybe there'd be a billion fewer people (and maybe that's not so bad) but we'd still have all the ills that these closed systems have brought on us.
senux 6y ago
This is not a stab at you or your comment. I think your message is valid and I agree with it. However, I do believe there's a common misconception in here that needs to be highlighted if hoped to be fixed. > We have open source browsers, we have open source social > apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. > Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users > will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of > complaining and >legal coercion, to one of choices and > markets. What you are talking about in the text above is not delivered by Open Source, which is just a practical advantage. The values you mentioned are fought for by the Free/Libre Software community [0]. I recommend to anyone interested in this topic (e.g. the differences between Libre and Open Source software), read more about the GNU project as a starter [1]. As a disclaimer, I'm by no means an expert on this topic which is another reason to follow the links below. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago

Next on the line is the open source electric vehicle.

Freak_NL 6y ago

Except that it won't break the app-store duopoly. At what point will WhatsApp or even Signal consider providing a web-app, or even an open API for others to built clients against? Not doing this is a policy choice, not a technical one. Will banks offer something that doesn't require authentication via an app? Governments? App here meaning: Android or IOS. One solution might be to provide a sandbox for Android apps, but you would still be locked into Google's app-store and require accepting their terms of use. And while your OS might be open and not user-hostile, all the apps everyone uses will still be the same. I want a phone like this, but I don't see it changing the duopoly.

padraic7a 6y ago
Signal has given some, probably very little, support to the Ubuntu Touch port now known as Axolotl. https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl https://github.com/nanu-c/axolotl I'm sure that if it grew in popularity they might be inclined to support it further.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  Wouldn't that mean you could use Signal without their client app? I though that was explicitly forbidden by OWS?
  - mpol 6y ago
    Sure. I use Whisperfish on Sailfish OS for Signal conversations. I hear the developer is quite positive about the support he gets from Signal about getting it up to speed. There was that famous blog post, I think in 2016, where they said they won't support third-party clients, but they got so much flac over it, they might have reconsidered. Also, there is in the EU a Digital Markets Act being worked on. That will mean some networks that play a big part in society will need to allow third-party clients. https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...
linmob 6y ago
IMHO, it does not have to change the duopoly, as long as it creates sustainable options for those who want to escape that duopoly. In that way it‘s already a success.
- 7357 6y ago
  It's more likely to happen with platforms such as this than without.
- amelius 6y ago
  The point was: if it doesn't change the duopoly then who will write apps for the open platform? Not banks. Not governments. They will keep on developing only for Android and iOS. And people with a pinephone will have a great phone with a great OS, but with a shitty selection of apps.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    I already use Linux with my bank and when I'm interacting with my government. And unlike on Android, the barrier of entry for me to write apps and set up quick solutions to problems is much lower. I don't need to run my code on a completely separate environment with no overlap. Emulation is going to be easier. I don't need to install Eclipse or whatever the heck Android devs tolerate now. That's part of the point of using Linux -- not creating an ecosystem from scratch. Virtually all of my computing outside of my phone is already done on Linux devices, and the setup works for day-to-day computing. Support is good enough for me. What makes you think Pinephone going to have worse support than my current Linux desktop? My hope with Pinephone is that a decent influx of Linux phone users will improve the quality of desktop software on Linux as well, since it forces devs to stop ignoring touch screens and to start thinking about responsive design. Ideally, the desktop versions of many apps should scale on interfaces like this without needing to be rewritten. But regardless, I'm still not particularly worried that my bank website is going to stop working.
    - amelius 6y ago
      To take one example: the interaction with your bank goes through a web-browser, I suppose? You probably need a special device for 2FA? In most bank apps, you can simply log in using a PIN-code and do things like check your balance, make small wire transfers, and make payments in stores through NFC. Doing these things in a web-browser on a mobile phone with a separate 2FA device is much more cumbersome. (I use Linux exclusively on the desktop so I know what you are talking about, but it just isn't going to work on a phone in the same way).
wwarner 6y ago
I'll agree, and add that it's not clear that people really want privacy. Not that we've been given a choice, but the very first thing that the major players are going to say is that people want the all knowing experience that Google and FB provide.
zepto 6y ago
There is no reason it can’t break the ‘duopoly’. It clearly isn’t going to do so overnight or in a year or two. But it easily could over the 5-10 year timeline. A distributed App Store plus an experience that is more attuned to the needs of users than iOS or Android can accomplish that. To solve the ‘bank’ problem all it needs to do is provide a really solid PWA story. What it shouldn’t do is provide Android compatibility.
- aroman 6y ago
  > plus an experience that is more attuned to the needs of users than iOS or Android can accomplish that. Why would this project be more effective at doing this than iOS or Android? I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone. To be clear, I think it’d be great if they did, but I think you’re massively understating the difficulty of challenging iOS and Android. Many companies have tried before - Microsoft, Amazon, Canonical, and failed.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    > I don’t see why people other than ideological technologists would want to use this phone. AFAIK every single change in tech starts from such people.
    - aroman 6y ago
      Sure, they start there but they eventually expand beyond that initial core group to the wider population. I’m saying that in this case, I don’t think it will expand beyond that initial group. Why would non-idealists use this phone when the alternative they already have in their pocket and know how to use can do everything the PinePhone can do?
      - zepto 6y ago
        > Why would non-idealists use this phone when the alternative they already have in their pocket and know how to use can do everything the PinePhone can do? Nobody expects them to. People will use it when it does something the alternative they already have cannot do. Using the term ‘idealists’ is perjorative but more importantly, it implies confusion about why people buy this phone. The people who buy the phone today do so because it allows them to do things which the alternatives cannot. I.e. the purchase is pragmatic. This is the precise opposite of idealism.
amelius 6y ago
If banks and governments keep writing apps only for the duopoly, then there is the argument that the duopoly becomes a public utility and should be opened up. This view would also protect FOSS projects that emulate the iOS environment (e.g. Wine but for iOS)
mannerheim 6y ago
Isn't the Signal client GPL? Seems you could fork or write your own client.
- Freak_NL 6y ago
  OWS doesn't allow third-party clients.
  - mannerheim 6y ago
    From a quick search, it looks like this is something they certainly don't like, but it doesn't seem like something they can stop either.
  - hiq 6y ago
    In practice they don't run after them, see signal-cli.
Krisjohn 6y ago
> At what point will WhatsApp or even Signal consider providing a web-app I have Telegram on my Pine Phone and it works great. It also runs a proper version of Firefox (even if it does identify itself as running on Android.)

Luker88 6y ago

Last month they even managed to fully open parts of the modem, and do calls without the closed blob for the firmware! https://twitter.com/biktorgj/status/1357217053745250304 https://twitter.com/biktorgj/status/1357217053745250304 (edit: caveat: they might not be able to actually ship the firmware since laws on this are very strict basically everywhere) The app store(s) is a bit of a problem, but in time it might be solved. Not a big problem for me.... But I'd also like to see android compatibility. Multiple banks now basically require you to have an android app. Unfortunately that might also require better specs, since sideloading an entire android might take significant RAM :( Still, kudos to pine64 devs for the openness of all of their projects! IMHO even the raspy is not as open, even if it might have better benchs

swiley 6y ago
I hope the pinephone never has app stores. The "work with the community to merge your software into the repo" model is much better for things that actually help people. Apple's AppStore is best for extracting money from people while siloing their data.
- viro 6y ago
  This is so divorced from reality I don't know where to start. There is effectively no difference between "apt install widget-a" and installing it from a "App Store" other than the App Store option lets the dev feed his family if he needs to to. at least from a user stand point.
  - swiley 6y ago
    Now many individual app developers are feeding their family with app store installs vs the individual OSS developers doing the same?
  - jascii 6y ago
    One could argue that it is exactly this financial incentive that causes all the mislabeled useless apps on the app stores.

viro 6y ago

I must really like down votes because "single most important technology project going on out there" is quite the stretch. Hell, I would argue that over the last year during a pandemic doordash was more important(feeding people while letting them be socially distanced). People on this site like overestimate the avg. persons concern with privacy. the hardware toggles are cool tho.

justapassenger 6y ago
You commit same error you accuse others off. DoorDash mostly solved problems for a small part of reasonably wealthy people, mostly without families, living in big cities, that don’t cook. You overestimate how your lifestyle isn’t representative of the world.
- viro 6y ago
  my lifestyle is middle class in the midwest. Why do you think a $1.99-$5.99 is a luxury?
  - justapassenger 6y ago
    There’s more to the world than USA, for a start. And more than just middle class.
    - mrtranscendence 6y ago
      The world absolutely doesn't begin and end with middle class in the USA. But you're just wrong to say "DoorDash mostly solved problems for a small part of reasonably wealthy people, mostly without families, living in big cities". There were times it or a competitor were a godsend for my not-quite-middle-class sister, with five children to feed, who lives in a small city a half hour from Cincinnati.
      - justapassenger 6y ago
        It’s not exclusively for middle class, sure, but that’s their main target market. It has other users, and it’s great if it’s solving their problems as well. I’m not diminishing their impact (although I question lots of their business practices). But it’s not the most important tech, by a huge huge margin.

mindcrime 6y ago

is the single most important technology project I'm not 100% sure I'd rank this as #1 on my list, but if not, it'd probably be at least #2 or #3. Open source phones (and tablets) are something I've been dreaming about and looking forward to for a very long time, and I'm happy this is finally starting to come to fruition.

sarabad2021 6y ago
Not from a personal point of view but from a global humanitarian point of view, mobile phones are how most people interact with the internet, technology, and the rest of the world. That should make it #1 on everybody's list. Right now 99.9999% of smartphones are closed source and closed hardware that is controlled by mega corps that don't have your best interests at heart.
- troyvit 6y ago
  You really put this well. I want this for convenience and to flip the bird to "the man" but globally smartphones are so much more important as a way for people to be connected. It's the only choice they have for doing it.

whitepaint 6y ago

Couldn't agree more. I really REALLY want to replace my Android smartphone. I want to own it the way I do my laptop running Linux.

dheera 6y ago

Isn't AOSP fully open source? What is the point of the PinePhone over an Android phone running pure AOSP?

megous 6y ago
The point is that it's not Android, so you can run whatever you can make run on mainline Linux on PinePhone, with fully supported kernel always available in uptodate state, and without any Android abstractions that may or may not limit what you can do.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Even AOSP hardcodes some reliance on Google servers. It is open source, but not independent of this dominant corporation as many privacy advocates would like.
ben-schaaf 6y ago
You're still relying on closed source drivers for the vast majority of devices using AOSP, that's pretty far from "fully open source".

NationalPark 6y ago

Hm, I'd say the mRNA COVID vaccines are probably a more important technology project at the moment. Realistically, most people don't actually care about the ideological purity of their phone, and the ones who do certainly don't have the time to personally audit the source of every dependency they install. So it's not exactly solving any practical problems, even more so since any internet connected device is at the mercy of our shared BGP systems and to a lesser extent DNS. Like it or not, you're part of a community and you can't solve every social problem with technology (or markets, for that matter)!

troyvit 6y ago
The fact that they made these vaccines so quickly and (apparently) so well is a testament to what humans can do when we put a ton of try-hard into something. That said, if we didn't have vaccines and people just kept on dying, it would definitely suck, but we would still have surveillance capitalism monitoring the most intimate aspects of our lives. Once we finally came out of the other side of Covid, even without a vaccine, we would still have google and apple and microsoft and facebook monitoring our every choice and monetizing it. Maybe there'd be a billion fewer people (and maybe that's not so bad) but we'd still have all the ills that these closed systems have brought on us.

senux 6y ago

This is not a stab at you or your comment. I think your message is valid and I agree with it. However, I do believe there's a common misconception in here that needs to be highlighted if hoped to be fixed. > We have open source browsers, we have open source social > apps, but we definitely do not have open source phones. > Phones that can be truly owned and controlled by users > will reshape the privacy discourse, from one of > complaining and >legal coercion, to one of choices and > markets. What you are talking about in the text above is not delivered by Open Source, which is just a practical advantage. The values you mentioned are fought for by the Free/Libre Software community [0]. I recommend to anyone interested in this topic (e.g. the differences between Libre and Open Source software), read more about the GNU project as a starter [1]. As a disclaimer, I'm by no means an expert on this topic which is another reason to follow the links below. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html