8 ms·

Luxury Linux Smartphones

65 points by cunidev 5y ago

smitty1e 5y ago
> But on a more technical side, most of those minor projects offer, unlike Android, very little (if any) sandboxing of apps by default, which, alongside the fact that less-known, custom-made apps are quite likely to be vulnerable, the security factor is moved to a lower layer (i.e., requiring very platform-specific exploits) rather than solved. This seems a reasonable, but broad and unsubstantiated claim.
- mcc1ane 5y ago
  https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html
  - megous 5y ago
    Android is based on Linux, so all the security primitives and defense in depth features are there in Linux kernel, too. How much of that a particular Linux distro will use depends on the distro maintainers. And several of the mentioned issues apply just as well to Android. (attacker waiting with data exfiltration until the network is available, etc.) Some issues are just hand-wavy, like the USB not being the good isolation barrier, citing a link that doesn't have anything about USB.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Android has a completely reimplemented user space on top of the (se-linux enabled) kernel. Saying that the two is one and the same is simply ignorant. They are as much the same as a human and a fish is. Just because the cells are largely the same doesn’t make them equivalent at all.
      - megous 5y ago
        I think you have problem with reading comprehension. Linux = kernel, in my comment, if you want a hint.
  - nsajko 5y ago
    That article is just a load of rubbish. The GP's point still stands. If you check out the other HN submissions from the same site, it becomes clear that the author is ignorant on most of the topics the articles whine about, and also that there's an agenda behind it. The usual anti-user-freedom agenda that supports "modern" stuff like Wayland or Android.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Any substance to your comment? The article lists quite a few (true) claims and you refuse none of them. Also, it shows your ignorance on the whole topic that you call wayland “anti-user-freedom agenda”.. Let me guess, you also hate systemd with a passion, right?
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  Unsubstantiated? For years Android has been improving its security and app isolation. AOSP by default is effectively more secure than any Linux distro on a laptop by default for a couple of reasons one being that on android every app runs as its own UID. On Linux that's only sometimes the case for daemons, and almost never the case for user programs.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Then native code is frowned upon other than some specific use cases mostly game related, seccomp and LinuxSE are enabled, Project Treble drivers run in userspace with Android IPC, eBPF modules instead of drivers, IPC is now required for file system access outside sandbox,...
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    > AOSP by default is effectively more secure than any Linux distro Sandboxing does not protect you from all the binary blobs, closed source components and all the telemetries and other forms of surveillance built in. Not to mention all the homecalling done by applications.
    - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
      Home calling by applications is literally an issue with the application - an application on Linux can just as easily call home.
      - goodpoint 5y ago
        An application on Linux is very unlikely to do so, especially if shipped in a security/privacy focused distribution. OTOH Android apps are a minefield, making it extremely difficult to protect user data. Also Android itself leaks data or sends telemetries in many places.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Privacy!=security. It’s not that hard to understand. The pinephone has zero security (as well as most linux distros) - eg. you pick it up at the wrong moment and it fails to put the lock screen on, a single rouge program can do whatever it wants with user privilege only because the old user-root distinction is meaningless, since every valuable thing is stored as the given user, etc. Android does proper sandboxing, MAC-based security, etc. The two are night and day.
- upofadown 5y ago
  Is there any stuff in existence that even needs to be sandboxed? I had the impression that all the software available on Linux phones comes from whatever Linux distribution is used.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Open source software may not be malicious, but any bug in them can be exploited. Eg, one in firefox can cause arbitrary code execution on your computer without any security barrier. And let’s be honest, everything written in C is no life time guarantee on correctness.
  - nsajko 5y ago
    Nitpick: sandboxing also makes sense for anything that executes untrusted code and similar. But the proper solution includes designing the sandboxing into the application, like Chromium does it. So this doesn't have much to do with the confused claims of those claiming that "Linux is insecure" and similar.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Well, let’s see if the people clamoring for real keyboards are going to put their money where their mouth is. Perhaps this phone also has the prized 3.5mm jack!
- filmgirlcw 5y ago
  You joke, but incredibly, a company no one has ever heard [1] of (and their background and funding sources are shall we say, sus) has licensed the BlackBerry name and claims it will be launching premium keyboard phones in the future. Of course, they promised this over a year ago and nothing has come of it (and I'll bet money it will never see the light of day), despite promises of a 2021 launch (which wouldn’t happen even if the chip crisis weren’t real), but it shows some people are still dumb enough to be convinced keyboard phones will make a comeback. [1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200819005202/en/OnwardMobility-Announces-Agreements-BlackBerry-Foxconn-Subsidiary-FIH https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200819005202/en/Onw...
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    https://www.unihertz.com/ https://www.unihertz.com/ - not sure if "premium" or not, but they seem to be successful enough. It works when economies of scale are involved.
    - filmgirlcw 5y ago
      Eh, debatable if the economics work for Unihertz or not. The volume is small and it is unclear how much money (if any) they are making.
    - kgwxd 5y ago
      I used the Jelly 2 for a year and now I'm on the Titan Pocket. The Jelly 2 was fun but the screen size was just too small to type on. I don't do much typing on my phone, but when I had to, it was very painful. The Titan Pocket is OK. It's pretty much everything it claims to be. The only problem I have with it is that I can't get my various messaging and reminder apps (K-9, Slack, Teams) to stay alive in the background, so I'm not getting any notifications from them. I had the same problem with the Jelly 2, but turning off battery optimization for those apps fixed it, that's not working on Titan. Unihertz phones are so cheap, it's fun to play with them for awhile. Ultimately, I think I'll end up back on a medium sized (thankfully it's trendy again to downsize screens), touchscreen-only device, with a 3.5mm jack, hopefully running Linux.
filmgirlcw 5y ago
> Or maybe Linux is becoming, more than ever, a convenient brand to put on any piece of technology that aims at being secure, or simply at escaping the norm, rather than something companies should not only adopt and modify for profit, but also contribute to. This might be true of Purism, but for XOR stuff, I don’t think Linux has anything to do with it except that it is there. Recall that XOR's lineage traces back to Vertu, a onetime Nokia subsidiary that used to sell $50,000 Symbian phones (and later equally overpriced and outdated Android phones) that then went through an assortment of owners and ultimately went bankrupt after a bunch of fraud [1]. To me, it seems much more likely XOR is just trying to continue the grift of selling “luxury” to sheikhs or other people with endless amounts of money, but without having to either deal with the Google licensing requirements for Android or the hassle of doing AOSP. Linux is what XOR uses because that’s what is available, but it isn’t part of the branding or the identity of the phone. As for Purism, aside from price, I wouldn’t call a phone that doesn’t support MMS or group SMS messages and is running hardware that was obsolete in 2019 when the specs were finalized, let alone now, “luxury.” Purism is certainly going after a very specific audience of users willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money for alpha-quality hardware/software (this isn’t a slight at the difficulty of what Purism is trying to achieve, but facts are facts), not to mention waiting months/years to get their devices to begin with, but I don’t know if that is luxury as much as it is incredibly, incredibly niche. That said, Purism certainly leans hard into the Linux branding, even if it isn’t able to deliver what it is promising. My personal favorite “luxury” Linux phone (although it was Android-based) was the Blackphone, the super expensive, “super secure” phone that turned out to not be so secure after all [2]. Or maybe the not Linux but QNX-based Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9982, which was a $2400 BlackBerry 10 phone that was identical to regular Z10 in specs, but had a better chassis and a nice leather pouch (certainly worth the 4x premium, right?) [3]. [1]: https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu-somehow-contin-1793227868 https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone [3]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982-hands-on.html https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982...
- danpalmer 5y ago
  Vertu is the only company who I know of who I think can lay full claim to "luxury" phones. It's easy to find expensive phones, and the design-collaboration phones like the Porsche Blackberry are certainly high-end, but I feel like it was the concierge services on the Vertu phones that really stood out as luxury. The Blackphone probably comes closest out of the rest of the market because of the suite of "secure" services, but even that was pushing it.
Artlav 5y ago
I'm kinda surprised they go for privacy aspects and customizability. Android is Linux enough for most use cases, and the big problem is just having root access to it and an ability to customize. A pure linux phone would just be a pointless annoyance, at least until someone makes a phone with external thermal interface.
- swiley 5y ago
  “Linux” (as in Linux based operating systems) are attractive because they’re community maintained and you can hack around in the OS with minimal skills and no special tools or extra computers. Android is almost the polar opposite of that.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  It'd be useful for desktop convergence, but I think the power isn't quite there (especially on current Linux devices).
  - Artlav 5y ago
    That's where external thermal interface comes in. If docking your phone involves attaching external cooler, then power is no longer an issue.
undecisive 5y ago
It seems a glaring omission not to mention the Astro Slide [1] which I seriously hope will be shipping in the next month, or even the F(x)tec range of phones[2]. The former has options for linux or dual boot with android, comes with a slide-out physical keyboard. Not top of the line processor, but not far off. Not the most stylish design (if that's even possible with a slide-out keyboard) but not far off. And definitely not a "luxury" pricetag. It's good that these devices are starting to appear - it's a shame that many of them are either so niche that they can justify the markup, or likely to require a large amount of skill to perform and manage the linux install. One day, we might meet in the middle. [1]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transformer/x/23358057#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme... [2]: https://www.fxtec.com https://www.fxtec.com
- swiley 5y ago
  Those two don’t have mainline Linux, they use a custom out of tree 4.x kernel.
  - MerelyMortal 5y ago
    Thanks for the info. I tried a quick search to see if I could find video or screenahots of it running a Linux distro, but couldn't find any.
- dTal 5y ago
  A keyboard does not a Linux phone make. All the Planet Computing phones are just Android phones with shitty Mediatek chipsets. Don't believe their marketing - their phones will never run mainline Linux, and maintenance of the proprietary kernel fork is abandoned the moment they release the next device.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    They are pretty practical; boot Linux or Android and a keyboard make them, for me, practical on the road Linux devices and phones. I have the pinephone which is miles from practical still but I like that it is a Linux phone so have to support it. We need more and different hardware like both of these to get adoption. At least we are allowed, from the very inception, to actually put Linux on them and that is already quite a think for 'modern' phones.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Do Sailfish phones count as Linux?
- dTal 5y ago
  I'd say so, but they don't count as free and open, and therefore do not count as trustable and secure.
motohagiography 5y ago
The AN0M phone created by the FBI was probably the most successful luxury phone we will ever see, where people paid thousands of dollars for them, and used them both practically and as a status symbol for their unique lifestyle use cases. They disinhibited themselves on the AN0M platform because it gave them a sense of freedom, safety, exclusivity, and privilege - everything a luxury product aspires to do. XOR or even Apple could learn a thing or two from them. But I'd also argue security features are what you need when you don't have power, because you in effect psychologically inferiorize yourself to both your threat model and your security provider, so that's why apple plays down their security narrative in their luxury brand as well. Security as a feature makes most experiences kind of lame in anything it touches, so I don't think it's a very sound basis for a luxury product.
HelixEndeavor 5y ago
"Luxury" is definitely the way to describe it. I've had people recommend me Linux phones again and again in tech circles. Not only are they absurdly out of my price range (I paid $150 for my current phone, used), they are incredibly underpowered, buggy, and the software just... Isn't. There is no software for them. A Linux phone simply cannot serve as a replacement for an Android or iPhone in the current market. They just cannot do the things most people need from their phones. They're something for Linux fans to cream themselves over and tinker with, but I'll bet you won't see any of the people who recommend these phones ever actually using them.
- fsflover 5y ago
  Using my Pinephone as a daily driver. What do you think it cannot do (apart from running Androis apps)?
  - l-albertovich 5y ago
    IIRC someone mentioned something about it running apps with waydroid or anbox (can't remember) a few days ago in a related thread right? Have you tested it?
    - 29083011397778 5y ago
      That may well have been me! I've been playing around with Waydroid on my Pinephone, and just installed Whatsapp to try out. I didn't message anyone, as it's a new number that I'd like to minimize FB knowing about, but the browser, Whatsapp, and the Voipms SMS app are more than smooth enough to be usable (though far from modern-phone fluid). I've said previously, and will say again though: the Pinephone and Waydroid are still very rough. For example, I'm going to have to figure out why Waydroid, which used to be full-screen, now only takes up half the screen. So if you occasionally need an app that's Android-only, maybe you can make the Pinephone work now. But likely only if you're at least a little bit fanatical.
  - batrachos 5y ago
    > What do you think it cannot do (apart from running Androis apps)? Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
Proven 5y ago
I want a Linux Stupidphone. Small screen, degoogled, featureless (no camera, no Bluetooth, no sensors; nothing but WiFi, 4G, microphone), decent battery life. Can make and receive phone calls and messages.

65 points by cunidev 5y ago

> But on a more technical side, most of those minor projects offer, unlike Android, very little (if any) sandboxing of apps by default, which, alongside the fact that less-known, custom-made apps are quite likely to be vulnerable, the security factor is moved to a lower layer (i.e., requiring very platform-specific exploits) rather than solved. This seems a reasonable, but broad and unsubstantiated claim.

mcc1ane 5y ago
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux-phones.html
- megous 5y ago
  Android is based on Linux, so all the security primitives and defense in depth features are there in Linux kernel, too. How much of that a particular Linux distro will use depends on the distro maintainers. And several of the mentioned issues apply just as well to Android. (attacker waiting with data exfiltration until the network is available, etc.) Some issues are just hand-wavy, like the USB not being the good isolation barrier, citing a link that doesn't have anything about USB.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Android has a completely reimplemented user space on top of the (se-linux enabled) kernel. Saying that the two is one and the same is simply ignorant. They are as much the same as a human and a fish is. Just because the cells are largely the same doesn’t make them equivalent at all.
    - megous 5y ago
      I think you have problem with reading comprehension. Linux = kernel, in my comment, if you want a hint.
- nsajko 5y ago
  That article is just a load of rubbish. The GP's point still stands. If you check out the other HN submissions from the same site, it becomes clear that the author is ignorant on most of the topics the articles whine about, and also that there's an agenda behind it. The usual anti-user-freedom agenda that supports "modern" stuff like Wayland or Android.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Any substance to your comment? The article lists quite a few (true) claims and you refuse none of them. Also, it shows your ignorance on the whole topic that you call wayland “anti-user-freedom agenda”.. Let me guess, you also hate systemd with a passion, right?
0xdeadb00f 5y ago
Unsubstantiated? For years Android has been improving its security and app isolation. AOSP by default is effectively more secure than any Linux distro on a laptop by default for a couple of reasons one being that on android every app runs as its own UID. On Linux that's only sometimes the case for daemons, and almost never the case for user programs.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Then native code is frowned upon other than some specific use cases mostly game related, seccomp and LinuxSE are enabled, Project Treble drivers run in userspace with Android IPC, eBPF modules instead of drivers, IPC is now required for file system access outside sandbox,...
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > AOSP by default is effectively more secure than any Linux distro Sandboxing does not protect you from all the binary blobs, closed source components and all the telemetries and other forms of surveillance built in. Not to mention all the homecalling done by applications.
  - 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
    Home calling by applications is literally an issue with the application - an application on Linux can just as easily call home.
    - goodpoint 5y ago
      An application on Linux is very unlikely to do so, especially if shipped in a security/privacy focused distribution. OTOH Android apps are a minefield, making it extremely difficult to protect user data. Also Android itself leaks data or sends telemetries in many places.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Privacy!=security. It’s not that hard to understand. The pinephone has zero security (as well as most linux distros) - eg. you pick it up at the wrong moment and it fails to put the lock screen on, a single rouge program can do whatever it wants with user privilege only because the old user-root distinction is meaningless, since every valuable thing is stored as the given user, etc. Android does proper sandboxing, MAC-based security, etc. The two are night and day.
upofadown 5y ago
Is there any stuff in existence that even needs to be sandboxed? I had the impression that all the software available on Linux phones comes from whatever Linux distribution is used.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Open source software may not be malicious, but any bug in them can be exploited. Eg, one in firefox can cause arbitrary code execution on your computer without any security barrier. And let’s be honest, everything written in C is no life time guarantee on correctness.
- nsajko 5y ago
  Nitpick: sandboxing also makes sense for anything that executes untrusted code and similar. But the proper solution includes designing the sandboxing into the application, like Chromium does it. So this doesn't have much to do with the confused claims of those claiming that "Linux is insecure" and similar.

tinus_hn 5y ago

Well, let’s see if the people clamoring for real keyboards are going to put their money where their mouth is. Perhaps this phone also has the prized 3.5mm jack!

filmgirlcw 5y ago
You joke, but incredibly, a company no one has ever heard [1] of (and their background and funding sources are shall we say, sus) has licensed the BlackBerry name and claims it will be launching premium keyboard phones in the future. Of course, they promised this over a year ago and nothing has come of it (and I'll bet money it will never see the light of day), despite promises of a 2021 launch (which wouldn’t happen even if the chip crisis weren’t real), but it shows some people are still dumb enough to be convinced keyboard phones will make a comeback. [1]: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200819005202/en/OnwardMobility-Announces-Agreements-BlackBerry-Foxconn-Subsidiary-FIH https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200819005202/en/Onw...
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  https://www.unihertz.com/ https://www.unihertz.com/ - not sure if "premium" or not, but they seem to be successful enough. It works when economies of scale are involved.
  - filmgirlcw 5y ago
    Eh, debatable if the economics work for Unihertz or not. The volume is small and it is unclear how much money (if any) they are making.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    I used the Jelly 2 for a year and now I'm on the Titan Pocket. The Jelly 2 was fun but the screen size was just too small to type on. I don't do much typing on my phone, but when I had to, it was very painful. The Titan Pocket is OK. It's pretty much everything it claims to be. The only problem I have with it is that I can't get my various messaging and reminder apps (K-9, Slack, Teams) to stay alive in the background, so I'm not getting any notifications from them. I had the same problem with the Jelly 2, but turning off battery optimization for those apps fixed it, that's not working on Titan. Unihertz phones are so cheap, it's fun to play with them for awhile. Ultimately, I think I'll end up back on a medium sized (thankfully it's trendy again to downsize screens), touchscreen-only device, with a 3.5mm jack, hopefully running Linux.

filmgirlcw 5y ago

> Or maybe Linux is becoming, more than ever, a convenient brand to put on any piece of technology that aims at being secure, or simply at escaping the norm, rather than something companies should not only adopt and modify for profit, but also contribute to. This might be true of Purism, but for XOR stuff, I don’t think Linux has anything to do with it except that it is there. Recall that XOR's lineage traces back to Vertu, a onetime Nokia subsidiary that used to sell $50,000 Symbian phones (and later equally overpriced and outdated Android phones) that then went through an assortment of owners and ultimately went bankrupt after a bunch of fraud [1]. To me, it seems much more likely XOR is just trying to continue the grift of selling “luxury” to sheikhs or other people with endless amounts of money, but without having to either deal with the Google licensing requirements for Android or the hassle of doing AOSP. Linux is what XOR uses because that’s what is available, but it isn’t part of the branding or the identity of the phone. As for Purism, aside from price, I wouldn’t call a phone that doesn’t support MMS or group SMS messages and is running hardware that was obsolete in 2019 when the specs were finalized, let alone now, “luxury.” Purism is certainly going after a very specific audience of users willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money for alpha-quality hardware/software (this isn’t a slight at the difficulty of what Purism is trying to achieve, but facts are facts), not to mention waiting months/years to get their devices to begin with, but I don’t know if that is luxury as much as it is incredibly, incredibly niche. That said, Purism certainly leans hard into the Linux branding, even if it isn’t able to deliver what it is promising. My personal favorite “luxury” Linux phone (although it was Android-based) was the Blackphone, the super expensive, “super secure” phone that turned out to not be so secure after all [2]. Or maybe the not Linux but QNX-based Porsche Design BlackBerry P'9982, which was a $2400 BlackBerry 10 phone that was identical to regular Z10 in specs, but had a better chassis and a nice leather pouch (certainly worth the 4x premium, right?) [3]. [1]: https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu-somehow-contin-1793227868 https://gizmodo.com/ridiculous-rich-person-phone-brand-vertu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackphone [3]: https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982-hands-on.html https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-19-blackberry-porsche-p9982...

danpalmer 5y ago
Vertu is the only company who I know of who I think can lay full claim to "luxury" phones. It's easy to find expensive phones, and the design-collaboration phones like the Porsche Blackberry are certainly high-end, but I feel like it was the concierge services on the Vertu phones that really stood out as luxury. The Blackphone probably comes closest out of the rest of the market because of the suite of "secure" services, but even that was pushing it.

Artlav 5y ago

I'm kinda surprised they go for privacy aspects and customizability. Android is Linux enough for most use cases, and the big problem is just having root access to it and an ability to customize. A pure linux phone would just be a pointless annoyance, at least until someone makes a phone with external thermal interface.

swiley 5y ago
“Linux” (as in Linux based operating systems) are attractive because they’re community maintained and you can hack around in the OS with minimal skills and no special tools or extra computers. Android is almost the polar opposite of that.
nivenkos 5y ago
It'd be useful for desktop convergence, but I think the power isn't quite there (especially on current Linux devices).
- Artlav 5y ago
  That's where external thermal interface comes in. If docking your phone involves attaching external cooler, then power is no longer an issue.

undecisive 5y ago

It seems a glaring omission not to mention the Astro Slide [1] which I seriously hope will be shipping in the next month, or even the F(x)tec range of phones[2]. The former has options for linux or dual boot with android, comes with a slide-out physical keyboard. Not top of the line processor, but not far off. Not the most stylish design (if that's even possible with a slide-out keyboard) but not far off. And definitely not a "luxury" pricetag. It's good that these devices are starting to appear - it's a shame that many of them are either so niche that they can justify the markup, or likely to require a large amount of skill to perform and manage the linux install. One day, we might meet in the middle. [1]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transformer/x/23358057#/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme... [2]: https://www.fxtec.com https://www.fxtec.com

swiley 5y ago
Those two don’t have mainline Linux, they use a custom out of tree 4.x kernel.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  Thanks for the info. I tried a quick search to see if I could find video or screenahots of it running a Linux distro, but couldn't find any.
dTal 5y ago
A keyboard does not a Linux phone make. All the Planet Computing phones are just Android phones with shitty Mediatek chipsets. Don't believe their marketing - their phones will never run mainline Linux, and maintenance of the proprietary kernel fork is abandoned the moment they release the next device.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  They are pretty practical; boot Linux or Android and a keyboard make them, for me, practical on the road Linux devices and phones. I have the pinephone which is miles from practical still but I like that it is a Linux phone so have to support it. We need more and different hardware like both of these to get adoption. At least we are allowed, from the very inception, to actually put Linux on them and that is already quite a think for 'modern' phones.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Do Sailfish phones count as Linux?

dTal 5y ago
I'd say so, but they don't count as free and open, and therefore do not count as trustable and secure.

motohagiography 5y ago

The AN0M phone created by the FBI was probably the most successful luxury phone we will ever see, where people paid thousands of dollars for them, and used them both practically and as a status symbol for their unique lifestyle use cases. They disinhibited themselves on the AN0M platform because it gave them a sense of freedom, safety, exclusivity, and privilege - everything a luxury product aspires to do. XOR or even Apple could learn a thing or two from them. But I'd also argue security features are what you need when you don't have power, because you in effect psychologically inferiorize yourself to both your threat model and your security provider, so that's why apple plays down their security narrative in their luxury brand as well. Security as a feature makes most experiences kind of lame in anything it touches, so I don't think it's a very sound basis for a luxury product.

HelixEndeavor 5y ago

"Luxury" is definitely the way to describe it. I've had people recommend me Linux phones again and again in tech circles. Not only are they absurdly out of my price range (I paid $150 for my current phone, used), they are incredibly underpowered, buggy, and the software just... Isn't. There is no software for them. A Linux phone simply cannot serve as a replacement for an Android or iPhone in the current market. They just cannot do the things most people need from their phones. They're something for Linux fans to cream themselves over and tinker with, but I'll bet you won't see any of the people who recommend these phones ever actually using them.

fsflover 5y ago
Using my Pinephone as a daily driver. What do you think it cannot do (apart from running Androis apps)?
- l-albertovich 5y ago
  IIRC someone mentioned something about it running apps with waydroid or anbox (can't remember) a few days ago in a related thread right? Have you tested it?
  - 29083011397778 5y ago
    That may well have been me! I've been playing around with Waydroid on my Pinephone, and just installed Whatsapp to try out. I didn't message anyone, as it's a new number that I'd like to minimize FB knowing about, but the browser, Whatsapp, and the Voipms SMS app are more than smooth enough to be usable (though far from modern-phone fluid). I've said previously, and will say again though: the Pinephone and Waydroid are still very rough. For example, I'm going to have to figure out why Waydroid, which used to be full-screen, now only takes up half the screen. So if you occasionally need an app that's Android-only, maybe you can make the Pinephone work now. But likely only if you're at least a little bit fanatical.
- batrachos 5y ago
  > What do you think it cannot do (apart from running Androis apps)? Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Proven 5y ago

I want a Linux Stupidphone. Small screen, degoogled, featureless (no camera, no Bluetooth, no sensors; nothing but WiFi, 4G, microphone), decent battery life. Can make and receive phone calls and messages.