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But these custom ROMs are hard to maintain especially as soon as when the phone manufacturer drops support. There's no way to get the latest AOSP on these devi
by jraph 3y ago
But these custom ROMs are hard to maintain especially as soon as when the phone manufacturer drops support.
There's no way to get the latest AOSP on these devices forever. Hard work is required to port any new version and that's not always possible because AOSP comes to rely on newer kernel versions but you are stuck with the heavily customized one (+ the blobs) the manufacturer provided.
- palata 3y agoEver tried LineageOS, /e/OS, GrapheneOS or CalyxOS? Of course you need to choose a supported phone, but these days there are plenty. And those alternative ROMs are getting really, really good. I have been running /e/OS for two years and I can't tell you a single thing I cannot do because of that (maybe a banking app started crashing once, and after I updated it, it was fine?). The biggest thing really is that instead of Google Maps, I use one of the awesome OSM apps (Organic Maps and OSMAnd, in my case). And maybe it takes a little bit longer to get a GPS fix (I'm talking a couple of minutes, sometimes).
- jraph 3y agoYes, I have. I know all this. I also know that the phone I was using back then is discontinued from what I can read from the LineageOS website. Which should not happen for a 7 years old device. And in any case, I strongly believe I should not have to use proprietary drivers. > And maybe it takes a little bit longer to get a GPS fix (I'm talking a couple of minutes, sometimes). That's probably related to A-GPS. The modem should be able to receive A-GPS data from the phone. It might even be able to fetch this data by itself. Have you tried microG? I had no such issues when I was using an Android phone with Lineage / microG.
- palata 3y ago> That's probably related to A-GPS. Yes that's what I think, too. I use microG, and it's using the "Mozilla Location Service" (which could use some love, maybe?). Also it's not bad, just a bit slower than Google phones (but Google is really good at tracking, so I expect their A-GPS to have better data, I suppose) :-).
- jraph 3y agoI would export A-GPS [1] data to be the same for everyone. It's just orbital data about the satellites that the GPS satellites also send you, but at a speed of 50 bit/s and you have to wait for the satellite to start broadcast it. As a consequence, it would take about 10 mins to have a fix, while it is instantaneous when the data is already there because it was downloaded beforehand. This data is typically provided by Qualcomm for phones based on their chips, but I guess this data is provided by many other companies. This is how you would typically do it on a phone running mobile Linux / ModemManager: wget -N http://xtrapath2.izatcloud.net/xtra3gr.bin sudo mmcli -m any --location-inject-assistance-data=xtra3gr.bin And I do get an instant GPS fix on the PinePhone Pro with this. I don't know how it works on Android, I didn't know how this stuff worked back then, I would expect something in the OS to fetch and inject A-GPS data on a regular schedule but that might be something to look into on your side. Some devices are just worse than others when it comes to get a GPS fix, regardless the OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS