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DivestOS ROM shuts after ten years
- BugsJustFindMe 2y agoI guess it doesn't matter anymore, but it took me a lot of clicks to understand what this actually is/does.
- loloquwowndueo 2y agoCare to share?
- jandrese 2y agoAndroid ROMs for phones that are out of support but otherwise still perfectly functional.
- wavewrangler 2y ago[flagged]
- Evidlo 2y agoThis seems really sudden. Is there any other info besides a handful of bullets? This was one of the few ROMS that still supported my old Android.
- joemazerino 2y agoDivestOS was a good ROM that combined the functionality of LineageOS with security of graphreem. It will be missed.
- flippyhead 2y agoIt's funny, I often hear, for the first time, about interesting projects just as they are shutting down. I wish there was some kind of pre-emptive news service that would tell me about them BEFORE they shutdown! Like maybe some kind of quantum computer internet thing that lets you time travel but just via the web browser.
- wiml 2y agoThis seems like a good place to Ask HN: What is the state of Android distros/forks right now anyway? What's the popular works-pretty-well-for-most-people project? What are some obscure or niche gems that could be better known?
- doublepg23 2y agoLineageOS is stellar on my Sammy S5e - pretty perfect comic tablet imo (ultralight, OLED, high res, external storage)
- baobun 2y agoReplicant is an older still relevant project that could use some support! As I understand they have been held back by lack of modern handsets with clearly separated modem chips. It still great on Galaxy S3... The Pinephone has been identified as an appropriate dev target. https://www.replicant.us/ https://www.replicant.us/
- fisian 2y agoGrapheneOS on a Pixel is probably the most polished and secure experience. I have installed it (and enabled sandboxed Google services) on my mom's phone (she's pretty non-technical) and she had no bigger problems in the last years.
- fmajid 2y agoProbably the most secure mobile OS available to the public right now.
- dsr_ 2y ago+1 for Graphene -- installation is easy, documentation is not bad, and it's really easy on the battery.
- yonatan8070 2y agoI got a Pixel 8 to run GrapheneOS just last week, I installed it right after I got the phone after all the recommendations I read online. Before that I was using crDroid on a Poco F3 (I switched because the camera was quite awful and the battery got drained rather fast), and I was expecting some of crDroid's features that were just missing. A shortcut to the flashlight via power button long press, battery charge limit/smart charging, bandwidth display on the status bar, the option to add more columns to the quick settings, just to name a few. I ended up running crDroid on the Pixel as well, overall it's a decent experience, but not nearly as polished, it turns out I had to manually grant Google Play Services the location permission via ADB so apps would know where I am (missed a train to that one). I'd love it if there was some ROM that combined the security and sandboxing from GrapheneOS with all the neat little features in crDroid... or an actually good Linux phone.
- blowsand 2y agohttps://divestos.org/pages/about https://divestos.org/pages/about https://divestos.org/pages/faq https://divestos.org/pages/faq “DivestOS is a full-time passion project (not a company) maintained solely by Tavi since 2014. It has many goals, but primarily: prolonging the life-span of discontinued devices, enhancing user privacy, and providing a modest increase of security where/when possible.”
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- piecerough 2y agoWho's Tavi?
- fwip 2y agoThe name of the maintainer.
- tmtvl 2y agoI believe the implied question is: 'what makes Tavi particularly outstanding, or trustworthy, or such when it comes to maintaining a ROM? Which qualifications does this Tavi have?'
- rcfox 2y agoWell, they're the maintainer of DivestOS...
- thaumasiotes 2y agoForget that and read his dramatized biography: https://www.amazon.com/Furies-Calderon-Codex-Alera-Book/dp/044101268X https://www.amazon.com/Furies-Calderon-Codex-Alera-Book/dp/0... ;D
- grizzles 2y agoI want a (preferably open source) android phone without spam. I'd pay a healthy amount for it. I don't want to flash roms or do anything like that. Anyone tried the Fairphone? How is it for notification spam?
- mminer237 2y agoWhat notification spam do you mean? Even on Google's Android, I feel like it's really easy to turn off any notifications I don't want.
- grizzles 2y agoThanks for your comments. I didn't realize settings allowed you to turn those off. Now fixed. Hallelujiah.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoPerhaps like https://www.androidauthority.com/stop-ads-samsung-phone-3108986/ https://www.androidauthority.com/stop-ads-samsung-phone-3108... ?
- fooqux 2y ago> Anyone tried the Fairphone? I wish I could say yes. Sadly, they still don't sell to the USA. They tried doing some sort of partnership a bit ago with the last Fairphone and an USA vendor but it seemed to not go very far. Can't even get the latest phone from them, and they have some sort of custom OS on it.
- throwawaymaths 2y agoyou can get a fairphone 4 in the USA. rooting and replacing with calyx is a thing.
- fooqux 2y agoSure, but paying Fairphone 5 prices for a less-powerful Fairphone 4, and then needing to flash an aftermarket ROM on it and live forevermore in a grey area support-wise? The value proposition just isn't there for me.
- surgical_fire 2y agoI used Divest OS on an old phone for a while. It was really good. I later replaced it for Lineage OS, because I needed a few specific apps that needed Google services, unfortunately. It was awesome to breathe life into old devices of you don't need Google services on them. Kinda sad to see it ending.
- gpvos 2y agoThis is rather sudden. I see in earlier news that DivestOS was submitted to the FLOSS/fund in November.
- palata 2y agoOh, it seems like I will need to find an alternative to Mull on Android, then :(
- cdurth 2y agoSame :( been using it the last few months as my daily driver.
- doug-moen 2y agoI have had a good experience with Chromite (Chromium based) and Fennec (Firefox based). I installed both from F-Droid.
- dartharva 2y agoSame, I had discovered Mull only last month and was wondering why it wasn't getting any updates since I installed it :(
- zozbot234 2y agoMuch of the older hardware that has working DivestOS builds could potentially be supported by postmarketOS or similar projects. Hopefully the code bases and whatever else is needed to make these builds work can get safely archived before the project shuts down for good.[0] Of course it would take a lot of work to try and get the hardware working under a modern kernel w/ no userspace blobs, etc. but it's worth leaving that possibility open if at all possible. [0] AIUI, we don't even have a proper list of what hardware was supported by the older CyanogenMod releases that were replaced by LineageOS. (You can find archived builds from the old CyanogenMod on archive.org etc. but the state of completeness is quite unclear.) It's worth trying to avoid a similar outcome here.
- replete 2y agoRIP DivestOS, truly a top-tier project. Not just the best alternative to GrapheneOS for non-pixel devices, but also a suite of other apps such as Mull, an Android Firefox fork. This really was a passion project and SkewedZeppelin deserves much respect for the monumental amount of quality work that was involved in this, at massive personal cost. Wish him the best for the future and whatever else he does next. Thanks for the 3 years of faultless updates. Not sure who else could fill those boots to be honest.
- sourraspberry 2y agoAny reasons given? Always sad to see projects like this go. This was probably the best alternative to GrapheneOS for non-Pixel devices.
- bean-weevil 2y agoI use divestos and I saw this coming when they failed to port to lineageos 21.0. I suspect they simply couldn't muster the effort (or funding) to continue.
- notpushkin 2y agoOh that’s why. Really sad tbh. I just want LineageOS with microG and relocked bootloader :-(
- RealStickman_ 2y agoYou can use LineageOS4microg Relocking the bootloader is a bad idea unless you know it doesn't verify integrity on boot or have some way of updating the keys used (AFAIK, only Pixels properly implement that)
- notpushkin 2y agoYeah, I was using it on my previous phone (and will probably switch to it now). Relocking the bootloader isn’t really necessary unless you care about the evil maid attack. I’m slightly worried about it because I travel a lot and want to be sure that my phone stays intact in the unlikely case it’s seized at the border or something. (Of course, the data is encrypted, and you could reflash the OS when you get the phone back, so relocking isn’t strictly necessary but still nice to have IMO.) I do have a Pixel; I think later OnePlus models also implement that but yeah, the support is really scarce.
- _rdvw 2y agothe 21 port was actually largely complete: https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/master/Scripts/LineageOS-21.0/Patch.sh https://github.com/Divested-Mobile/DivestOS-Build/blob/maste...
- neilv 2y agoThis is led by one person, but with a large community, yet one person can just shut down everything, including Web forums and chat rooms? Is the situation that no one else is willing to sustain it? Or no one else trustworthy? Also, is there any funds left over?