The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)

The Rise and Fall of the Open Source Mobile (2014)(relay70.metatron.ai)

52 points by cheiVia0 9 years ago | 25 comments

sergiolp 9 years ago |

Three days ago, a Jolla C replaced an iPhone 5S as my main phone. To be fair, me using iOS was just a kind of an experiment. Before that, I was using a CM build without Google Apps using FDroid as unique app repository.

I must say that, while still needs some polishing, Sailfish OS (which is not 100% free, but is quite there, and provides a complete Linux experience), does the job. My Pebble works, my BT car kit works, and I have all apps I need. In fact, my biggest complain is about the hardware, being underpowered and with an atrocious camera. An official port from Jolla to some mid level device would make me _very_ happy.

In some countries, like mine, the FOSS mobile OS killer has a name: WhatsApp. Without official support for FFOS or Ubuntu Touch, and being very aggressive against third party apps (banning their users), most people can't even think of them as an option for daily usage.

Jolla goes around this bundling a commercial Android Dalvik emulator. Not the best solution, but one quite pragmatic.

nextos 9 years ago | |

I have a Jolla too, and while I love it as an N9 successor, I'd lie if I didn't say I'm disappointed they didn't opensource the whole system. This failed to attract a critical mass of developers and has made the platform quite stagnant. I understand their investors were afraid of opensourcing key assets, but their alternative plan hasn't worked well either.

Does it make sense to go the N900 route now? Anyone has any experience on this? Some worthy successors like Pyra and Neo900 are coming out, and N900 can be still found easily to use while waiting for these newcomers. How good is Maemo these days?

An obvious alternative is to get a Nexus and install CopperheadOS + FDroid. The ecosystem is very polished and lively, plus hardware is very good albeit with planned obsolescence due to the lack of long-term kernel updates.

tluyben2 9 years ago | |

What do you notice about the 'complete Linux experience'? I cannot find too much on the Sailfish OS homepage; going to Mer shows it's a minimal Linux with QT on top. For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that? I would buy a phone/tablet device that runs Ubuntu (or Debian) smoothly (all hardware supported) in a heartbeat but seems nothing is there yet so I currently have to go for the Pyra which has all that and a keyboard and replaceable batteries.

Also; the Mer wiki mentions an Android compatibility layer and you manage an Android emulator; would either or both not solve the Whatsapp issue?

mbel 9 years ago | | |

> For me a complete Linux experience would be xterm and sudo apt-get install build-essential. Is their anything like that?

Pretty much yes. With developer mode on you gain access to a terminal with bash and other expected utils. There is a mobile terminal application with custom keyboard which is more or less usable, you can also ssh into the phone without any problem. As for the package manager there is pkcon (probably some alternatives are also available), you can install build utils without any problem.

I've been using Jolla for some time before moving to iOS. It was a very cool experience. I really liked having a phone that I could hack and mess around with. The gesture based UI was nice, it was amazingly comfortable after getting used to it. The main drawback was the lack of apps and the reliability of the phone. The Android apps work poorly, they are sluggish and plenty of apps are not going to work due to lack of Google Play Services. Also with Android apps you get the old flawed Android permission model. The phone crashes from time to time, sometimes in the least suitable moment (stability varies between updates).

moyta 9 years ago |

The N900 is an interesting piece of hardware, perhaps a phone based on an Allwinner chipset with a fully separate baseband processor would be the way to go for an N900 replacement?

I guess the major impediments I see are getting an LTE baseband at a decent price point, and providing Signal Private Messenger and other apps that you can get on iOS & Android, as we have seen, developers won't go for a 3rd development target (Windows Phone).

cheiVia0 9 years ago | |

https://neo900.org/

Gruselbauer 9 years ago | | |

That might be the first hardware crowdfunding I ever buy into. I've got a seething rage at just about every aspect of current phones and a huge nostalgia for Nokia's early smartphones.

Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic.

Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live without any mobile games - srsly, get a handheld or build one yourself[1] - and I don't use many other services I couldn't find alternatives for.

rsync 9 years ago |

I want a unix phone.

I want a dialer command that can be used with pipes and stdio.

I want to consume "signal strength" with AT+CSQ from a command that I can pipe into things.

I want to see nearby towers in a 'top' like interface that shows me what the local carrier environment looks like. I want to enable and disable airplane mode with a command.

It would seem like you could do this with android, but I don't think you can ...

cheiVia0 9 years ago | |

Android phones run Linux and most have busybox/toybox installed, which gives you a form of Unix.

The rest of what you want needs a bit of coding but should be possible to do, just need to interface with the RIL.

rsync 9 years ago | | |

Let me clarify ...

I want to control the phone with unix. I want to perform telephony functions with the command line.

I want to place calls with a command line. I want to redirect stdio into an SMS. I want to query provider/signal/encryption/service with sysctls.

And so on ...

I don't think many unix cellular telephony tools exist, do they ?

chriswarbo 9 years ago |

My OpenMoko is still (free)running fine. It pre-dates the N900, and Nokia's previous "internet tablets" were WiFi-only, so weren't really 'phones.

When Android came out I installed it, but wasn't a fan. Been with Qtopia ever since.

I've since been given an N900, but it doesn't boot. Looking forward to the Neo900 (I'm scared to install a GTA04 board myself :P ).

whyagaindavid 9 years ago |

Sadly... The compromise is AOSP or copperhead OS, CM equivalents. With daydream tightly controlled by Google/Play perhaps genuine FOSS lovers need to live in 2D world.

thrilleratplay 9 years ago | |

The only compromise I see with open source Android is the proprietary firmware blobs. With the exception of http://www.replicant.us/, this is true for most open source mobile operating systems. Cyanogenmod adds in closed source analytics but those parts can be removed with https://github.com/nvllsvm/freecyngn

While I cannot attest to daydream, I have happily been building a custom version of Android from source for years without Google Apps or other closed source applications. Everything I need is either part of Android, on Fdroid.org or Github.

bad_user 9 years ago | |

Open-source is quite alive on top of Android and you don't need Play:

https://f-droid.org

SunboX 9 years ago |

"At the end of the story Nokia entrusted the project “to the community”, which was equivalent to abandoning it. [...] I am happy with a bleeding edge, open source, but much more limited ZTE Open phone running the Firefox OS."

History repeating. I loved Firefox OS, now Windows Mobile and I think Microsoft is not far away from releasing it "to the community". I don't want to live in a world without choice.

joe1222 9 years ago |

Obviously this publisher hasn't heard of the Ubuntu Phone.

jordigh 9 years ago | |

> the increasingly popular Ubuntu distro (released in 2004 and since 2013 branching out to mobile phones itself)