So, are we going to get any European alternatives to android?
It’s just a slow locking down to stay in control… We just need to all shift to proper #Linux phones instead of linux-by-google. Could be nice to see some European moves there. There are plenty of good developers within the EU. The biggest issues would be in funding that development and to market it properly to artificially kickstart adoption of such a platform. There are already phones made in Europe; Fairphone is Dutch, I think?
And you think Fairphones are made in Europe? They are made in China, just like all the iPhones and Google Pixels.
Fairphone is indeed Dutch, and they even make a point on their website of paying a decent living wage to all Chinese workers making their phones.
Typed from my Fairphone 4 running /e/OS
There’s virtually no choice for building competitive phones in Europe. The tech just doesn’t exist there. After decades of buying all electronics in China, China was the only country progressing in manufacturing. So FairPhone is really as European as it gets.
There is Gigaset who makes phones in a factory in Germany. But their phones are locked with Google play services, and they never attracted ROM development, they also don’t attract the general public to start with.
There are definitely chip manufacturers in Europe. You could probably build a phone from scratch. But it would be prohitively expensive.
There’s virtually no choice for building competitive phones in Europe.
Or anywhere else for that matter. Know of any good phone made in Canada?
So FairPhone is really as European as it gets.
Indeed, and that was not an irrelevant consideration when buying one. As is often the conclusion when discussing FairPhone… “Yeah, that’s far from perfect but it’s truly the best they could do given the circumstances”.
FairPhone has been of a long journey, fighting an uphill battle. The first phone was little more than an off the shelf phone with some fair metals. You need huge volume to actually convince any Chinese manufacturers to make you a custom phone.
And they have truly gone a long way.
By all rights there should be more such production in Europe. If not existing, than startups should be planned given the geopolitical mess.
Yes, but something like that will take a long time.
There is all the manufacturing know how and the need to make the manufacturing process economically viable. That is certainly not something that can be done overnight, but also certainly something that can be done.
But the materials are a way bigger mess. The literal materials you need in order to make that phone are not available here.
You need to start with a reliable supply of rare earths, and good luck doing that in Europe (the extraction is, with current industry practices, really quite polluting).
China developed the deposits they have in some regions and we were all too happy ti never have to do that crap again domestically. Then they put rare earths under export control, so that if you want rare earths in your products (and you do, you really do) you have to manufacture in China.
So yes, we really need to have an alternative, but your next phone is definitely going to be made in China just like the one you have now. And probably the one after that too.
Couldn’t someone fork Android and get a head start that way? As I understand It android is FOSS at its core.
I think you are either replying to the wrong comment, or completely misunderstanding the issue.
The majority of Android is open source, though its development is still led by Google.
That is how you have so many deGoogled versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS, etc. They all start from the OS version, called AOSP, and then add things from there.
The Android you have on your phone contains a few proprietary bits by Google (the Play services) which are absolutely essential to using Android the way most people do. These can be replaced with open source versions that are mostly fine (mostly).
If Google makes android closed source, we stop getting updates, but we keep all we have, and can move forward from there.
Having a good mobile operating system without Google if need be is totally doable.
But if you want to use a mobile operating system, you first need a mobile phone to run it.
And while we can totally already have a mobile OS without the USA, right now we really can’t have a mobile phone without China. And neither can the US. And that’s going to take a long time to sort out.
We have some European alternatives to Android.
- Ubuntu Touch Germany 🇩🇪
- Postmarket OS Europe 🇪🇺
- Sailfish OS Finland 🇫🇮
I used postmarket os in past and I can recommend it… it has terminal for people who want to tinker with it but it can be used without terminal. Os is very easy to use and supports many devices, their support channels are hosted on matrix
What hardware works probably for it to be a daily phone? Looks like none have the camera more than partly working and most have worse problems.
Pissed me off phones aren’t just like PCs. They shouldn’t need Device Tree and custom ROMs. We should be able to install whatever OS we want and be confident it can work.
This really could use some EU regulation. But probably not a very simple issue (especially the cameras I believe)
Absolutely. Google aren’t going to demand discoverability for their platform. ARM aren’t going to put it in either. Both are happy for things to go obsolete and be replaced just because of software. So it falls to regulators when the market fails.
e/os too, yeah?
- /e/ OS France 🇫🇷
Isn’t that a fork of LineageOS?
More like a derivative, they consistently port stuff over from Lineage, which is just a distribution of Android, which is in turn based on a gazillion other OS project starting from Linux.
In the end either it’s good enough to have the “headquarters” of this specific project in Europe, no version of Android can be considered European enough, as it all depends way too heavily on Google.
There is also a decent chance of Google making Android closed source in the medium term anyway, but the last several releases of Android have not exactly added mindblowing features, and I don’t have a tremendous amount of interest in whatever kind of enshittified cloud dependent AI infested mess they have planned next.
Typing this reply from Sailfish!
Hardware support is the main issue for me, all of these 3 none support my phone (Pixel 3)
Odd as Ubuntu Touch is fully optimized on the pixel 3a.
I’m trying to degoogling my life for quite long time. This is what is curreently missing:
- wallet: only apple, samsung and google solutions out there for all Europe. There is a EU project that unfortunatlely cannot be used in the UK. I mean, to understand how sick the system is, think that most of all credit cards out there are owned by the US.
- Family link, something to managed kids devices
There’s hope for the wallet thing in the future.
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.taler.wallet.fdroid/
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
iCard allows paying with their cards from their app.
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wallet: my current solution is Garmin Pay. For that you need a compatible Garmin watch. Once the card is added to the watch, all the payment is done without even passing by the phone, just communication between watch and payment terminal. Garmin watches work really very well with Gadgetbridge. Cards have to be added via the Garmin App, and possibly via a phone running a stock OS (mine didn’t work from the aftermarket ROM, but may be bank dependent)
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Family Link: For other options you may need to do a factory reset and install a device manager app, that then needs to be enabled via ADB. Or use a custom ROM. No pleasant options out there.
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It’s been mostly this way for a while reason why it takes a little bit before lineageos releases the next version. AOSP is just fully down stream. What will be concerning is when those releases get longer and longer. As another comment said we all just need to figure out linux phones. Been eyeing a pine phone for a while now should probably pull the trigger.
I would recommend against the pinephone. While the hardware is well supported, the hardware sucks. Voyager in Firefox runs at around 4 fps, while the battery percent drops every minute and the back of the phone is uncomfortably hot.
You would be better off with a Pixel 3a, oneplus 6 or poco f1, which are all supported by PostmarketOS. While many hardware features don’t work on these phones, they all have rudimentary camera support and have actually good SOCs that perform well.
I just found FuriOS phone the other day. Looks promising.
FuriOS is based in Hong Kong like Pine64.
Do you people know some of those banking apps that work without google, maybe a list of them?
This website can sometimes help with working out whether something works without Google Play Services https://plexus.techlore.tech/ | https://github.com/techlore/Plexus-app?tab=readme-ov-file
More spyware please!
I wonder what this will do to grapheneOS. I was just about to flash it on my phone this weekend.
Yet another example of companies circling the wagons
It says in the article the code will still be released in the same way it’s been for ages.
I understand that.
But the development will be in closed branches.
That has a greater chance of causing pains when GOS devs are adjusting these new features right?
Because now you, theoretically, have no upfront information about whatever bloatware google is about to inject in.
They didn’t before this only affects code changes going from AOSP to Google’s private branch, which is going away. Code from Google’s private branch to AOSP is unaffected. Custom ROMs are all just down stream consumers of AOSP repository anyways.
That’s a fair response and answers a lot of my doubts actually. Thanks!
Is this the end of Graphene and related AOSP builds?
No, as it says in the article
This is why open source should use the GPL license.
GPL wouldn’t prevent this in any way. It doesn’t compel you to provide source unless you’re also providing binaries. That’s exactly what they’re going to do, only show their work upon release. Not defending that choice, just explaining that it would be perfectly GPL-compliant.
I thought they were moving to closed source entirely which is against the GPL license but I didn’t properly read the article it seems.
Sooo ACSP?
"…Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branches.
This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished."
I think that is just “Android”
I honestly read that as ASCII and got confused.
