Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.
Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. Then phones on that shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list, which seems to be exclusively Sony¹.
So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.
(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices
(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)
So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market.
¹ Caution about Sony: they are an ALEC member who supports hard-right politics. They were also caught using GNU software in their DRM shit which violated FOSS licensing in a component designed to oppress. Obviously buying a new Sony thing is unethical. But perhaps a 2nd-hand one is fine. It’s still dicey though because the 2nd-hand market still feeds the 1st-hand market and rewards the original consumer. Sometimes it’s clear you’re not buying from an original owner, like someone on the street with a box of 100+ phones.
I have a Fairphone 4 and would definitely give them the biggest recommendation I could.
Any part can be replaced with a screwdriver which is an order of magnitude better than I’ve seen with other brands. I dropped and broke my phone screen and although I had to buy a new screen, after that I had a phone working as if it was brand new.
I also got mortar into my usb charging socket and was able to replace the charging socket.
You might be able to tell that I’m not the best at looking after things, I’m working on this but in the meantime, fairphone have saved me at least two situations where I’d normally need to buy a new phone. Can’t recommend them enough.
Fairphone might be worth taking a look at.
If you just want to use a FOSS OS, LineageOS with a Google Pixel phones have the best support and will be the path of least resistance.
It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g. Also, the idea of a smartphone is to use internet services or at least web pages, and those invariably want you to use recently made phone hardware to deal with bloat. If you can get 5 years from a phone you’re doing ok.
It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.
Indeed the amount of lifetime you get out of a phone depends on what you need. I don’t actually use a smartphone as a phone. My phone has no SIM chip inserted. Wi-Fi is not getting outpaced as quickly. If you have sufficient control over your device, you can reverse tether as well.
This is how my old AOS 5 device connects (2 ways):
① AOS 5 → Wi-Fi → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)
② AOS 5 → USB 2 reverse tethered → 16 year old laptop → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)My AOS 2 phone (from ~2009ish?) can also still connect via method ① but I have no use for putting it online.
What I care about is the phone-laptop connection so I can side-load f-droid apps, OSMand in particular. I will always be able to hack together a hotspot to update the OSMand maps.
and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.
You may have just helped solve a mystery for me. I was using an HSDPA stick to connect 2 yrs ago. Then one day I suddenly had no internet. Had to scramble to get another mobile broadband stick, which happened to be LTE – which worked. I bitched to the carrier. I thought maybe they pushed a faulty baseband update to my hardware and broke it. They claimed my modem just died. I thought no fucking way does a simple solid state USB device like that just croak.
Maybe they pulled the plug on 3g and didn’t inform anyone.(update) Nope… Just checked and it was this year that they pulled the plug on 3g… just last month for one carrier. So my mystery is still unsolved. Though I don’t suppose it matters… what good is a 3g modem now? I wonder if there are any hacks to get a 3g modem talking to a self-hosted fake tower.
Do you use that old laptop for anything else? That is probably drawing a huge amount of power just to reverse tether the phone, could definitely be accomplished with a extremely low power SBC nowadays
The old laptop is the same one I use for all computing. So using an SBC would just add to the energy consumption.
But an SBC could be interesting anyway because there could be moments when I would want a phone to connect without the laptop dependency. So I would be interested in hearing how it works. Does the SBC also charge the phone over USB? Does the reverse tethering software exist that can run on an SBC? It would be cool to have this configuration:
phone → USB → SBC → ethernet → router…
Especially cool if the SBC could run Tor and proxy all traffic over Tor (though I suppose that job would best be served by the router).
All phones have orphaned kernels. They are orphans because the source code to run the physical hardware is not available. The manufacturer adds these binaries in the last step of the ROM. They cannot be reverse engineered effectively and every model is different. Reverse engineering one does nothing for the next.
The hacked ROMs are maintained by people that know the kernel source at a crazy deep level. They know both the original kernel that the orphan is based on along with the state of every change and CVE that gets fixed in the current kernel. They are back porting all changes to the old kernel in order to keep it going. Eventually this becomes untenable or they lose interest.
