I‘m currently using an old iphone since I bought it before I knew much about apple and it was advertised for its long lifespan.
The problems I have with apples policy and the way I cant use this phone like i want to are driving me to want a different phone.
But the discussion I had about alternative OSs feels very biased. A lot of folks seem to be mostly focused on privacytm, not owning your device.
What do I mean by that?
If you buy a computer, most people got windows with it. Some upgraded as soon as a new OS came out, some waited until the old one ran out. But it used to be that you can keep your device many years until it cant really run anything anymore. With linux its a different ballgame but out of the scope of this post.
Phones are a fashion item
Not so with phones. Some drop support for their phones like a hot potato but no phone keeps being supported after 5 yrs (apple) or three yrs (android phones mostly), some even earlier.
Manufacturers keep telling us its for safety or performance but the advancements in mobile computing arent that huge imo.
Privacy is a trend
And people seem to not care, not even most alternative os users. Graphene OS, running on pixel phones, seems to also drop support when the manufacturer support runs out.
This is, at its core, a terrible situation. But nobody seems to talk about it. These phones are not broken, they are getting intentionally „soft bricked“. The manufacturers could release the codes to sign software for these devices from what I read. They could make it easy for the community to support them.
We are being manipulated
But they condemn our hardware to the landfill and us to do their bidding and buy new as well as ruining our climate even further.
Thats why decided to go with postmarket os and buy an old phone. I‘ll try to get it working as best I can and also try to help with development since I have some skills.
please help
That said, if you have tech skills, consider helping with making old phones work longer either by testing postmarket os or others. Alternatively you can help developing this community project.
But even without tech knowledge, you can sign this petition to make manufacturers open their devices to us after support ends.
I think one should also take into factor that not only software(at OS level), but the hardware(including GSM base-band) is being continuously deprecated in favor of newer and faster(?) hardware. Eg. 5G is pushed aggressively at the cost of lower speeds of 4G and broken connectivity of 3G.
Despite this, if someone is ready to work with a deliberately throttled network, then there is full ecosystem of apps and services which continuously target newer OS versions, in order to get access to better, faster, more secure libraries and OS APIs. If the case is not about smartphones, then the dumb phones don’t need any OS upgrade to continue working. A caution here is - those phones would not be secure to vulnerabilities found afterwards.
Similar situation prevails in Computers as well(stopping OS upgrades and associated browsers/apps stops working after some years on that OS) but the lifespan of a computer is longer than that of a phone.
Regarding custom OS – getting the latest version of Android work on older phone hardware is already tedious task. It requires rewriting the malfunctioning drivers to be compatible with the new OS APIs. The hardware vendors add to the misery and don’t release workable documentations on how to approach writing drivers for a different OS. Now, multiply this effort for all sorts of different hardware made by different vendors! I believe a general purpose phone OS which would support such a large variety of phone hardware would be a humongous task.
E: After reading the petition – I think for the sake of not wasting a decently working hardware we can have some sort of jailbreak. But without a proper working replacement OS after the jailbreak, the situation would not change much. And, if one can provide such reliable OS, it is a potential company idea right there!
The issue here to me seems to be a theoretical opinion without actual knowledge about the topic. Feel free to correct my assumption.
Developing an operating system is not an easy task but it has been done many times. The issue atm are solely the drivers which are locked behind intellectual property laws.
Phones also dont have a shorter lifespan by definition. They can absolutely outlive a computer if they are handled with care.
For that reason making companies open (jailbreak) their devices or more accurately their bootloaders is not only a nice idea but the single most important step towards truly owning our devices.
Also, there will never be „one“ os. Thats not how FOSS works. There will always be 100 different opinions and as many will try to make their own thing. Its important to lose the current prevalent view of needing „one“ for everything. Thats not how democracy works either which ultimately is the goal of this community.
Edit: for completions sake we would later make hardware vendors to open source their drivers as well. This will be much harder than opening the OS and therefore cant be pushed for together with the latter. Otherwise we will not get either. Push for one, then push for the other.
By “general purpose OS” I meant “an OS or OSes which are capable to provide features so that the phone can reasonably used as a daily driver”. Similar to bare-bone AOSP. I didn’t stress on a single OS. Sorry, that was not clarified in my response.
Regarding the other parts, the issue is not about the jailbreak or unlock of bootloader - it is already being done. And it is getting increasingly easy for those phones which stop getting updates. I was stressing the fact that even after such unlock, the harder part is to avail/install a workable OS on such a phone, and even harder is to develop such. A lot of reverse engineering needed in such efforts.
Yeah, if we can get the device unlocked, get the full hardware specifications with datasheets and firmware code, and source code of the drivers then we might have a shot.
Sorry, I was not on the same ideological page as you on Anti-Corporate Movement. I’m new here, and wasn’t fully aware of the goal of community. So, my reply was along the lines of technical issues of the approach.
Thank you for clarifying and please dont worry. It was a clear misunderstanding on both ends. I respect that you are being open about it.
Have a nice day! :)