Keep Android Open
38 points by pauloxnet
38 points by pauloxnet
While this is a valiant effort, we should also start running alternative OSs outside the duopoly as they both tighten their grips, & become more like the other. This shouldn’t be a surprise as we all know how these cycles go. It will probably mean using cash again for some of you, but that’s probably a good thing.
I got a Sailfish OS phone last year (which has access to Aurora Store & F-Droid which is great for compatibility—nay, required to have a decent experience in most cases). I would be hesitant to recommend the OS for a number of reason, but at least I’m trying to keep one foot out the Google door (& it has proper Nix!). Other projects to keep tabs on: postmarketOS, Librem, Ubuntu Touch, KDE Plasma mobile, Mobian. If not leaning into the web apps (Lobsters is broken on Sailfish OS’s Fx ESR 91 for), I think most of the Linux OSs will offer some form of Android compat like Waydroid which can help folks have an off-ramp (maybe you can create a patch upstream or file bug reports to get Android apps working with these layers too).
Sailfish is great. Considering the resources they have, I find it truly impressive it's usable as a daily driver, admittedly with some friction. It's disappointing Mozilla has not made a bit of an effort to create a Firefox build for SFOS. After all, Firefox Mobile started with Maemo, it's predecessor, and it's a fairly standard Linux stack. A recent mainstream browser is the single most important thing.
The rest of the stuff is nearly there. Offline maps and navigation are one of the platform's strongest points. VoIP calls and chat support is not bad, could be better, but there's always Android emulation to fall back to. Personally, I'd love to see SFOS reaching critical developer mass, as I think their indie applications have a lot of potential.
Well, I think they’d need Qt6 support for adoption. The biggest issue is the alpha state of my Xperia 10 V—where many hardware things haven’t yet been released: headphone jack, battery indication, camera. Apparently they are coming soon™.