Nice! I've been waiting for something like the FairPhone to show up in the US.
A sweet bonus would be if they also provided and fully supported de-googled image or at least had an option to download the de-googled image after accepting some disclaimers. Or perhaps even set up a public community for phone hackers to help them build said image i.e. crowdsource the work.
An optional large shell for a bigger battery would be a nice upgrade too. My current phone has a 10,000mAh battery and lasts a very long time after disabling background networking on most apps.
That's quite a line-up they have! I have a Elephone S3 pro, two day battery is really great when traveling, no worries. I'll strongly consider an Ulephone next..
I ran a Samsung S5 (?) like this many, many years ago and it was pretty cool but holy crap it was a beast. My jeans pockets started to stretch out from carrying it, and it was impossible to keep it in a jacket pocket at all.
I did similar with a galaxy S4 (third party battery w/special back case to accommodate the larger size). Worked nice but eventually the battery bulged.
The tradeoff with replaceable batteries is if when you swap the phone loses track of time until finding a cell tower. Fine if in range but a risk when hiking far away, and might also propagate the wrong time to your smartwatch.
I think they would be perfect. I was hoping they had a rom for my phone but I could only find one supporting a really old version. If they partnered with Nokia to build supported images for their phones that would be incredible.
They aren't responsive to Americans. I used a reshipper and they wouldn't forward loose batteries, FP was unresponsive and we had to throw away batteries because they couldn't be returned or forwarded. Shame....
Otherwise FP works fine with Google Fi and T-Mobile in the US. Maybe not the best coverage but worth it to be able to swap parts easily.
Why do none of the good phone options get sold in the US??!? E.g. Sony has one of the few modern smartphones in a reasonable size (xperia 10II (might be the dumbest name though)), and way too few of the bands work in the American market.
Does it? I thought Americans were still using alternative frequencies to everyone else.
[Edit]
It appears that the US doesn't overlap with the majority of the world for most of the ranges, except for one band at the top which overlaps with Japan/Korea.
At this point frequency compatibility is purely a firmware setting, no? It seems like every 5G (and even 4G) phone these days supports every frequency on a chipset level and just enables/disables some of them depending on the intended region.
Plenty of models that can work with all frequencies, so I am not sure if that's enough of a justification.
Anyway, your point reminds me that the my "dream smartphone" would be one with no cellular connectivity at all. I'm still waiting for some company to start producing a keychain-sized 4G (or 5G) hotspot with an eSIM, which (I hope) would lead to more people asking for the return of the iPod Touch and for something equivalent in the Android/Mobile Linux/Windows world.
> Anyway, your point reminds me that the my "dream smartphone" would be one with no cellular connectivity at all.
You mean a PDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant)? Modern smartphones are basically a PDA with cellular connectivity (this is more obvious with early smartphones like the Treo 650), so if you take out the cellular connectivity, what you have is once again a PDA.
Personally what I want is a dumb flip phone which can act as a 4/5G hotspot for my 7" tablet.
When I'm on the internet, browing maps, reading books, I find a phone screen too small. But I don't want a massive phone.
A dumb flip phone that lasts a week on a charge so that I can camp with it, combined with a 7" tablet that I can throw in my bag, for when I want to read, but doesn't need cellular connectivity so that it lasts without spying on me.
I don't think this distinction makes any sense nowadays. A "smartphone without cellular connectivity" is a lot more than a "Personal Digital Assistant". Could a Palm Pilot stream music? Did it have an app store? GPS? Microphone? Could it make VoIP calls? Could it connect with an external modem so that it could work as a softphone?
Non-US corporations, of any size, have no duties towards US residents whatsoever. It's entirely their choice whether or not to enter foreign markets. Americans are not default humans, and they do not decide what products other nations' companies offer them.
Not a duty to the people buying, a duty to the owners of the company. To make a profit out of easy opportunities. Or justify not doing it, to the owners.
And the duty to owners is what you said yourself in your other comment, so I'm not sure why you seem to not understand what I'm saying.
You are making the exact blinkered US-centric assumptions I'm poking fun at. US companies may be duty bound to put increasing owner value above other considerations, but fortunately out here in most of the world, your law does not apply to us, and our laws are not modelled on yours.
I can assure you, for example, that in many nations companies can legally have many reasons for choosing not to export a product to a specific country that don't make any reference to profit. Again: all you know is your laws. Your laws are not our laws. It's a big world out here, not encompassed by the mores of the nation you just happen to come from.
Hum, maybe I meant the size of a key fob? It could be a bit thicker, I'd guess it would hold something like ~2000mAh. For just the radio, and for something that would be used only while on the go (otherwise you can use your home/your job connection), why couldn't that work as long as a feature phone, which could go for a week in a single charge?
In my experience with hotspots on the go, it's having to maintain the WiFi AP that kills their battery fast. Maybe there's a better protocol to run between the hotspot and other devices, although you'd need one that would also allow for 5G speeds.
- WiFi AP in super reduced Rx/Tx power mode when not charging. The only requirement here is that signal is strong within a 3ft radius from the hotspot, and acceptable on a 6ft radius. It really shouldn't need more than that.
- WiFi AP in normal mode when charging.
- WiFi AP completely shut-off when the paired device reports that they have access to any other trusted wifi network.
My idea here is that for me at least, mobile data is truly a connection of last resort. Almost anywhere I go there is WiFi available. And the places where there isn't, perhaps I simply don't need an always-on fast connection?
> Plenty of models that can work with all frequencies, so I am not sure if that's enough of a justification.
Only some chipsets work with all frequencies and when 90% of the population of the planet all use the same settings why spend the cost to cover the other 10% which would double your chipset costs but would unlikely increase sales.
Americans bully each other over the colour of their chat bubbles because apparently not buying iPhone makes you appear poor. There are lots of justifications to avoid increasing costs to try selling to the Americans.
If I had to plug a surf stick every time on the device to use it as a phone or to connect to the internet via 4G, then of course I'd rather have it integrated with the device already. Wireless connection is not a nice-to-have, it is the key feature.
Eh, getting the device out of my pocket, turning it on, activating the wireless connection, remembering to charge it every day vs. just plug it in. And on top of that my phone can already give me a hot spot (with bad battery life). Not quite sure I see any big advantage.
>turning it on, activating the wireless connection.
Can be managed by bluetooth LE.
> remembering to charge it every day
People do it for their smartwatches. Also, making it in a key fob format would lend itself naturally to some nice key holder accessory where you can charge it (wirelessly, even?) or it can have a spring-loaded usb port to charge in your car.
I feel like I recall reading that getting some certification here is more annoying than it should be, which means some devices are just straight up not brought here - curious if anyone knows if this is true or not.
We have decent variety in the US, but I think it's fair to want phones for specific purposes that aren't generally served here. The more repairable phones are hard to come by, and as someone who likes trying alternative OSes the phones that seem best served by e.g. Ubuntu Touch (Volla Phone and Fairphone) aren't available.
There are plenty devices that work well with UT and are available in the US, e.g Google Pixel 3a/3a XL. Mentioned devices still have an Android Kernel and many limitations. Waydroid on the Volla phone isn't stable, Ubports itself mediocre compared to SailfishOS and suffers from competing for developer time over other Linux on Mobile OSses.
You're overestimating the Volla phone and Fairphone, 1st one still doesn't support VoLTE which I heard is essential in the US, 2nd thing isn't even recommended by UT.[1]
Either go with an Xperia + SailfishOS [2] if you want more than a toy or Pinephone + PmOs [3] if you love to tinker on your daily driver. Both have VoLTE support.
> FP2 is the second device on the "promoted" devices page. That feels like a recommendation?
The FP2 is a very old device lacking some features and probably got recommendation back then because other devices were worse. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp2
Otherwise I'd also could have recommended the Nexus5.
On FOSDEM 2023 Ubports developers didn't show off this old phone, either.
I can and will complain when the "abundance of choice" here is overwhelmingly geared toward ad delivery rather than actual long-term ownership and usefulness.
As someone who works in e-commerce related to phones, I think a big part of the answer is that the US is not a big market when it comes to selling phones without a contract.
In the EU it's common practice to buy without a contract, whereas this is very rare in the US.
In other words, carriers have way more power in the US.
> I think a big part of the answer is that the US is not a big market when it comes to selling phones without a contract.
If that was true, then Wal-Mart wouldn't bother carrying every pre-paid SIM under the sun in the same section of the store that sells shitbox Motorolas, nor would Amazon bother carrying the same exact Motorola shitboxen - all unlocked, mind you.
Honestly it would be a huge selling point for this device if it had excellent custom ROM support on top of the repairability. There are phones from 2015 still being supported today by Lineage.
Lineage: My S5 (klte, 2014)[0] still works and is still getting updated last I checked.
I did buy a newer phone a few months ago, but I'm keeping the S5 around as a spare. In fact my previous S2 is still working as well, but I don't think it receives updates (also it has no battery right now - luckily it can operate with just power plugged in).
I still have my original LG V20 and I bought the international/dual-sim version to be my main. It's like the Thinkpad of smartphones. Along with my T480, it's on the best gadgets I've owned.
I have an old Nokia smartphone. I barely use it as a phone; really it's just for 2FA, when the provider insists on SMS for 2FA.
An inexpensive Android device which is hackable and exposes GPIO pins would make an interesting robotics platform. If this device supports replaceable CPU, then perhaps it also exposes GPIO.
Do they seriously lock the bootloader of a "repairable" phone? That's the most important feature for me, which has prolonged the life of all my Android devices by several years.
I think you’re misunderstanding the Android bootloader model. All the Android phones I saw when researching one to buy came with locked bootloaders, even the easily-unlocked Google Pixel series. So it’s not even a question whether the bootloader will arrive unlocked. What differentiates models is whether “there’s a way to unlock it” – plenty of models don’t support any such way. (I didn’t consider some classes of Android phones in my research of which to buy, so this could be a faulty generalization.)
The parent comments weren’t specific about whether this phone’s bootloader can be unlocked, but when they talk about this phone’s locked bootloader, I think unlockability is the issue they are really talking about.
From my experience with some of their models - they had been "unlockable". After some quick googling it seems it might have changed for some of their phones. Can someone with up to date knowledge correct me?
I have a G20, and it's pretty vanilla Android stock.
I'm actually excited for this. My family tends to shop in this price range, and you've got a lot of fairly interchangeable phones out there. It ends up being sort of frustrating because there's no obvious right choice.
Now you have a simple argument. You don't have to deep dive explain to Mom the difference between CPUs or manufacturer update policies, just "If this one breaks, it can be fixed without a huge production number."
There was a time when one of the (admittedly secondary) arguments for buying an iPhone or Galaxy S (as opposed to a cheaper alternative) was that the local fix shops had a lot of dead scrap units and could arrange for a cheap quick fix, while if you bought a Nokia or Umidigi, you were waiting weeks for them to get parts and it was probably twice the cost because they didn't want to work on a phone they weren't wildly familiar with.
If you have a G20, your phone is probably already as repairable as this Nokia. I've personally pulled apart a G30 and it was basically identical to the phone they showed in the article.
This is excellent. However, I wish they released a more powerful version with the same repairability. I believe this would better appeal to the audience that values the repairability, as well as put pressure on other vendors to do the same.
> It runs Android 12 and will be supported for three years of monthly security updates and two major Android version upgrades.
And that's why I stick to iPhones for long-lasting devices, those two major versions are a joke. Apple has the crown with seven on the iPhone 6S. When will someone make Android phones other than Pixels with non-abysmal software support? Yes, I know you can install alternate ROMs on your phone, but this is not what the general public does, especially with a phone at this price point. The average joe will definitely change his phone after three years when they cannot install whatsapp or messenger or their banking app anymore.
That said, kudos to Nokia for entering this market, I genuinely hope it will be profitable enough for them to keep it up!
Yes, I had to throw away my perfectly capable phone because my banking app refused to work at some point because the version of Android was too old and the phone stopped supporting newer versions of Android.
It's supposed to never leave your pocket or your hand.
Besides, if someone gets your credit card number and purchases something, you can charge it back. The vendor is supporting the risk, not you.
Do they really? All they care is about some particular version of Android (like any other app). I don't think I ever saw any banking app which would check for presence of some particular security updates (not even sure if it's possible).
AFAIK if I use a bank app on an insecure phone, and they stole my money, the bank should give it back to me. Authentication is their job after all.
But it is not much of as a problem right now. They definitely try to push people towards more secure and up-to-date systems, but as now, you still can bank from insecure systems as well, and allow your account to be stolen.
Right, like the good old "we care so much about security that we blocked rooted devices, but we make no effort whatsoever to check the security patch date":)
I, personally, do care. But I saw lots of computers with old Windows, like XP, 2003 and so on. On my current work we have dozens of customers with Windows Vista which causes lots of headache and significantly limiting us with development tools. Well, it works for them, so who am I to judge. All I can see is that not everyone cares about security updates, including Windows workstations which handle quite important data.
The fault is not with the bank, but with the vendor of the phone. The hardware is perfectly capable of running newer Android versions, but the phone simply doesn't support them.
This is especially the case with lower end phones. My mother (an immigrant whose family communicates via WhatsApp, and other free services) buys a new phone every year or so because her BoA, or transit app can’t be used without the version of Android that was never released for her phone.
It’s some real “serpent eating its own tail” sh*t if I ever saw it.
I have 5+ year old Android phones that have no issue with banking apps. I'm not sure where this rhetoric is coming from, but it doesn't align with my experience on Android.
Capital one/wells fargo requires android 8+. Citi bank 7.1+. (I stopped looking it up at this point). 8 was released in 2017. So assuming 2 years of major OS updates, that means roughly phones from 2015 can still work with it.
Also... even if the app stops working, you can use a web browser still.
Phone batteries die off long before this becomes a reality.
I think the relevant question is whose phone lasts 6-7 years? Because you might well replace the battery a couple times over the life of the phone and that's fine.
Anyway I just got a whole new iphone 8+ out of a failed battery replacement and it was showing all kinds of OS and application glitches, just as the moto G I had before it did too. The flash and DRAM doesn't last forever, the practical lifespan of the handset itself is about 3 years for complete stability, 4 years for moderate glitchiness, and 5 years for complete unusability, same pattern across both phones.
But yes, this means I will be using a 2017 phone for another 4 years, so the software lifespan probably needs to be close to a decade, and Android's lifespan is absurdly far from that level.
2017 and above android phones are generally considered to be mature enough on both hardware and OS version side compared to a decade-old phones released on 2015 and below.
I would not surprise if we'd gradually get longer software support on future phones as time goes on.
Can’t carriers lock OS versions? I remember a long time ago circa Android 4 I had to replace a bunch of deployed devices because Verizon wouldn’t allow upgrades.
If you're using a banking app to do online banking, security doesn't seem to be a priority in the first place. Or what is your banking app's second factor for authentication? Fingerprint? On Android? On the same device you bring with you everywhere and use for surfing all sorts of websites?
Can’t you use web app tho? I only seen one bank that would limit features on a web app (I don’t understand why), but there are tons of banks out there nowadays, many digital ones with features where no traditional bank will ever even dream to implement.
I suggest you complain to your bank about it. If you can, maybe switch to another one if they don't fix the issue.
I know it sounds extreme, but it's time to send the signal that it's not ok to force people to throw electronics to landfill because of shiny new APIs.
It's the oems fault in this case. And they have no excuse. Google has modified the architecture of Android to make it possible for oems to update as quickly as possible, as well as all of the previous efforts to enable updating user-facing features without updating the OS. But it's all still a kludge compared to iOS.
The bottom line is I don't think this is solvable with technology. Google should have gotten much tougher with OEMs once Android got widely accepted.
They had their chance with Project Treble, and took the decision to make updates optional and not a requirement for Play Store contracts, so naturally nothing changed.
The Android team is the one to blame, several times on Android Fireside sessions they have answered that they rather have the fragementation of the ecosystem where partners are allowed to experiment and come up with new ideas.
Well one of the ideas is to sell newer devices instead of free beer upgrades, with Google's complacency.
I still rather be on Android, because even with them screwing up Sun and leaving it to implode, I like that they push a managed OS no matter what.
Those that unaccept it and keep diving into the NDK with GL based UIs, always get a few scars in the process.
Also Pixels usually gets less official OS iterations than iPhones.
Only nice thing on Android is the aftermarket ROMs since it's AOSP. Sadly from my experience the aftermarket ROMs for newer OS iterations arent polished or miss features that the OEM roms had.
what they mean is iPhones receive updates (OS upgrades and security updates) and are officially supported by Apple for a longer period of time than any Android phone.
The Google Pixel receives new android versions and security updates for a longer period of time than any other android phone, but that's fewer than the equivalent iPhone
Yeah my wife’s old iPhone 8 Plus still gets updates, still runs. Many of my android devices from that time are dead, no more updates, and/or borderline unusable due to random android slowdown performance issues.
In fact running across that old phone is what convinced me to switch.
I usually get the latest and greatest from work every 2 years. Then I pay a nominal fee to get it for myself (because of taxes or accounting or something).
I get a new phone from the company, my old one goes to my SO. Their old one goes either to my kid or to mine or my SO's parents, depending on which part of the lifecycle they are at.
Can't do that with Android, the 5-6 year old ones would be so bad and out of date that I wouldn't want to be the one doing tech support for them.
Not to dismiss, but I have a pixel 3, still snappy, android 12. It was released 1 year after iphone 8 if I'm not mistaken, but still, it's about ~5 years from today
I guess what they meant is that third-party apps are much stricter on iOS (at least partly because Apple updates faster and for longer, probably). I was on Android 8 (2017) until recently without any issues, whereas iOS apps only seem to support 1-2 versions back generally. Plus the Safari rendering engine doesn't update independently so you can't fall back to the web.
> iPhones drag to a crawl after a couple of OS updates when the hardware is no longer up to the stuff of the latest iOS versions.
Not really, and definitely not with more modern ones. I have an iPhone 11 from 2019. It was released with iOS 13. It is now running iOS 16.1.1. It is as snappy as the day I bought it. I'm considering a phone upgrade, but that's because of the improved camera, not performance (or even battery life).
My old iPhone 8 (2017) is still getting updates, and now is moderately pokey with nontrivial apps, but the OS is fine. And I get it with regards to apps, as the perf and battery improvements between the A11 and the A13 chips was pretty significant.
It's also six years old and where it's pokey tends to be apps, not the OS. The browser, mostly. Turns out we all like to write a lot of JavaScript, I guess?
Even if that weren't the case, a six-year-old iPhone 8 has out-survived the useful, secure life of, what, every Android device not made directly by Google? Hell, a 3.5-year-old iPhone 11 has out-survived the useful, secure life of the overwhelming majority of Android devices, too. And, further, given that A11->A13 was the most significant period of perf improvement and energy reductions (the A14/A15 are moderately faster but the tail certainly appears to be here), that bodes well for its continuing usefulness.
> Not really, and definitely not with more modern ones. I have an iPhone 11 from 2019. It was released with iOS 13. It is now running iOS 16.1.1. It is as snappy as the day I bought it.
I mean.. that is (on average) roughly 2.5 years old. If your phone was expensive and is still fairly new, then it's not going to be affected by the stuff that pertains old, mid-tier phones, before it gets even older than those.
That's not an Apple/iPhone property but I find it fascinating, that they are able to sell it as such.
I bought mine at release, to replace an iPhone 6 (which itself replaced an Android device of higher spec because I was tired of the treadmill and a friend sold it to me used). So mine's closer to 3.5 years old than to 2.5.
And when you slot that against Android options, 3.5 years is a lot for a usable, secure life of a mobile device. I can safely assume I'll get five years of good, secure perf out of any Apple device from the last five years and another 2-3 years (at minimum) of tolerable performance, and that's pretty hard to argue with in this market.
Don't get me wrong, it's not enough and I'd like it to be better; I'd like all hardware reusability to be better. I'm pretty big on it; I still have an iPad 3 and a Nexus 7 in use as house kiosks (which sidesteps the security issue that phones necessarily have). But if I am maximizing useful life, buying Apple devices has been less fraught for most, if not all, of my adult life.
I’m now to the point where I frequently have first party apps crash on my iPhone 7, plus the screen has phantom touch issues. I really don’t want to replace it though.
See my comments elsewhere but this is handset damage (flash and DRAM wear and battery performance leading to processor throttling) and would go away if you had your handset replaced with another 7. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's your particular unit.
You're definitely right that some of the slowdown is due to physical wear. I have had the battery replaced once, about 2 years ago back when Apple was offering it at a reduced price, but it's back to "significantly degraded" status. I have a hard time thinking that the system software load increasing over time doesn't also have a significant impact, though.
Well I'm happy to have a bit slower phone to be able to use it fully for 7 years, with all security updates and current apps (again, with their respective security updates).
Did you actually daily drive one? Because I did use an iPhone 6S for its full software support span (7 years) and yes, by the end of 2022 it was definitely the fastest kid on the block. But to run messaging apps, play music, grab quick pictures and scroll memes in the subway, it's more than fine.
So you’d prefer a phone that has no updates, functional or security, to one that is slower? Because that’s the reality for functional updates after less than two years, and security after 3 for this phone. 7 major OS updates is over twice as long.
Ok. Sure Jan. I think the majority will take that slow phone in a heartbeat.
Considering the increase of putting your entire life into your phone, your phone’s security should honestly be among those you care about the most.
Most people will access all facets of their life on their phone, from social, to financial, to work. If anything, the risk is only going to increase as time goes on.
First is common sense, computer viruses is a so common knowledge thing that scares many people, even my parents who are dummy on technology fears them and avoid suspicous sites and malwares from unknown sources, same thing carries for apps (ie. don't install from second sources)
Second is even if an android version lagging behing on security features from later versions, play store enforce enough harsh policies on app submissions requiring access to external data and collect user data, that you can trust most of it. Sure some apps can slip under their radar but play store bots can eventually catch up to them.
I mean, no. Their market share says nothing about people’s wants and needs on this topic, it just means that on the whole the Android package is more appealing. Which could be for many reasons, of which price is going to be the biggest.
If people could choose a longer period of updates, I don’t really expect any to refuse.
The fact that Android phone releases (like the one we’re commenting on right now) generally announce the supported feature and security updates indicates that it very much is one already, at least on the Android side.
Or, you know, those that want their phones supported for longer than two years.
Minimizing a group of people does nothing but stroke your own ego. There are many reasons to buy an iPhone. There are many reasons to buy an Android. Buying one or the other says nothing about you as a person and implying otherwise is absurd and childish.
We’re not on Reddit; this is supposed to be adults having conversations not preteen fanboys blindly worshipping a mobile OS.
Nobody. Did you even read the comment you replied to? The one that says there are reasons to buy each OS? Pointing out a clear advantage is not worshipping, it’s just pointing out a clear advantage.
Price is a clear advantage for Android phones. Does that make me an Android worshipper now?
IIRC, there was only one prominent case of that happening (slowing down noticeably), I think it was iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 but I might be wrong about that. And I think they fixed it a bunch in 7.1, so it wasn't even for that long.
But ever since then Apple really hasn't pushed updates that slow the phone meaningfully. Instead they gatekeep new features to newer models that can support it, which makes sense.
My experience does not align with this at all. I've been using an iPhone XS for nearly 5 years. Other than wishing it had a more powerful camera, I haven't felt the need to get a new phone at all. Sure, it's not as snappy as my wife's brand new iPhone 14 Pro, but I can easily live with it for another year or two.
> when they cannot install whatsapp or messenger or their banking app anymore.
Hyperbole much? That's a ridiculous claim. I've been sporting a "renewed" Samsung S10E since early 2021. There's still nothing it can't do. Prior to that I owned a Galaxy S7 since 2016! That's a 5 whole years without any phone issues on an Android phone. I turned on the S7 a few months back and after an update, all the apps still work.
that's at least 3 years each using a phone with absolutely no security updates to network, wifi, cryptolibs, html/js engine etc.
not that iphone are any better. you have zero idea what you get on a new ios for old devices since the binaries are not the same. only thing you can be certain is the extra slow down loop
A big benefit of Android, its modular and bits and pieces can be updated independently. Part of the reason iPhones require to have long term OS support is the fact that their browser would otherwise be stuck at an old version.
You have it backwards. In the early days Android didn't have any components in the Play Store and Apple still provided updates for much much longer than Android manufacturers.
Google moved the web browser component to the Play Store because Android's OS updates are so bad. They had no choice but to do it.
Apple could do it too if they wanted to but they don't need to because they actually provide OS updates for a decent period.
Regardless of the history though, now, Chrome (+ webview) and Firefox on Android receive at least one update per month (sometimes more frequently). Thats a plus.
On the S7 I got security updates up until September 2020 IIRC. I anticipate the S10E will continue to receive security updates for just a little while longer and it's currently on Android 12.
My point was that old Android phones "not working" after a few years is complete bs. The S10E was launched in March 2019 and still going strong.
Fairphone that's mentioned in the article has 7 years of support (IIRC).
Never used it though, my last 3 phones were all from Nokia. It's pretty much the only manufacturer that still releases new stock (Android One) models regularly.
(Excluding too-expensive-for-my-taste Pixels and some Motorolas I could never find in my country).
Android One = nearly the same stock Android you'd get on a Pixel, no (non-Google) bloatware, no custom UI.
It was never quite popular, but if you scroll through the Wikipedia list of devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One), you'll see it's pretty much only Nokia nowadays.
Some Motorola models as well, but I couldn't find those specific models back when they were still new and I was looking for a phone.
Honestly modern Motos are as close to the stock A. as you can get. Not really sure about E4, flashed it to LOS pretty soon, but g8 and, now, g30 has a minimal Moto integrations and some are actually useful, eg on g30 I finally adopted MotoActions (flash by chop-chop and camera by uugh doggo shake? lol) despite ignoring them for years, since XT720/RAZR.
With g30 I even left the default launcher, it is good enough that I didn't bother.
I am an iPhone user. Irrespective of software update, the device gets really slow at 3yrs mark, forcing me to change. So I do not know if supporting a phone software for >3yrs is a good idea or just marketing.
Small to medium Android phone manufacturers need to team up and support a single ROM instead of maintaining individual flavors like this which only last for a few years.
5 years for parts is better than nothing but its still a lot of e-waste. Ideally given screens and ports and batteries are something that have been around for decades and will be around for decades more in similar ways it would be nice to extend this out longer. With progress on CPUs/GPUs slowing we do need to start to consider much longer usable life times for computer products and having obsolence built in at 5 years when a consumable like the battery fails isn't OK.
OS updates also very short so this phone is quickly going to end up on LineageOS.
I'm not sure if the physical volume of the phone in a landfill is the only issue to consider. What about all the energy and resources used to manufacture it?
Think of how much people throw away each week. A phone is only a couple hundred grams and takes up a small amount of space. Think of how many phones could fit in a single garbage bag. The number will be way more than the number of phones they will go through in their entire life. So in your entire life you are saving a fraction of a garbage bag's worth of garbage.
The Librem 5 is still on backorder as of today but is likely to reach shipping parity later this year.
Not exactly top-tier hardware-wise. But the Librem is running a mainline Linux kernel, so it will have a decade or more of software support and security updates.
I had the worst customer support by Nokia. Purchased a Nokia 7 Plus in another country. The phone had a design issue which resulted in loose USB C port. Many people reported the same problem online. When I was back in the US, I tried reaching out to Nokia support and they literally said their repair center won’t even accept my phone for repair because I had purchased it in another country!
Third party repair shops told me it takes $100 to fix the USB C port, almost 1/3 the phone price. Needless to say I didn’t do that and the phone died shortly after only because it couldn’t get charged anymore. Switched to other brands and will never buy Nokia again.
Not they haven’t this phone isn’t anymore repairable than an iPhone it might be just a bit more serviceable.
Users can’t do board or component level repairs, and Nokia isn’t making schematics, diagnostic software and access to low level firmware that will be needed to independently repair this phone available.
User replaceable battery is nice, however every other component is reliant on a supply on parts being made available for the long run which is unlikely to happen since there will never be a healthy supply chain for niche devices.
I’ve serviced multiple iPhones replacing a battery and broken screens with no equipment other than what came in the kit (and an hair dryer) and not the Apple one.
Yes it’s a PITA but honestly they open easily with a hair dryer and a suction cup.
What is far more important on the “right to repair” front is long term software support which the lack of bricks far more devices than any hardware failures, a healthy supply chain and not DRMing components.
The former 2 is something that iFixIt always seems to ignore especially the first one the latter is something I that should be the focus of RtR legislation together with a guarantee for parts being made available for a period of X years from when the devices officially stop being sold just in the same way that car manufacturers and in the past appliance manufacturers were forced to.
Apple isn’t that bad, and being able to find parts for 10 year old devices and actually having nearly a decade of software support makes up for it.
Ofc it would be better if they didn’t lock down parts further at least the screen and battery aren’t locked down yet.
I replaced a screen on an iPhone XS not even a month ago with a £30 kit from Amazon that came with everything needed including a new liquid protection seal.
Apple should definitely get flack what what they do but this pathetic attempt is just that pathetic this isn’t a way forward in any practical manner.
If you really think you’ll be able to find parts for this phone in 5 years then well I got a bridge to sell you. And not for nothing it will turn into a paper weight after the 3 years of software support period will be over.
"Encrypting" parts also has to do with the black market for iPhones. If you steal someone's iPhone, they can brick it remotely, so you can't just resell it as a whole working device, so you part it out to a shady cell phone repair store who will reuse the parts and give you like fifty bucks so you can score your next bag of drugs. By embedding serial numbers on the parts, Apple stops this and makes the parts unusable, driving down the value of a stolen iPhone.
And driving up the cost of repairs. If I want to turn off the thing that bricks the identification features, there's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to do that- my device follows my orders, not the other way around.
Yes, but Apple provides low-cost replacement parts. Like the cost of an iphone battery via apple store or apple self-service is objectively reasonable, so yeah, you can't use amazon batteries and who cares?
> If I want to turn off the thing that bricks the identification features, there's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to do that
The reason is because it encourages the resale of stolen goods, which encourages the theft of goods.
"Why shouldn't my dollars do what I tell them to, they're paper in MY wallet" well if what you're telling them to do is buy a hot stereo out of the back of a truck, that's illegal and society is going to discourage that because we don't want our stereo to be stolen next. And stereos are going to be built with things (like serial numbers) that help prevent that. Even if you feel that infringes your privacy (serials are the root of all this tracking after all!) tough shit.
That's always the problem, the people complaining pick out specific elements and whine about that one thing being unfair and ignore that they're specific elements of an overall system that includes elements to compensate the unfair parts.
Yes, iphones will only accept signed parts because that discourages theft, because the phone can't be stripped and sold as parts. And then Apple provides subsidized services (their service division runs at a loss) for people who want repair service, and at-cost OEM parts to anyone who wants to service their own phone. That's also why you have to buy parts individually - because they have to be paired to the phone. Yes, this is inconvenient for third-party service vendors who can't just keep a backroom of parts, but it's not infeasible, they just have to have users order their own parts. This is not John Deere where nobody but techs can even order parts, everyone can, they just don't want to have to.
The big-picture e-waste and service picture of iphones is completely fair overall for consumers. It's less fair for servicemen who have to deal with subsidized services and OEM parts being sold at-cost and losing revenue on selling those parts (rossman is not selling you a screen at-cost), but, that's what auto service centers had to learn to live with when RockAuto showed up in the picture too. And none of that is bad for consumers.
If you're just making a moral stand that you have a god-given right to put a $20 battery in your phone every 6 months instead of a $40 battery every 2 years, and you think that justifies unwinding anti-theft provisions and increasing e-waste to do it... just use the repair/service chains from the vendor like a normal human being, buddy. In the meantime we can all enjoy not having our phones stolen and stripped.
Or maybe a better analogy is removing immobilizers from cars. I have a god-given right to just have a normal metal key without needing to take it into the dealer to get it programmed, right? It's my car, why should I have to pay the manufacturer just to replace a $2 metal key? But in aggregate we're all better off not having well-developed criminal networks built around stealing and stripping cars... so people have just learned that they need to keep at least 2 spare keys at all times to program the immobilizer if they lose one, or else you'll have to take it in to a dealer and have the key programmed. It's just not that big a deal to most people, and actually the opposite is true - not having your car stolen is actually a huge deal to them.
Could you build a car without an immobilizer? Sure. Would it be more expensive to insure? Yes. Does anybody actually want that, apart from a few weirdos? No.
>well if what you're telling them to do is buy a hot stereo out of the back of a truck, that's illegal
You're dodging the question.
If I buy a replacement Home button, I expect the fingerprint sensor within to work. The fact is, that expectation is objectively right; it neither breaks your arm or picks your pocket.
That's the entire reason why we're getting right to repair laws, for that matter; society agrees with me, and not you (and so you're wrong, by your own rules).
The fingerprint sensor is tricky, it’s not clear if it’s actually is Apple’s call or not as it’s part of secure payment flow which would make it quite problematic vis-à-vis the certification requirements that the payment card industry enforces.
FaceID devices don’t have that problem since the front camera including the FaceID IR camera simply move from the old device to the new one.
It also was technically possible to move the old Touch ID sensor just a tad harder.
Apple doesn’t lock down screens and battery replacements (currently at least) as I’ve done both on 6-7 devices for F&F in the past decade or so.
Apple has by far some of the cheapest 1st party replacement services of the major brands, and also the cheapest OEM parts now Samsung charges far more at least in the UK.
3rd party parts are also much more readily available.
I’ve just recently replaced an XS screen with a £30 kit from Amazon for a Galaxy S10 which came out about the same time IIRC the cheapest replacement screen kit on Amazon is more than £200 and Samsung does no longer offer repair services despite the fact that this device isn’t even 5 years old.
Apple does a lot of shitty stuff and whilst it’s about as far from being a right to repair champion as one can imagine in reality the long term support they offer for their devices and the fact that they release only a limited number of SKUs each year whilst moving extremely large volumes of them makes that in practice their devices are the easiest to repair whether you are using 1st party, 3rd party or doing it yourself.
The fingerprint sensor is the important one, because thats where the secure enclave is, that's where your fingerprint is stored, it's the lynchpin to Apple's entire security system. The more access to any parts of that system, the more it needs, the more software it has, the more likely that software is to have bugs, the more likely bugs there are, the more likely it is that there will be an exploit, and the more likely exploits are, the more likely it is that your fingerprint will get leaked, or that the security will be broken.
It pains me that TouchID sensors can't be reused/it's harder, because of the waste, but as a protection measure, I don't see any way around it.
That’s not particularly effective since it seems that most repair shops even the none official ones have ways to rest the devices.
Also the screen can be still easily reused and the rest of the parts can be salvaged for components that end up even in Apples own supply chain I suspect.
If your iPhone is stolen it will be in an electronics chop shop in China within a week.
Shame no compass or gyroscope, both of which I value. I hope the idea catches on though the toolkit looks suspiciously like ever other mobiles. Lift screen with sucker while prying with pick. Then unscrew battery and admittedly wrestle with glue... Still a way from the old fashioned, pop off the plastic back and lift the battery straight out in 20 seconds.
I worked for a client in 2019 which wanted to make something similar to what Nokia is doing now.
They wanted a barebones, no effort to catch up to top competitor phone, with more practicality, and everyday convenience in mind than putting in 10ghz CPU inside a phone.
We went for a year, and bang... Google probably seen client's PR, and banned Android phones without a superfluous gycoscope/accelerometer/etc stuff. We spent close to year on it.
In fairness though I had an android phone from 2014 with no gyroscope and it was a problem. Accelerometer, gyro, and GPS are all complimentary features that are used to keep each other calibrated. That phone was absolutely terrible in cities (NYC and LA) because the GPS would get confused by GPS signals echoing off skyscrapers, and all of a sudden it decides you're randomly bouncing around 1/4 mile going random speeds and directions. Navigation was unusable in dense cities.
Going without a gyro or accelerometer is fine under normal conditions because you've got 2-of-3 so you can synthesize the output from the remaining sensor (my phone had synthetic gyro). But once you lose GPS fix you've lost your last degree-of-freedom and the only remaining sensor is the accelerometer, at which point the system goes into gimbal lock and the platform loses its fix.
I'm happy about this! But, while repairability is always great, a major (maybe the biggest) part of phone obsolescence is due to software. 2 or 3 years of updates are a joke, Apple does up to 8.
The best hope here is that this phone's repairability will attract a software hacking community to provide inofficial updates, but what a terrible thing to have to rely on. Besides: Phones by other brands like Pocophone are plenty repairable, being made for the indian market, and have good community software support.
The real next innovation for an Android device maker will be providing at least 5 years of updates (I'm well aware of the challenges involved, but these are not that hard, make it so).
> 2 or 3 years of updates are a joke, Apple does up to 8.
Saying an iPhone can handle 8 generations of iOS updates is a bigger joke. I’m a cheapskate that somehow uses Apple phones, and I’ll let you know after 2-3 major OS updates the performance is always severely diminished.
My dad uses a 5yr old iPhone X and it runs perfectly fine with the latest software updates. The baseline CPU (and RAM) quality has improved dramatically since around then where it's not a big deal to upgrade. Or maybe the software has matured enough.
My mom had a 3yr old mid-teir Samsung phone and tablet (combo deals they always sell) they both became unusable when it upgraded to the latest version of Samsung basterdized Android 2 months ago. But I'm sure Pixels are more similar to iPhone.
Sadly most Android come with vendor crippled software. Maybe the >2yr crippling is the goal for them.
Are you sure it's not just that the battery has aged after a few years? I've of heard many people (myself included) getting their battery replaced and saying their phone felt like new.
I use an 6S that I bought in 2016. It is on its 4th battery replacement. So I've got almost a full 7 years out of it. It won't receive any major iOS updates anymore, but will still receive security updates. I'd continue down this path for another 2 years, but as a non-iCloud user I want iCloud Advanced Data Protection to sync Notes and Messages.
If you make a claim like this can you provide details?
My anecdote: I'm using an iPhone XS that has seen 4+ years of use across iOS 12-16 (5 major versions) and I haven't noticed any real consistent slowdowns. I've seen the occasional clear bug shipped where performance dips from time to time doing certain specific things, but these seem to be resolved upon the next update or two usually.
I felt this way with the 6 because it got downthrottled into the ditch with iOS-whatever, but my 5 (which I actually got after the 6 cause it, uh, accidentally broke) was a perfect phone its entire support life. I even kept it past Apple support limits and only left it when my cell carrier stopped working with it entirely.
No. Your phone becomes damaged (DRAM and flash and performance problems due to battery) but the phone itself usually is fine.
I just got a whole new phone out of a failed battery replacement for my iphone 8+ - my guess is the OS installation was just too damaged to accept the battery pairing process and it just flaked out, it was bootlooping and refusing to charge the battery. I got a refurbished 8+ in consideration, and it's actually great despite being a 5.5 year old release at this point. It's not the actual performance level of the phone itself that's the problem, they just tend to become worn out at a hardware level and the phone tends to become unstable. It was showing all kinds of weird software quirks (discord "send" button would fail to appear when posting a meme despite the image being in the send box, and you'd have to tab back and forth to a different server before the "send" button would show up, etc) and all of that vanished as soon as I got a new phone.
While I can't prove it, my opinion is it would have come back over time even if I did a factory reset, perhaps even worse. Because I had the same experience with my previous phone, an Android Moto G first-gen (Falcon), which I owned for just about 5 years exactly (early 2014-early 2019). The phone simply got more and more unstable due to bad flash/RAM and perhaps some glitching caused by the weak battery... first I'd have to factory reset once in a while, then the whole OS would need to be reflashed, finally the installs were being corrupted less than a day after a clean reflash.
The practical lifespan of the DRAM/flash in a phone seems to be about 3-4 years in my experience and by the time things hit 5 years they are so damaged they are unusable even after fresh OS installs/etc. The timeframe is identical for both my Moto G and the 8+, I bet if I'd continued to use the same handset for another year it'd have started corrupting itself even after a factory reset/etc. I don't know why that would be - whether phones are writing certain flash cells too much and they're burning out, or what. Obviously PC SSDs and DRAM can be fine for a decade.
I am very onboard with some degree of refurbishment being a critical element of long-term phone repair after these experiences. They start to go janky at 3 years, by 4 years it is becoming a problem, and by 5 years it is unusable. Even with clean software installs (factory resets or OS image reflashes), it just is not stable. The Moto G I could write off as a fluke, it was a cheap phone to begin with, maybe it was just janky. The 8+ failing in the exact same ways on a very similar timeline (about 6-12 months later due to higher hardware quality) says to me that DRAM or flash is just wearing out over time. If it was just battery performance problems then it wouldn't have failed to re-pair after a fresh battery was installed either.
Again, now that I've got a refurbished 8+ in like new condition, I can tell you it's still perfectly fine as a phone/piece of hardware, it's more than fine enough to run discord and apollo and gmail and banking and all the other things I do day-to-day. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's a particular unit becoming worn and failing.
This also goes to show the importance of long-term software support... I have basically a new handset on 5.5 year old hardware. It will probably be 10 years old before I retire it. iOS is insanely good about that, I am still receiving full software updates at this point, although probably not for that much longer. Show me an Android phone with 6-7 years of feature updates, please. Most androids won't even get security updates for half of that. That is what keeps the e-waste down. I'm sure my handset will be diagnosed and refurbished and sent out to someone else for replacement too, or sent to APMA region for those customers, the circle of life.
And they hated him because he spoke the truth. Phones being disposable is something we just accepted. A POTS phone bought in the 1890’s would work without modification until the 1990’s and still will work today with an adapter. Why? Because we didn’t have continuous protocol churn. If it was invented today in 2 years there would POTS/2, KETTLE, and a draft spec for POTS2.1 written on a used napkin but somehow already in production at Google.
Our stuff turns to trash because everything is built on shifting sand with no thoughts given to supporting it long term and for some reason we like it this way.
Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
But new shiny thing! Alright, that’s great. Is it so
much better that you want everyone in the world to throw away their old devices? Probably eventually but you’re daft if you think those kinds of events should be every few years. God can you imagine if we did that to cars? Sorry, Honda dropped support for your Civic, you can keep using it for a bit but in a year we’re gonna change the roads and it will be undrivable.
> Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
No. We want modern APIs that prioritize modern concerns, usable with modern toolkits and frameworks and taking advantage of modern programming principles. Even if we had an API intended for longevity, once its creators die we will tear it down completely and replace it with something that suits our newer-therefore-better tastes. For them it was the cornerstone of an industry's worth of innovations; for us it is but a millstone around our necks and must be replaced. I know this because I've seen it happen many times. Once the people who've staked their entire careers building upon $THING, and developed some truly remarkable software, grow old, up rises the chorus of people who are sick of $THING, who can't even fathom how anyone got anything done with $THING, who give talks at conferences about how $THING is fundamentally broken and how we should be using $NEWTHING instead. And these voices grow louder, their chants more thunderous, until it's generally accepted that $THING is a relic and $NEWTHING is the future. Even the things we thought would last forever -- POSIX, C, X11 -- are now, if anything, well past their expiration date.
This is how things are. This is how they must be. There is naught we can do but be like a Japanese person observing the seasons, contemplating, with some sadness, the constant change and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
There's such a thing as lasting too long without deprecating old cruft.
POSIX isn't too bad, but is still kind of a mess. C has a lot of broken features. X11 doesn't fit how hardware works these days and trying to force it with extensions isn't a good fix.
There are real problems with faddishness on the scale of 5-10 years, but there are also real improvements that happen across decades, and if 40 year old tools don't get updated then they should be replaced.
But you forgot to mention how this requires ignoring the old devices. Can X11 replacement not work on old hardware? What critical improvement in POSIX would mandate the same?
Unless that's slowly=unusable that's not a good example (would also help if this poor support was a result of some "modern programming principles"). Otherwise that's way too early to retire in Japan
Some of it is to do with your so-called "protocol churn" but also the fact that a phone from the 1890's is order of magnitude less complex than a modern smartphone. It's really a ridiculous argument.
Many of the required updates to a device are security related, perhaps they could write said software better so that there are never bugs...but software is complicated now; millions & millions of lines or code and dozens and dozens of different chips. It's better to make phones much more recyclable than it is to make them last longer.
And to that I point to cars, devices that also have millions of lines of code (some luxury cars apparently have 100 million lines of code) that drive security and safety critical systems. They are also an amalgam of far far more parts and chips than any phone is.
But here’s the thing, the complexity isn’t even relevant, the thing that would make phones last for ages is just committing to some basic set of hardware interfaces. You can pull an ancient desktop out of your basement and run the latest Linux on it and you ought to be able to do that with phones too.
Wait, OnePlus provides 9 years of security updates? That is huge!
Apple’s update policy (and history) is one of the two reasons I own an iPhone (SE). The other reason being all the unremovable junkware I’ve had on Android phones in the past.
Next time I need to upgrade (hopefully 6+ years in the future), I will take another look at OnePlus.
Why they don't support heodphones? Because Google needs to sell matching Pixel buds that can't be repaired due to size and operate on flaky Bluetooth connections with questionable sound quality.
That'd just get lost. Such small devices constantly get lost, especially when not using the device for fun but e.g., to use the phone as an LTC reader to check timecode generators on set. (or even as cheap ToD LTC generator for multicam work).
The headphone jack is not just for music, it's a versatile industry-standard connector. Being able to swap the same devices between a phone, zoom audio recorders, the monitoring out of my Ninja V, or audio interfaces when editing is a valuable advantage of a standard connector.
And the entire rest of the industry continues using 3.5mm, 6.3mm and XLR. It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
I feel your pain, and I just buy bunch of them so I always have some.
> It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
companies have marketing department, who probably found that customers more interested in slick design and Ok to use usb-c buds or bluetooth headphones.
LG used to produce phones with 3.5 and audiophile signal quality, now they are out of business.
> I feel your pain, and I just buy bunch of them so I always have some.
Sadly many don't support all the features of a headphone port, meaning TRRS with control, allowing you to use an external microphone and play/pause/skip buttons as well.
I'm using some tech that actually makes use of that, specifically as timecode reader for AV stuff.
I need my phone to be a modern version of star trek's tricorder, not a piece of jewelry.
I expect manufacturers not to offer bad options like a 150 € phone with 3 years of updates. Give me a 200€ phone with 5 years? Or a 10€ service fee per year of updates.
The problem is: you and ten other persons might genuinely pay for that after three years (also considering the specs of this thing). In silicon valley, I suspect devs can't open up their env for that money and still put food on the table in the evening after paying for their morning outdoor coffee and rent.
I'm curious how much work honestly goes into these updates, though. How many patches do they maintain on top of Android that security updates would cause them to need to fix their patches again? Or how many parts of Android are even changed by those updates in a given month? I don't really have any idea of either proportion. How much money would it require us to pool to get one month longer security updates? One year?
May be something to ask Fairphone, they seem like the type of business that might be willing to share this for the purpose of pressuring the market to offer the support after a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Yes, EU needs to step in and deal with the software lifespan problems on Android just as they have with ports and repairability on Apple. It is obvious that this is a market failure leading to negative social outcomes (e-waste) and phone vendors clearly are not going to deal with it on their own.
This really should be from date-of-purchase and not date-of-launch as well. Otherwise you're leaving refurbished phones out in the cold too. We should be encouraging refurbishment and not giving those users a worse experience - if anything the law should attempt to favor them, they're doing the thing we want.
Requiring bootloader unlock when support ceases is another fantastic idea someone pointed out - and that one will hit Apple too honestly. But if you're not going to support the thing then at least let someone else do it.
That actually makes me really happy to hear tbh. Unpopular take but the support story scared me away from android for my second smartphone (and I buy for 5+ years), it just was a real mess with my cheapo Moto G Falcon, say what you want about iOS lockdowns (as a nerd/dev I think there are logical ideas there taken to sometimes-unpopular conclusions around eg app sandboxing, app store root-of-trust freedom vs permissioning social enforceability, etc) but $50 for a battery replacement plus a couple otterbox cases for 5+ years of ownership (with my 8+) has been a very reasonable overall package.
I don't mind "bundling" service into the initial purchase if that guarantees it'll be there and I also get a premium phone with walk-in service with first-party repair staff and parts (not at+t store or w/e either) etc. I've shifted to (lower-end/refurb) apple devices for a few things and I know the TCO involved and I find it favorable overall given the expected longevity and service levels and device quality.
But there needs to be more than one "gets 5+ years of solid support" option on the market so that shitty point A doesn't lead to a lock-in on shitty point B. At the end of the day competition is what keeps the ecosystems relatively honest and having options if Apple does a dick move is always welcome too.
I expect lifetime updates. I get that on my real computers: my Linux distribution doesn't suddenly stop updating just because my computer is 3+ years old. Why should phones be any different? You're telling me these trillion dollar corporations can't match the quality of service of Linux distribution maintainers?
> I expect lifetime updates. I get that on my real computers: my Linux distribution doesn't suddenly stop updating just because my computer is 3+ years old. Why should phones be any different?
No other desktop OS works like that. Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices. Admittedly - after much, much more time than phone OSes, though.
> You're telling me these trillion dollar corporations can't match the quality of service of Linux distribution maintainers?
I mean, "quality" means different things. There's a reason the "year of the linux desktop" still hasn't arrived.
But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
> Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices
Yeah, and they suck too because of it.
Truth is there should be no need for them to "support" anything. All they have to do was get their device driver code into the Linux kernel where it belongs. Then everything would work out of the box and the Linux community would support their device for them. If things change, the community will fix their driver for them. If no one does, it's because nobody's using it.
But no, they just need to keep making shitty proprietary software instead. As a result I get insanity like "manufacturer applications" that only work in a single version of Windows to control stuff like laptop fans, power profiles and keyboard LEDs. Software so shoddy it takes over a minute to display a window on the screen. I had to reverse engineer that crap and write a Linux version to make my system usable again. I went as far as my skills allowed me to go and the result was free software that will work forever. That's what quality means to me.
> "quality" means different things.
"Quality" here means shipping software continuously to a diverse set of users and having things not break down just because they'd really enjoy it if we bought their latest flagship phone. I get that on my Linux laptop, why not on a phone?
> But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
Yes, and these corporations should be profoundly ashamed of themselves that they can't match what a bunch of "volunteers" provide even though they're worth billions.
Some professionals. It certainly seems to be the rule rather than the exception with these corporations. The copyright industry literally can't match the quality of the output of a bunch of "pirates" either: while they're streaming to their paying customers some shitty compressed video with artifacts in 95% black frames, "pirates" get blu-ray remuxes in convenient DRM-free formats.
> No other desktop OS works like that. Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices. Admittedly - after much, much more time than phone OSes, though.
10x more. Windows 10 runs on computers that are 20 years old.
You have to remember billions of people don't live in the west, they live in india or africa where they use equipment much longer.
10 - 20 years is a real lifespan for cars and appliances, it is also realistic for electronics (leaving batteries aside).
The pace of improvement for computer hardware is slowing, so this issue will become more relevant
> 10x more. Windows 10 runs on computers that are 20 years old.
1. The last Apple phone that lost OS suppose was the iPhone 6. Apple supported that phone for 7 years.
2. I'm skeptical that Windows 10 would run on many Pentium IV computers. Windows 8 only came out 11 years ago. And I remember a whole lot of computers out there that couldn't run that at the time.
I feel a bit vidicated by that video. In the beginning, he basically says that he needed to run the rare last variant of the Pentium IV to get it to work and that most Pentium IVs would be impossible to get it to work.
Pretty impressive that it's possible at all, though.
Do you? Or do you just say/write/comment that you expect that? Actual expecting would be refusing to buy a phone that didn't provide said updates. Otherwise it's just an HN comment, with no (real, physical, 'economic') role to play, certainly not that of an expectation.
I absolutely do. I always buy top of the line flagship phones and use them until they literally break down. Well, I used to do that: my next phone will be an iPhone because of stupid problems like this.
Truth is Android's situation used to be tolerable for me because I would always trash the official OS and run something like LineageOS instead. Unfortunately, that will become impossible due to hardware remote attestation. Therefore, I no longer care about Android phones unless they run postmarketOS.
Wish these chip makers would start playing nice with the Linux kernel already. They should me mainlining their drivers before their products are even releaaed.
When you optimize around something that's more of an interest than a need, you get results that don't make a lot of sense, like a stick-shift electric car. The Indian market has a legitimate reason for repairable phones, so they have a solution that makes sense in terms of cost and usability.
As other have noted, the lack of updates and locked boot loader make this a no go, but the state of fully open-source, non-Android phones OSs is likewise abysmal. As such, leaving the iPhone isn’t going to happen for me. I’m still using my iPhone 11, and it’s still nice and speedy, the battery is fine, it gets updates quickly, and generally doesn’t annoy me too much. If the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro had a solid, fully functional, open source, non-Android operating system that was also good with power management… I would switch without hesitation. That’s just a super high bar, and I don’t expect anyone to actually pull it off any time soon.
What do you think about fairphone 4?
According to web, it supports:
Fairphone OS
CalyxOS
DivestOS
/e/OS (Murena)
iodéOS
LeOS
LineageOS
postmarketOS
Ubuntu Touch
Previous versions of the Fairphone also weren't available in the US due to as I understand it hurdles posed by FCC approval (and I would assume the Canadian equivalent).
strange comment, comparing apples and oranges, and concluding your much more expensive orange is better for you... yeah I am not switch my Samsung s22 ultra for this neither, I find it very important to state this to the whole world because my own currently-utterly-unrealistic-to-beat set of reasons
Is the argument that no open-source phone actually works ?
On parent’s point, the Nokia g22 is 180 euros, the iPhone 11 at same capacity was 700 euros at launch. You can’t expect Nokia to contractually promise 8 years of OS updates at that price point.
To note, iPhone also don’t have 5+years of OS support promises, we’re just looking at the trend and assume that it will continue. I’d also expect this Nokia to have a bit more than 3 years of support time, we just don’t know how much.
In fact there are versions of Android that run on the PinePhone like GloDroid, but it's really not the goal.
The goal behind efforts like the Librem 5 or PinePhone is not to create yet another Android phone, which Open Source or not will strengthen the Duopoly of Google and Apple in the Mobile Phone Operating System market. The goal is to create hardware that can jump-start the development of a true GNU/Linux Mobile Operating System.
With its real world use case, it has brought great advances to Mobile "Desktop" Environments like Plasma Mobile or Phosh by motivating developers who could finally use their creations and improvements on a real phone.
Having the same OS on my laptop and phone is amazing. Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one, without a possibility to run desktop apps.
> Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one
Android still runs the Linux kernel and the only reason you can't have shell access on it is user-hostile restrictions, which an open-source build wouldn't have.
I think it would be a lot easier to add desktop apps capability to Android for the minority that actually wants to run Linux apps on their phone than building a touch-optimized userspace from scratch.
If your desire is to run Linux desktop apps on Android I bet you can already do it if you find an X Server APK and got your Linux app to use it as your X display - that would've been a quick, pragmatic solution to satisfy the "Linux desktop" requirement while taking advantage of Android's mature & battle-tested touch-optimised userspace.
It's the minority, because people didn't realize yet how convenient and logical it is. There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size. You don't need to develop independent apps. You don't need to learn independent tools.
That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free. They'd save an insane amount of time and actually deliver a product competitive with mainstream phones right now, which would give them funding & marketshare to continue refining it down the line (potentially replacing it with non-Android components one at a time).
> There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size
And the input method, which is a massive difference - touch and mouse are completely different, and so are the contexts in which phone vs desktop apps are used. If you try to merge the two, you'd look like the idiots who gave us Windows 8. So there's still effort in making specific UIs for different mediums.
> I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop
I'm not sure there's an actual need for it? This has even been tried by large companies such as Samsung and Microsoft and didn't go anywhere - in practice this isn't a problem the vast majority of people has and seems like an absurd thing to start with for a resource-constrained company in a very competitive market.
> That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free.
This is not true. They are stuck with hardware-specific things like power management, camera, and LTE calls. "Calls" application itself was developed very quickly, for example.
I think my point still stands if you replace "apps" with "functionality" - they're still reimplementing from scratch and without much resources nor expertise something that Android has a (correct me if I'm wrong) permissively-licensed, mature & battle-tested implementation of they could just use.
I don't think using permissively-licensed Android components wouldn't compromise user freedom and would actually increase it because it would put a non-user-hostile, freedom-respecting, usable phone in the market right now. You can just patch out or choose to not include the user-hostile bits (though most of those wouldn't be part of the open-source release in the first place).
Of course, this only applies if the objective is to deliver a usable, competitive product rather than practice effectively useless ideological bikeshedding similar to the war on systemd and refuse the admit that the typical GNU/Linux userspace is at this point prehistoric and significantly lacking compared to other alternatives (whether proprietary or open-source such as Android).
> Android turns a general-purpose device into a restricted one, without a possibility to run desktop apps.
You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power. This is an important design feature. This is why smartphones OS are built differently.
And even then, I don't see how android "restricts" things. It's software. Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
> You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power.
You imply that having large power consumption is fine as long as the app is designed for desktop. I disagree: All apps should be as lightweight as possible to fight with the climate change and slow UI. I am using desktop Firefox on my Librem 5 just fine. All desktop plugins work, too.
> Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
> Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
What exactly do you mean by "desktop apps"? Of course it's not going to support KDE or GTK or QT or win32 or some other windowing API. But it's an OS, it can run software. And since it's open source, I don't see any reason why it would not run something.
Of course you would need to use the android API to do something, but it makes sense because it's a different OS.
It doesn't behave like a desktop OS, but as opposed to what, exactly? Desktop apps are a subset of software in general, desktop apps are not everything there is about software.
If you mean "I cannot run desktop apps because I need to redesign them so they can work on a phone", then yes, indeed, but a phone is not just "a small desktop".
Why not? It's a general-purpose computer, isn't it? Why intentionally design an OS in such a way that you must rewrite all software for it from scratch?
Yes, the UI is very different, but changing the UI is much easier than rewriting the program from scratch. Why is there no full Firefox on Android? It was already adapted for GNU/Linux phones and runs fine there, but not on Android. Same for LibreOffice AFAIK. Isn't it due to the design on this OS?
You don't have to rewrite everything from scratch, you can already use C++ or other languages, only the front end of software must be rewritten. And it's also possible to use other ways, like a graphics renderer or wrapper.
> Why not?
As I said, much less energy thus less processor cycles, much less L2 cache memory, no x86. The main reason it's entirely different is to force developers to make an app that doesn't drain battery, which is why it's very much different: it can do a single thing at a time, the software must be pause-able at any time, it can only run when the OS is okay with it, it can only animate in certain way, only use a very small subset of opengl capabilities, etc
The ways smartphones' OS work is a fundamental part of how it can save battery. It is painful for developers so that in the end, batteries last longer. Desktop software is millions years away from being energy-efficient, most of desktop or server software is generally ruled by the law of Wirth: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Of course it's a big constraint of how developers can make their software work, but they don't need to rewrite "everything", they just have to adapt.
Why is GNU important? toybox's coreutils is a good enough replacement. If you really wanted you could install GNU's core utils. 99% of users don't want to be messing with command line tools anyways.
Android already brought Linux as a mobile operating system to the mainstream.
The boot loader will probably be unlocked sooner or later. It should be open, but I think it's reasonable to expect either update support or unlocked booting, not necessarily both.
In a gook device, that is. You have to remember that most consumers do not want to know how their phone works or to become expert in its configuration. They just want it to work.
A compromise here would be to have an option to unlock everything, but with the understanding that by doing so you opt out of warranty service.
Not just that, but the pinephone camera is complete garbage. It's basically a deal killer for many since we've grown to rely on our phone producing quality digital images and video. If they fix that and battery life you will draw enough developers to help make a reasonably decent mobile experience. But as it is now, there are few devices which have both adequate capabilities and driver support for it to work.
Reducing cost and making it more repairable is a step in the right direction, but there is no reason why shouldn't get 5-6+ years of life out of a mobile phone.
The tradeoff is "back cover that comes off in an instant, whenever you want it to" versus "back cover that comes off in an instant, even when you don't want it to."
The way you could buy cases that replaced the back cover meant for a much thinner profile phone than the typical metal case wrapped in silicone.
Replaceable batteries are glorious. I never plugged-in my phone, just flipped the battery with one from the charger when I left the house. Instant 100% battery. Travelling? Just take a few charged batteries at a fraction of the weight of a power-bank and much more convenient.
Moreover, the battery coming out seemed to act as a shock absorber. If you do throw it hard enough for it to come out, and that was rare for me, at least something gives instead of breaks.
Ah, the memories of classmates playing soccer with phones in high school... phones could run MSN, browse websites (without JS! The .mobi site owners were just forced to make sites lightweight), play Java-based games, had replaceable screen covers, honestly what more should we want? That it's now open source Android instead of proprietary Symbian is great, but slap a touchscreen on it for web browsing and upgrade it from GPRS to 4G or so, and theoretically we could just have nice things.
I had a dumb phone back in the days that ran on 4 conventional AA batteries. Opening the lid and swapping 4 batteries is less convenient than swapping a single flat cell but its so much better than being wired to the wall or using a clumsy power bank with a cable that is always to short and to long at the same time. The whole charging ritual is far more absurd than it seems. The screen needs to power down, there has to be a power savings mode. With intense use (normal?) and erratic charging patterns batteries degrade much faster than advertised. I mean, I read "lifespan is 2 – 3 years, which is about 300 – 500 charge cycles" when actually used you get about 5 hours out of a charge. real use say 3 months, running from socket to socket. LOL
Cant stop laughing thinking about it, luxurious homes with all the trimmings then have the whole family gather around the extension cord. Like on a construction site. Imagine guns worked like this. We can glue in the cartridge and you'd be able to shoot people for many years? 6 shots should be enough for 3 years when the software expires.
Nowadays? Never, obviously. The odds of me breaking the phone are so large, and the tools I need specialized enough, that I need a new phone on stand-by anyway. No point replacing the battery if I already bought a new one just in case I break the old one by trying to do something as weird as replacing a wear-heavy part.
So it has fallen out of style. There is no market for spare batteries and using them as range extenders is not common use. It seems like an outlandish thing to do now.
I think I went through three batteries on my Galaxy Note 2 (first Android phone) before upgrading. Apps dropping support became a problem... nothing wrong with the hardware at the time where I felt forced to trash it. Anyway, carrying an extra battery for long travel days was not a weird thing to do. I also remember non-tech people having spare batteries for Nokias (when they became more capable; not when the only use was calling your mom to say you were going to a friend's after school).
> Can anyone explain why they think that this is wrong?
I suspect it is this: > Only forced obsoleting by the company. No other reasons exist.
While companies do want you to buy the newest version every year or two, it is more likely that cost-benefit analysis tells them to build the way they build; they know they must release newer better phones periodically because the competition will do this also. But to support older phones has a cost, and at some point those old phones don't generate enough revenue to justify the cost of supporting them.
But then thickness and aesthetic "cheapness" is a secondary one.
A removeable cover and battery is always going to introduce a little bit of thickness, which on a thin phone is noticeable even if not major.
And then whether you have screws or the ridges for removing the cover, it just always feels a little "cheap". You can't get the same kind of rounded smooth glass or aluminum backing that wraps seamlessly around the edges.
And when people are comparing two phones in their hands, the one that feels more "premium" is often the one they'll go with if they feel they're already paying a premium price. This is an object they hold in their hand all day long. And if you live in a major city, it's really not a big deal to get your battery replaced after 2 years at an Apple Store.
Huh, guess I am just that gullible to buy the marketing to the point where I now wonder: how the heck can you have a removable battery and also survive being held under water? (It has an IP67 rating.) I guess waterproof everything except the battery contacts and trust that the salinity is low enough that the 5V doesn't jump between the poles, plus it not being wet for long enough to start rusting (IP67 afaik doesn't require it to work a week later still)?
Older devices I used had gaskets around the battery contacts and a tight fastener. That seems to work well until the gasket eventually degrades over time.
It's a thin, twisty rubber gasket held in place by a flimsy plastic back.
And in my experience with anything involving thin rubber gaskets, they degrade and just flat-out break incredibly easily.
E.g. with wristwatches, it's common knowledge that as soon as you replace the battery in a water-resistant watch, you shouldn't consider it water-resistant anymore. You might get lucky once or twice in recreating the same seal it had at the factory, but you should probably assume you didn't.
Could be wrong (please correct me) but i recall hearing that allowing a customer to change a battery (e.g, 3rd party) on a chargable device can change the safety of the product/UL rating or whatever, so it could simply be a certification thing.
Not exactly the same thing, but I have a Garmin heartrate chest strap with a replaceable battery (no charging) -- in the US the cover swivels open to change, but in Australia it requries a screw, for child safety rules. I Thought that was interesting
There's a specific issue with young children eating button-cell lithium batteries, which I'm guessing is what your Garmin device uses. Australia appears to have a law requiring the battery compartments of such devices to be child-resistant.
I'm not sure if any countries have similar regulations related to larger Li-ion rechargeable batteries.
>Why is it so hard to add a removeable back cover to have swappable battery?
This is one of the delights of the Moto z series phones because they have magnetic batteries that can be swapped on and off with your bare hands without even having to open up a battery cover or power off the phone.
Just unglued my samsung to replace battery/usb c. The mobile network does not work now. I guess getting something repairable is not a bad idea. Probably shorted, because you cannot disconnect battery without removing mid frame (and oh god that's hard).
Ugly notch and no Linux... Not sure what the appeal is? I believe HMD sales tanked right after they introduced the notch (they aren't Apple to get away with it) and this phone seems like a way to clear out unwanted displays via "repairability fans".
Nokia, what it once was, and where it’s playing at now.
They weren’t very friendly nor open back in the days, but time has its ways. Happy to see them do this now.
This seems like a Savvy move from Nokia. At least in my country, Nokia phones are remembered for the following:
- nearly indestructible
- well priced
- back pops out
Nokia is doing the most sensible thing to reuse these as its differentiator.
I understand people taking about the OS. But Nokia has little control over the software and it has also never been its selling point for me with Symbian, and later Windows Phone.
I sure miss their wonky phones with weirdly arranged buttons and their random quirks.
TCL produced Blackberry-branded devices for a few years, but they stopped a few years ago. Blackberry is still an independent company doing other things (mostly in the enterprise security space I think)
I applaud this initiative by Nokia, and can't wait to lay my hands on one of those phones when mine dies, but let's be real: it won't be as tough as the 3310.
Why does it have a notch but a thick bottom bezel? I thought the point of the notch was so that you could make the screen cover the whole display? Why can they not just move the screen down a bit to get the bezel to the top, remove the notch and put the camera at the top?
Ask HMD, they made some boneheaded design decisions in the last gen, thinking they are Apple to get away with it. Their sales showed otherwise and now they probably need to get rid of components they bough in advance, so here comes a repairable phone.
Time flies and 3 years update is nothing. Remember the beginning of covid days? More than 3 years ago. So if you bought this phone those days now it was in the garbage bin. I don't want to spend time and effort to buy a phone every 2-3 years. Buy an iPhone, they replace the battery for you for $69 even after 3 years. iPhones are rock-solid and get 6-7 years of updates.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] threadA sweet bonus would be if they also provided and fully supported de-googled image or at least had an option to download the de-googled image after accepting some disclaimers. Or perhaps even set up a public community for phone hackers to help them build said image i.e. crowdsource the work.
An optional large shell for a bigger battery would be a nice upgrade too. My current phone has a 10,000mAh battery and lasts a very long time after disabling background networking on most apps.
The tradeoff with replaceable batteries is if when you swap the phone loses track of time until finding a cell tower. Fine if in range but a risk when hiking far away, and might also propagate the wrong time to your smartwatch.
Like xda? :)
Otherwise FP works fine with Google Fi and T-Mobile in the US. Maybe not the best coverage but worth it to be able to swap parts easily.
(I've similarly been wanting a FairPhone here.)
[Edit]
It appears that the US doesn't overlap with the majority of the world for most of the ranges, except for one band at the top which overlaps with Japan/Korea.
https://5gobservatory.eu/5g-spectrum/
> Currently, the most used bands are:
- Low-band: 700 MHz (except in US); 600 MHz (US)
- Mid-band: 3.3 – 3.8 GHz (except US); 2.6 GHz, 3.7 – 4.98 GHz (US)
- High-band: 26 GHz (except Japan, South Korea and US); 28 GHz (Japan, South Korea and US)
Anyway, your point reminds me that the my "dream smartphone" would be one with no cellular connectivity at all. I'm still waiting for some company to start producing a keychain-sized 4G (or 5G) hotspot with an eSIM, which (I hope) would lead to more people asking for the return of the iPod Touch and for something equivalent in the Android/Mobile Linux/Windows world.
You mean a PDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant)? Modern smartphones are basically a PDA with cellular connectivity (this is more obvious with early smartphones like the Treo 650), so if you take out the cellular connectivity, what you have is once again a PDA.
When I'm on the internet, browing maps, reading books, I find a phone screen too small. But I don't want a massive phone.
A dumb flip phone that lasts a week on a charge so that I can camp with it, combined with a 7" tablet that I can throw in my bag, for when I want to read, but doesn't need cellular connectivity so that it lasts without spying on me.
An odd term in this context. No-one has to 'justify' not selling their stuff to Americans.
Small entities can do whatever they want but big corporations should have justifications for not selling a thing.
And the duty to owners is what you said yourself in your other comment, so I'm not sure why you seem to not understand what I'm saying.
I can assure you, for example, that in many nations companies can legally have many reasons for choosing not to export a product to a specific country that don't make any reference to profit. Again: all you know is your laws. Your laws are not our laws. It's a big world out here, not encompassed by the mores of the nation you just happen to come from.
They don't have to maximize profit at the cost of other things. But if they want to ignore a huge sales venue, they should justify it.
Justifying isn't some huge bar. It's due diligence. If you have many reasons, then write them down.
You've been repeatedly arguing against a strawman where I want to force companies to make certain decisions. But that's not what I said at any point.
- Bluetooth for control/signaling.
- Bluetooth for voice audio.
- WiFi AP in super reduced Rx/Tx power mode when not charging. The only requirement here is that signal is strong within a 3ft radius from the hotspot, and acceptable on a 6ft radius. It really shouldn't need more than that.
- WiFi AP in normal mode when charging.
- WiFi AP completely shut-off when the paired device reports that they have access to any other trusted wifi network.
My idea here is that for me at least, mobile data is truly a connection of last resort. Almost anywhere I go there is WiFi available. And the places where there isn't, perhaps I simply don't need an always-on fast connection?
Only some chipsets work with all frequencies and when 90% of the population of the planet all use the same settings why spend the cost to cover the other 10% which would double your chipset costs but would unlikely increase sales.
Americans bully each other over the colour of their chat bubbles because apparently not buying iPhone makes you appear poor. There are lots of justifications to avoid increasing costs to try selling to the Americans.
https://www.hardwareschotte.de/tests/Surfsticks
Sure, having wifi hotspots would be nice, but this way you don't have to worry about batteries.
Can be managed by bluetooth LE.
> remembering to charge it every day
People do it for their smartwatches. Also, making it in a key fob format would lend itself naturally to some nice key holder accessory where you can charge it (wirelessly, even?) or it can have a spring-loaded usb port to charge in your car.
You're overestimating the Volla phone and Fairphone, 1st one still doesn't support VoLTE which I heard is essential in the US, 2nd thing isn't even recommended by UT.[1]
Either go with an Xperia + SailfishOS [2] if you want more than a toy or Pinephone + PmOs [3] if you love to tinker on your daily driver. Both have VoLTE support.
1. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/
2. https://shop.jolla.com/
3. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PinePhone_(pine64-...
FP2 is the second device on the "promoted" devices page. That feels like a recommendation?
https://ubports.com/supported-products
> Google Pixel 3a/3a XL.
Doesn't support one of the most interesting features to me in UBports, which is display output for convergence.
The FP2 is a very old device lacking some features and probably got recommendation back then because other devices were worse. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp2 Otherwise I'd also could have recommended the Nexus5.
On FOSDEM 2023 Ubports developers didn't show off this old phone, either.
In the EU it's common practice to buy without a contract, whereas this is very rare in the US.
In other words, carriers have way more power in the US.
If that was true, then Wal-Mart wouldn't bother carrying every pre-paid SIM under the sun in the same section of the store that sells shitbox Motorolas, nor would Amazon bother carrying the same exact Motorola shitboxen - all unlocked, mind you.
I did buy a newer phone a few months ago, but I'm keeping the S5 around as a spare. In fact my previous S2 is still working as well, but I don't think it receives updates (also it has no battery right now - luckily it can operate with just power plugged in).
[0]: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/klte/
Btw degoogling phone almost double battery life.
Just makes me picture Maggie Simpson
But to be actually on topic, supporting custom ROMs in order to extricate android from Google is my top priority when buying a phone.
If this phone gets lineageOS support then it may be the perfect phone.
Well, a really old Maggie Simpson with a buzz-cut. I do jokingly call them onesies. Expensive onesies anyway.
If this phone gets lineageOS support then it may be the perfect phone.
That would work for me as well.
I have an old Nokia smartphone. I barely use it as a phone; really it's just for 2FA, when the provider insists on SMS for 2FA.
An inexpensive Android device which is hackable and exposes GPIO pins would make an interesting robotics platform. If this device supports replaceable CPU, then perhaps it also exposes GPIO.
Otherwise it'll be bogged down with bloatware and will be useless as soon as security updates aren't available anymore.
But if so, very nice :)
Based on some superficial Googling, this phone's predecessor, G21 also comes without an unlockable bootloader.
Cool thing about 6.1 is that it's officially supported by LineageOS
The parent comments weren’t specific about whether this phone’s bootloader can be unlocked, but when they talk about this phone’s locked bootloader, I think unlockability is the issue they are really talking about.
I'm actually excited for this. My family tends to shop in this price range, and you've got a lot of fairly interchangeable phones out there. It ends up being sort of frustrating because there's no obvious right choice.
Now you have a simple argument. You don't have to deep dive explain to Mom the difference between CPUs or manufacturer update policies, just "If this one breaks, it can be fixed without a huge production number."
There was a time when one of the (admittedly secondary) arguments for buying an iPhone or Galaxy S (as opposed to a cheaper alternative) was that the local fix shops had a lot of dead scrap units and could arrange for a cheap quick fix, while if you bought a Nokia or Umidigi, you were waiting weeks for them to get parts and it was probably twice the cost because they didn't want to work on a phone they weren't wildly familiar with.
- Sent from my Xiaomi A2 Lite (released 2018), currently running Android 13
Heck grapheneOS stops supporting devices shortly after google because they can't really offer full security coverage.
And that's why I stick to iPhones for long-lasting devices, those two major versions are a joke. Apple has the crown with seven on the iPhone 6S. When will someone make Android phones other than Pixels with non-abysmal software support? Yes, I know you can install alternate ROMs on your phone, but this is not what the general public does, especially with a phone at this price point. The average joe will definitely change his phone after three years when they cannot install whatsapp or messenger or their banking app anymore.
That said, kudos to Nokia for entering this market, I genuinely hope it will be profitable enough for them to keep it up!
Edit: not sarcastic, 100% serious.
OK.
But surely banks ought to. If you care about having a banking app, then you ought to care transitively.
If you buy something in a store, you have no certainty that your CC number doesn't end in the hands of store personnel.
> Besides, if someone gets your credit card number and purchases something, you can charge it back.
You have to keep an eye on it. It is easy to overlook if the amount small is enough.
All in all, I wouldn't call this good security practice.
But it is not much of as a problem right now. They definitely try to push people towards more secure and up-to-date systems, but as now, you still can bank from insecure systems as well, and allow your account to be stolen.
It’s some real “serpent eating its own tail” sh*t if I ever saw it.
That belongs on https://twitter.com/shituserstory
I want to buy a new phone when trying to access to my money
So that an IT manager at the bank can put a check mark next to a policy OKR
I have 5+ year old Android phones that have no issue with banking apps. I'm not sure where this rhetoric is coming from, but it doesn't align with my experience on Android.
Capital one/wells fargo requires android 8+. Citi bank 7.1+. (I stopped looking it up at this point). 8 was released in 2017. So assuming 2 years of major OS updates, that means roughly phones from 2015 can still work with it.
Also... even if the app stops working, you can use a web browser still.
Phone batteries die off long before this becomes a reality.
My local bank requires 9 or above
>Also... even if the app stops working, you can use a web browser still.
It's not uncommon at all for banks to have a website that's virtually impossible to use on mobile browsers.
This thread is discussing a phone with replaceable battery. For at least 5 years.
I think the relevant question is whose phone lasts 6-7 years? Because you might well replace the battery a couple times over the life of the phone and that's fine.
Anyway I just got a whole new iphone 8+ out of a failed battery replacement and it was showing all kinds of OS and application glitches, just as the moto G I had before it did too. The flash and DRAM doesn't last forever, the practical lifespan of the handset itself is about 3 years for complete stability, 4 years for moderate glitchiness, and 5 years for complete unusability, same pattern across both phones.
But yes, this means I will be using a 2017 phone for another 4 years, so the software lifespan probably needs to be close to a decade, and Android's lifespan is absurdly far from that level.
I would not surprise if we'd gradually get longer software support on future phones as time goes on.
I know it sounds extreme, but it's time to send the signal that it's not ok to force people to throw electronics to landfill because of shiny new APIs.
The bottom line is I don't think this is solvable with technology. Google should have gotten much tougher with OEMs once Android got widely accepted.
There are too many benefits for the OEMs to dump phones on the market and not update. No reason to care otherwise so far, sadly.
The Android team is the one to blame, several times on Android Fireside sessions they have answered that they rather have the fragementation of the ecosystem where partners are allowed to experiment and come up with new ideas.
Well one of the ideas is to sell newer devices instead of free beer upgrades, with Google's complacency.
I still rather be on Android, because even with them screwing up Sun and leaving it to implode, I like that they push a managed OS no matter what.
Those that unaccept it and keep diving into the NDK with GL based UIs, always get a few scars in the process.
Only nice thing on Android is the aftermarket ROMs since it's AOSP. Sadly from my experience the aftermarket ROMs for newer OS iterations arent polished or miss features that the OEM roms had.
The Google Pixel receives new android versions and security updates for a longer period of time than any other android phone, but that's fewer than the equivalent iPhone
In fact running across that old phone is what convinced me to switch.
I usually get the latest and greatest from work every 2 years. Then I pay a nominal fee to get it for myself (because of taxes or accounting or something).
I get a new phone from the company, my old one goes to my SO. Their old one goes either to my kid or to mine or my SO's parents, depending on which part of the lifecycle they are at.
Can't do that with Android, the 5-6 year old ones would be so bad and out of date that I wouldn't want to be the one doing tech support for them.
I only change phones when they die in some form, so 300 euros every 5 years on average is more than enough, I am not buying phones with laptop prices.
I have anyway access to Apple devices via project assignments in consulting projects.
Not really, and definitely not with more modern ones. I have an iPhone 11 from 2019. It was released with iOS 13. It is now running iOS 16.1.1. It is as snappy as the day I bought it. I'm considering a phone upgrade, but that's because of the improved camera, not performance (or even battery life).
My old iPhone 8 (2017) is still getting updates, and now is moderately pokey with nontrivial apps, but the OS is fine. And I get it with regards to apps, as the perf and battery improvements between the A11 and the A13 chips was pretty significant.
As you tell yourself, the iPhone 8 isn't its former self with its original iOS version.
Even if that weren't the case, a six-year-old iPhone 8 has out-survived the useful, secure life of, what, every Android device not made directly by Google? Hell, a 3.5-year-old iPhone 11 has out-survived the useful, secure life of the overwhelming majority of Android devices, too. And, further, given that A11->A13 was the most significant period of perf improvement and energy reductions (the A14/A15 are moderately faster but the tail certainly appears to be here), that bodes well for its continuing usefulness.
Apps or OS doesn't matter, they are interwined.
I mean.. that is (on average) roughly 2.5 years old. If your phone was expensive and is still fairly new, then it's not going to be affected by the stuff that pertains old, mid-tier phones, before it gets even older than those.
That's not an Apple/iPhone property but I find it fascinating, that they are able to sell it as such.
And when you slot that against Android options, 3.5 years is a lot for a usable, secure life of a mobile device. I can safely assume I'll get five years of good, secure perf out of any Apple device from the last five years and another 2-3 years (at minimum) of tolerable performance, and that's pretty hard to argue with in this market.
Don't get me wrong, it's not enough and I'd like it to be better; I'd like all hardware reusability to be better. I'm pretty big on it; I still have an iPad 3 and a Nexus 7 in use as house kiosks (which sidesteps the security issue that phones necessarily have). But if I am maximizing useful life, buying Apple devices has been less fraught for most, if not all, of my adult life.
Did you actually daily drive one? Because I did use an iPhone 6S for its full software support span (7 years) and yes, by the end of 2022 it was definitely the fastest kid on the block. But to run messaging apps, play music, grab quick pictures and scroll memes in the subway, it's more than fine.
Ok. Sure Jan. I think the majority will take that slow phone in a heartbeat.
Most people will access all facets of their life on their phone, from social, to financial, to work. If anything, the risk is only going to increase as time goes on.
Second is even if an android version lagging behing on security features from later versions, play store enforce enough harsh policies on app submissions requiring access to external data and collect user data, that you can trust most of it. Sure some apps can slip under their radar but play store bots can eventually catch up to them.
As long as the apps they use work ok I'm not sure the majority cares about updates security or otherwise.
If people could choose a longer period of updates, I don’t really expect any to refuse.
Only rich people care about iPhones, or those that buy everything on credit.
Minimizing a group of people does nothing but stroke your own ego. There are many reasons to buy an iPhone. There are many reasons to buy an Android. Buying one or the other says nothing about you as a person and implying otherwise is absurd and childish.
We’re not on Reddit; this is supposed to be adults having conversations not preteen fanboys blindly worshipping a mobile OS.
Price is a clear advantage for Android phones. Does that make me an Android worshipper now?
IIRC, there was only one prominent case of that happening (slowing down noticeably), I think it was iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 but I might be wrong about that. And I think they fixed it a bunch in 7.1, so it wasn't even for that long.
But ever since then Apple really hasn't pushed updates that slow the phone meaningfully. Instead they gatekeep new features to newer models that can support it, which makes sense.
Hyperbole much? That's a ridiculous claim. I've been sporting a "renewed" Samsung S10E since early 2021. There's still nothing it can't do. Prior to that I owned a Galaxy S7 since 2016! That's a 5 whole years without any phone issues on an Android phone. I turned on the S7 a few months back and after an update, all the apps still work.
not that iphone are any better. you have zero idea what you get on a new ios for old devices since the binaries are not the same. only thing you can be certain is the extra slow down loop
Google moved the web browser component to the Play Store because Android's OS updates are so bad. They had no choice but to do it.
Apple could do it too if they wanted to but they don't need to because they actually provide OS updates for a decent period.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-android-updates-114...
My point was that old Android phones "not working" after a few years is complete bs. The S10E was launched in March 2019 and still going strong.
EDIT: Looks like the S10E is still getting monthly security updates too: https://doc.samsungmobile.com/sm-g970f/xeo/doc.html
Never used it though, my last 3 phones were all from Nokia. It's pretty much the only manufacturer that still releases new stock (Android One) models regularly.
(Excluding too-expensive-for-my-taste Pixels and some Motorolas I could never find in my country).
Hm? Writing this on g30 and Motos aren't popular here for years.
Edit: like I bought the cheapest Samsung last year and the experience is night and day.
Android One = nearly the same stock Android you'd get on a Pixel, no (non-Google) bloatware, no custom UI.
It was never quite popular, but if you scroll through the Wikipedia list of devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One), you'll see it's pretty much only Nokia nowadays.
Some Motorola models as well, but I couldn't find those specific models back when they were still new and I was looking for a phone.
https://www.nokia.com/phones/nokia-g-22/specs
OS updates also very short so this phone is quickly going to end up on LineageOS.
Phones are a tiny amount of waste. Trying to get a few extra years out of one is a microoptimization in reducing one's waste output.
Can you elaborate on that? Seems completely wrong to me.
Not exactly top-tier hardware-wise. But the Librem is running a mainline Linux kernel, so it will have a decade or more of software support and security updates.
Third party repair shops told me it takes $100 to fix the USB C port, almost 1/3 the phone price. Needless to say I didn’t do that and the phone died shortly after only because it couldn’t get charged anymore. Switched to other brands and will never buy Nokia again.
Users can’t do board or component level repairs, and Nokia isn’t making schematics, diagnostic software and access to low level firmware that will be needed to independently repair this phone available.
User replaceable battery is nice, however every other component is reliant on a supply on parts being made available for the long run which is unlikely to happen since there will never be a healthy supply chain for niche devices.
I’ve serviced multiple iPhones replacing a battery and broken screens with no equipment other than what came in the kit (and an hair dryer) and not the Apple one.
Yes it’s a PITA but honestly they open easily with a hair dryer and a suction cup.
What is far more important on the “right to repair” front is long term software support which the lack of bricks far more devices than any hardware failures, a healthy supply chain and not DRMing components.
The former 2 is something that iFixIt always seems to ignore especially the first one the latter is something I that should be the focus of RtR legislation together with a guarantee for parts being made available for a period of X years from when the devices officially stop being sold just in the same way that car manufacturers and in the past appliance manufacturers were forced to.
The problem is with manufacturers. Encrypting parts, so simple part swap does not work. Or replacement screen for $300...
Apple is really really bad when it comes to repairability!
Apple isn’t that bad, and being able to find parts for 10 year old devices and actually having nearly a decade of software support makes up for it.
Ofc it would be better if they didn’t lock down parts further at least the screen and battery aren’t locked down yet.
I replaced a screen on an iPhone XS not even a month ago with a £30 kit from Amazon that came with everything needed including a new liquid protection seal.
Apple should definitely get flack what what they do but this pathetic attempt is just that pathetic this isn’t a way forward in any practical manner.
If you really think you’ll be able to find parts for this phone in 5 years then well I got a bridge to sell you. And not for nothing it will turn into a paper weight after the 3 years of software support period will be over.
And driving up the cost of repairs. If I want to turn off the thing that bricks the identification features, there's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to do that- my device follows my orders, not the other way around.
Yes, but Apple provides low-cost replacement parts. Like the cost of an iphone battery via apple store or apple self-service is objectively reasonable, so yeah, you can't use amazon batteries and who cares?
> If I want to turn off the thing that bricks the identification features, there's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to do that
The reason is because it encourages the resale of stolen goods, which encourages the theft of goods.
"Why shouldn't my dollars do what I tell them to, they're paper in MY wallet" well if what you're telling them to do is buy a hot stereo out of the back of a truck, that's illegal and society is going to discourage that because we don't want our stereo to be stolen next. And stereos are going to be built with things (like serial numbers) that help prevent that. Even if you feel that infringes your privacy (serials are the root of all this tracking after all!) tough shit.
That's always the problem, the people complaining pick out specific elements and whine about that one thing being unfair and ignore that they're specific elements of an overall system that includes elements to compensate the unfair parts.
Yes, iphones will only accept signed parts because that discourages theft, because the phone can't be stripped and sold as parts. And then Apple provides subsidized services (their service division runs at a loss) for people who want repair service, and at-cost OEM parts to anyone who wants to service their own phone. That's also why you have to buy parts individually - because they have to be paired to the phone. Yes, this is inconvenient for third-party service vendors who can't just keep a backroom of parts, but it's not infeasible, they just have to have users order their own parts. This is not John Deere where nobody but techs can even order parts, everyone can, they just don't want to have to.
The big-picture e-waste and service picture of iphones is completely fair overall for consumers. It's less fair for servicemen who have to deal with subsidized services and OEM parts being sold at-cost and losing revenue on selling those parts (rossman is not selling you a screen at-cost), but, that's what auto service centers had to learn to live with when RockAuto showed up in the picture too. And none of that is bad for consumers.
If you're just making a moral stand that you have a god-given right to put a $20 battery in your phone every 6 months instead of a $40 battery every 2 years, and you think that justifies unwinding anti-theft provisions and increasing e-waste to do it... just use the repair/service chains from the vendor like a normal human being, buddy. In the meantime we can all enjoy not having our phones stolen and stripped.
Or maybe a better analogy is removing immobilizers from cars. I have a god-given right to just have a normal metal key without needing to take it into the dealer to get it programmed, right? It's my car, why should I have to pay the manufacturer just to replace a $2 metal key? But in aggregate we're all better off not having well-developed criminal networks built around stealing and stripping cars... so people have just learned that they need to keep at least 2 spare keys at all times to program the immobilizer if they lose one, or else you'll have to take it in to a dealer and have the key programmed. It's just not that big a deal to most people, and actually the opposite is true - not having your car stolen is actually a huge deal to them.
Could you build a car without an immobilizer? Sure. Would it be more expensive to insure? Yes. Does anybody actually want that, apart from a few weirdos? No.
You're dodging the question.
If I buy a replacement Home button, I expect the fingerprint sensor within to work. The fact is, that expectation is objectively right; it neither breaks your arm or picks your pocket.
That's the entire reason why we're getting right to repair laws, for that matter; society agrees with me, and not you (and so you're wrong, by your own rules).
FaceID devices don’t have that problem since the front camera including the FaceID IR camera simply move from the old device to the new one.
It also was technically possible to move the old Touch ID sensor just a tad harder.
Apple doesn’t lock down screens and battery replacements (currently at least) as I’ve done both on 6-7 devices for F&F in the past decade or so.
Apple has by far some of the cheapest 1st party replacement services of the major brands, and also the cheapest OEM parts now Samsung charges far more at least in the UK.
3rd party parts are also much more readily available.
I’ve just recently replaced an XS screen with a £30 kit from Amazon for a Galaxy S10 which came out about the same time IIRC the cheapest replacement screen kit on Amazon is more than £200 and Samsung does no longer offer repair services despite the fact that this device isn’t even 5 years old.
Apple does a lot of shitty stuff and whilst it’s about as far from being a right to repair champion as one can imagine in reality the long term support they offer for their devices and the fact that they release only a limited number of SKUs each year whilst moving extremely large volumes of them makes that in practice their devices are the easiest to repair whether you are using 1st party, 3rd party or doing it yourself.
It pains me that TouchID sensors can't be reused/it's harder, because of the waste, but as a protection measure, I don't see any way around it.
Also the screen can be still easily reused and the rest of the parts can be salvaged for components that end up even in Apples own supply chain I suspect.
If your iPhone is stolen it will be in an electronics chop shop in China within a week.
They wanted a barebones, no effort to catch up to top competitor phone, with more practicality, and everyday convenience in mind than putting in 10ghz CPU inside a phone.
We went for a year, and bang... Google probably seen client's PR, and banned Android phones without a superfluous gycoscope/accelerometer/etc stuff. We spent close to year on it.
I was fuming.
Going without a gyro or accelerometer is fine under normal conditions because you've got 2-of-3 so you can synthesize the output from the remaining sensor (my phone had synthetic gyro). But once you lose GPS fix you've lost your last degree-of-freedom and the only remaining sensor is the accelerometer, at which point the system goes into gimbal lock and the platform loses its fix.
EDIT: 3.5mm headphone jack too! Wow.
The best hope here is that this phone's repairability will attract a software hacking community to provide inofficial updates, but what a terrible thing to have to rely on. Besides: Phones by other brands like Pocophone are plenty repairable, being made for the indian market, and have good community software support.
The real next innovation for an Android device maker will be providing at least 5 years of updates (I'm well aware of the challenges involved, but these are not that hard, make it so).
Saying an iPhone can handle 8 generations of iOS updates is a bigger joke. I’m a cheapskate that somehow uses Apple phones, and I’ll let you know after 2-3 major OS updates the performance is always severely diminished.
My daily driver is a 2018 iPhone XS, and it’s about as snappy with iOS 16 as I remember it being straight out of the box.
My mom had a 3yr old mid-teir Samsung phone and tablet (combo deals they always sell) they both became unusable when it upgraded to the latest version of Samsung basterdized Android 2 months ago. But I'm sure Pixels are more similar to iPhone.
Sadly most Android come with vendor crippled software. Maybe the >2yr crippling is the goal for them.
My anecdote: I'm using an iPhone XS that has seen 4+ years of use across iOS 12-16 (5 major versions) and I haven't noticed any real consistent slowdowns. I've seen the occasional clear bug shipped where performance dips from time to time doing certain specific things, but these seem to be resolved upon the next update or two usually.
I think with newer ones, the OS updates are fine.
I just got a whole new phone out of a failed battery replacement for my iphone 8+ - my guess is the OS installation was just too damaged to accept the battery pairing process and it just flaked out, it was bootlooping and refusing to charge the battery. I got a refurbished 8+ in consideration, and it's actually great despite being a 5.5 year old release at this point. It's not the actual performance level of the phone itself that's the problem, they just tend to become worn out at a hardware level and the phone tends to become unstable. It was showing all kinds of weird software quirks (discord "send" button would fail to appear when posting a meme despite the image being in the send box, and you'd have to tab back and forth to a different server before the "send" button would show up, etc) and all of that vanished as soon as I got a new phone.
While I can't prove it, my opinion is it would have come back over time even if I did a factory reset, perhaps even worse. Because I had the same experience with my previous phone, an Android Moto G first-gen (Falcon), which I owned for just about 5 years exactly (early 2014-early 2019). The phone simply got more and more unstable due to bad flash/RAM and perhaps some glitching caused by the weak battery... first I'd have to factory reset once in a while, then the whole OS would need to be reflashed, finally the installs were being corrupted less than a day after a clean reflash.
The practical lifespan of the DRAM/flash in a phone seems to be about 3-4 years in my experience and by the time things hit 5 years they are so damaged they are unusable even after fresh OS installs/etc. The timeframe is identical for both my Moto G and the 8+, I bet if I'd continued to use the same handset for another year it'd have started corrupting itself even after a factory reset/etc. I don't know why that would be - whether phones are writing certain flash cells too much and they're burning out, or what. Obviously PC SSDs and DRAM can be fine for a decade.
I am very onboard with some degree of refurbishment being a critical element of long-term phone repair after these experiences. They start to go janky at 3 years, by 4 years it is becoming a problem, and by 5 years it is unusable. Even with clean software installs (factory resets or OS image reflashes), it just is not stable. The Moto G I could write off as a fluke, it was a cheap phone to begin with, maybe it was just janky. The 8+ failing in the exact same ways on a very similar timeline (about 6-12 months later due to higher hardware quality) says to me that DRAM or flash is just wearing out over time. If it was just battery performance problems then it wouldn't have failed to re-pair after a fresh battery was installed either.
Again, now that I've got a refurbished 8+ in like new condition, I can tell you it's still perfectly fine as a phone/piece of hardware, it's more than fine enough to run discord and apollo and gmail and banking and all the other things I do day-to-day. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's a particular unit becoming worn and failing.
This also goes to show the importance of long-term software support... I have basically a new handset on 5.5 year old hardware. It will probably be 10 years old before I retire it. iOS is insanely good about that, I am still receiving full software updates at this point, although probably not for that much longer. Show me an Android phone with 6-7 years of feature updates, please. Most androids won't even get security updates for half of that. That is what keeps the e-waste down. I'm sure my handset will be diagnosed and refurbished and sent out to someone else for replacement too, or sent to APMA region for those customers, the circle of life.
I paid $725 fo...
We should have several decades of support for all cheap electronics at least…
Our stuff turns to trash because everything is built on shifting sand with no thoughts given to supporting it long term and for some reason we like it this way.
Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
But new shiny thing! Alright, that’s great. Is it so much better that you want everyone in the world to throw away their old devices? Probably eventually but you’re daft if you think those kinds of events should be every few years. God can you imagine if we did that to cars? Sorry, Honda dropped support for your Civic, you can keep using it for a bit but in a year we’re gonna change the roads and it will be undrivable.
No. We want modern APIs that prioritize modern concerns, usable with modern toolkits and frameworks and taking advantage of modern programming principles. Even if we had an API intended for longevity, once its creators die we will tear it down completely and replace it with something that suits our newer-therefore-better tastes. For them it was the cornerstone of an industry's worth of innovations; for us it is but a millstone around our necks and must be replaced. I know this because I've seen it happen many times. Once the people who've staked their entire careers building upon $THING, and developed some truly remarkable software, grow old, up rises the chorus of people who are sick of $THING, who can't even fathom how anyone got anything done with $THING, who give talks at conferences about how $THING is fundamentally broken and how we should be using $NEWTHING instead. And these voices grow louder, their chants more thunderous, until it's generally accepted that $THING is a relic and $NEWTHING is the future. Even the things we thought would last forever -- POSIX, C, X11 -- are now, if anything, well past their expiration date.
This is how things are. This is how they must be. There is naught we can do but be like a Japanese person observing the seasons, contemplating, with some sadness, the constant change and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
There's such a thing as lasting too long without deprecating old cruft.
POSIX isn't too bad, but is still kind of a mess. C has a lot of broken features. X11 doesn't fit how hardware works these days and trying to force it with extensions isn't a good fix.
There are real problems with faddishness on the scale of 5-10 years, but there are also real improvements that happen across decades, and if 40 year old tools don't get updated then they should be replaced.
Most Wayland compositors pretty much assume you have a GPU. Weston can be gotten to work -- slowly -- without one.
Many of the required updates to a device are security related, perhaps they could write said software better so that there are never bugs...but software is complicated now; millions & millions of lines or code and dozens and dozens of different chips. It's better to make phones much more recyclable than it is to make them last longer.
But here’s the thing, the complexity isn’t even relevant, the thing that would make phones last for ages is just committing to some basic set of hardware interfaces. You can pull an ancient desktop out of your basement and run the latest Linux on it and you ought to be able to do that with phones too.
pixels starting with pixel 6 have 5 years of updates.
Apple’s update policy (and history) is one of the two reasons I own an iPhone (SE). The other reason being all the unremovable junkware I’ve had on Android phones in the past.
Next time I need to upgrade (hopefully 6+ years in the future), I will take another look at OnePlus.
It may be safer to have another phone without security updates.
Even this nokia phone has a 3.5mm port, why doesn't Google support it anymore?
> why doesn't Google support it anymore?
maybe preserve space for something else inside.
Can I still charge my phone at the same time?
Can I also get it with a larger battery?
Should I just hot glue a connector, a powerpack, and a case to my phone to get an actual usable device out of it?
Looks like you are 0.001% minority, who doesn't pay enough money to draw interest from large manufacturers.
It's only a few top of the line models which doesn't have these features. Devices which are more of a fashion statement than a device.
Just,none of the recent flagships. Flagships used to have the most features, not the least.
The headphone jack is not just for music, it's a versatile industry-standard connector. Being able to swap the same devices between a phone, zoom audio recorders, the monitoring out of my Ninja V, or audio interfaces when editing is a valuable advantage of a standard connector.
And the entire rest of the industry continues using 3.5mm, 6.3mm and XLR. It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
I feel your pain, and I just buy bunch of them so I always have some.
> It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
companies have marketing department, who probably found that customers more interested in slick design and Ok to use usb-c buds or bluetooth headphones. LG used to produce phones with 3.5 and audiophile signal quality, now they are out of business.
Sadly many don't support all the features of a headphone port, meaning TRRS with control, allowing you to use an external microphone and play/pause/skip buttons as well.
I'm using some tech that actually makes use of that, specifically as timecode reader for AV stuff.
I need my phone to be a modern version of star trek's tricorder, not a piece of jewelry.
Nice. Didn't know this. Got a 7 pro shortly after it came out; spectrum had a $400 discount on them.
I'm curious how much work honestly goes into these updates, though. How many patches do they maintain on top of Android that security updates would cause them to need to fix their patches again? Or how many parts of Android are even changed by those updates in a given month? I don't really have any idea of either proportion. How much money would it require us to pool to get one month longer security updates? One year?
May be something to ask Fairphone, they seem like the type of business that might be willing to share this for the purpose of pressuring the market to offer the support after a successful crowdfunding campaign.
This really should be from date-of-purchase and not date-of-launch as well. Otherwise you're leaving refurbished phones out in the cold too. We should be encouraging refurbishment and not giving those users a worse experience - if anything the law should attempt to favor them, they're doing the thing we want.
Requiring bootloader unlock when support ceases is another fantastic idea someone pointed out - and that one will hit Apple too honestly. But if you're not going to support the thing then at least let someone else do it.
"EU wants to enforce 5 years of security and 3 years of OS updates for all phones"
https://www.androidauthority.com/eu-smartphone-updates-rules...
I don't mind "bundling" service into the initial purchase if that guarantees it'll be there and I also get a premium phone with walk-in service with first-party repair staff and parts (not at+t store or w/e either) etc. I've shifted to (lower-end/refurb) apple devices for a few things and I know the TCO involved and I find it favorable overall given the expected longevity and service levels and device quality.
But there needs to be more than one "gets 5+ years of solid support" option on the market so that shitty point A doesn't lead to a lock-in on shitty point B. At the end of the day competition is what keeps the ecosystems relatively honest and having options if Apple does a dick move is always welcome too.
No other desktop OS works like that. Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices. Admittedly - after much, much more time than phone OSes, though.
> You're telling me these trillion dollar corporations can't match the quality of service of Linux distribution maintainers?
I mean, "quality" means different things. There's a reason the "year of the linux desktop" still hasn't arrived.
But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
Yeah, and they suck too because of it.
Truth is there should be no need for them to "support" anything. All they have to do was get their device driver code into the Linux kernel where it belongs. Then everything would work out of the box and the Linux community would support their device for them. If things change, the community will fix their driver for them. If no one does, it's because nobody's using it.
But no, they just need to keep making shitty proprietary software instead. As a result I get insanity like "manufacturer applications" that only work in a single version of Windows to control stuff like laptop fans, power profiles and keyboard LEDs. Software so shoddy it takes over a minute to display a window on the screen. I had to reverse engineer that crap and write a Linux version to make my system usable again. I went as far as my skills allowed me to go and the result was free software that will work forever. That's what quality means to me.
> "quality" means different things.
"Quality" here means shipping software continuously to a diverse set of users and having things not break down just because they'd really enjoy it if we bought their latest flagship phone. I get that on my Linux laptop, why not on a phone?
> But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
Yes, and these corporations should be profoundly ashamed of themselves that they can't match what a bunch of "volunteers" provide even though they're worth billions.
Some professionals. It certainly seems to be the rule rather than the exception with these corporations. The copyright industry literally can't match the quality of the output of a bunch of "pirates" either: while they're streaming to their paying customers some shitty compressed video with artifacts in 95% black frames, "pirates" get blu-ray remuxes in convenient DRM-free formats.
10x more. Windows 10 runs on computers that are 20 years old.
You have to remember billions of people don't live in the west, they live in india or africa where they use equipment much longer.
10 - 20 years is a real lifespan for cars and appliances, it is also realistic for electronics (leaving batteries aside).
The pace of improvement for computer hardware is slowing, so this issue will become more relevant
1. The last Apple phone that lost OS suppose was the iPhone 6. Apple supported that phone for 7 years.
2. I'm skeptical that Windows 10 would run on many Pentium IV computers. Windows 8 only came out 11 years ago. And I remember a whole lot of computers out there that couldn't run that at the time.
I feel a bit vidicated by that video. In the beginning, he basically says that he needed to run the rare last variant of the Pentium IV to get it to work and that most Pentium IVs would be impossible to get it to work.
Pretty impressive that it's possible at all, though.
Should the cellular carriers have never moved past 2G?
Do you? Or do you just say/write/comment that you expect that? Actual expecting would be refusing to buy a phone that didn't provide said updates. Otherwise it's just an HN comment, with no (real, physical, 'economic') role to play, certainly not that of an expectation.
Truth is Android's situation used to be tolerable for me because I would always trash the official OS and run something like LineageOS instead. Unfortunately, that will become impossible due to hardware remote attestation. Therefore, I no longer care about Android phones unless they run postmarketOS.
Previous versions of the Fairphone also weren't available in the US due to as I understand it hurdles posed by FCC approval (and I would assume the Canadian equivalent).
On parent’s point, the Nokia g22 is 180 euros, the iPhone 11 at same capacity was 700 euros at launch. You can’t expect Nokia to contractually promise 8 years of OS updates at that price point.
To note, iPhone also don’t have 5+years of OS support promises, we’re just looking at the trend and assume that it will continue. I’d also expect this Nokia to have a bit more than 3 years of support time, we just don’t know how much.
This is not a high standard in the year 2023.
My Samsung S10 5G is turning 4 in a few months, still receiving regular security updates.
android doesn't require google services to work
The goal behind efforts like the Librem 5 or PinePhone is not to create yet another Android phone, which Open Source or not will strengthen the Duopoly of Google and Apple in the Mobile Phone Operating System market. The goal is to create hardware that can jump-start the development of a true GNU/Linux Mobile Operating System.
With its real world use case, it has brought great advances to Mobile "Desktop" Environments like Plasma Mobile or Phosh by motivating developers who could finally use their creations and improvements on a real phone.
Desktop OS allows to use desktop apps on the phone and enjoy convergence: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
Android still runs the Linux kernel and the only reason you can't have shell access on it is user-hostile restrictions, which an open-source build wouldn't have.
I think it would be a lot easier to add desktop apps capability to Android for the minority that actually wants to run Linux apps on their phone than building a touch-optimized userspace from scratch.
If your desire is to run Linux desktop apps on Android I bet you can already do it if you find an X Server APK and got your Linux app to use it as your X display - that would've been a quick, pragmatic solution to satisfy the "Linux desktop" requirement while taking advantage of Android's mature & battle-tested touch-optimised userspace.
I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free. They'd save an insane amount of time and actually deliver a product competitive with mainstream phones right now, which would give them funding & marketshare to continue refining it down the line (potentially replacing it with non-Android components one at a time).
> There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size
And the input method, which is a massive difference - touch and mouse are completely different, and so are the contexts in which phone vs desktop apps are used. If you try to merge the two, you'd look like the idiots who gave us Windows 8. So there's still effort in making specific UIs for different mediums.
> I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop
I'm not sure there's an actual need for it? This has even been tried by large companies such as Samsung and Microsoft and didn't go anywhere - in practice this isn't a problem the vast majority of people has and seems like an absurd thing to start with for a resource-constrained company in a very competitive market.
This is not true. They are stuck with hardware-specific things like power management, camera, and LTE calls. "Calls" application itself was developed very quickly, for example.
I don't think using permissively-licensed Android components wouldn't compromise user freedom and would actually increase it because it would put a non-user-hostile, freedom-respecting, usable phone in the market right now. You can just patch out or choose to not include the user-hostile bits (though most of those wouldn't be part of the open-source release in the first place).
Of course, this only applies if the objective is to deliver a usable, competitive product rather than practice effectively useless ideological bikeshedding similar to the war on systemd and refuse the admit that the typical GNU/Linux userspace is at this point prehistoric and significantly lacking compared to other alternatives (whether proprietary or open-source such as Android).
You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power. This is an important design feature. This is why smartphones OS are built differently.
And even then, I don't see how android "restricts" things. It's software. Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
You imply that having large power consumption is fine as long as the app is designed for desktop. I disagree: All apps should be as lightweight as possible to fight with the climate change and slow UI. I am using desktop Firefox on my Librem 5 just fine. All desktop plugins work, too.
> Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
What exactly do you mean by "desktop apps"? Of course it's not going to support KDE or GTK or QT or win32 or some other windowing API. But it's an OS, it can run software. And since it's open source, I don't see any reason why it would not run something.
Of course you would need to use the android API to do something, but it makes sense because it's a different OS.
It doesn't behave like a desktop OS, but as opposed to what, exactly? Desktop apps are a subset of software in general, desktop apps are not everything there is about software.
If you mean "I cannot run desktop apps because I need to redesign them so they can work on a phone", then yes, indeed, but a phone is not just "a small desktop".
Why not? It's a general-purpose computer, isn't it? Why intentionally design an OS in such a way that you must rewrite all software for it from scratch?
Yes, the UI is very different, but changing the UI is much easier than rewriting the program from scratch. Why is there no full Firefox on Android? It was already adapted for GNU/Linux phones and runs fine there, but not on Android. Same for LibreOffice AFAIK. Isn't it due to the design on this OS?
> Why not?
As I said, much less energy thus less processor cycles, much less L2 cache memory, no x86. The main reason it's entirely different is to force developers to make an app that doesn't drain battery, which is why it's very much different: it can do a single thing at a time, the software must be pause-able at any time, it can only run when the OS is okay with it, it can only animate in certain way, only use a very small subset of opengl capabilities, etc
The ways smartphones' OS work is a fundamental part of how it can save battery. It is painful for developers so that in the end, batteries last longer. Desktop software is millions years away from being energy-efficient, most of desktop or server software is generally ruled by the law of Wirth: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Of course it's a big constraint of how developers can make their software work, but they don't need to rewrite "everything", they just have to adapt.
Why is GNU important? toybox's coreutils is a good enough replacement. If you really wanted you could install GNU's core utils. 99% of users don't want to be messing with command line tools anyways.
Android already brought Linux as a mobile operating system to the mainstream.
The boot loader will probably be unlocked sooner or later. It should be open, but I think it's reasonable to expect either update support or unlocked booting, not necessarily both.
In a gook device, that is. You have to remember that most consumers do not want to know how their phone works or to become expert in its configuration. They just want it to work.
A compromise here would be to have an option to unlock everything, but with the understanding that by doing so you opt out of warranty service.
Is your iPhone's boot loader unlocked?
Reducing cost and making it more repairable is a step in the right direction, but there is no reason why shouldn't get 5-6+ years of life out of a mobile phone.
Probably not, for that you need Nokia 1100 made in Bochum.
It's on the level of a 2017 Google Pixel 2. I mean not bad but it' also £150/200€. For that much I'd rather get a used iPhone 11.
Seemingly battery replacement can still be done "in 5 minutes" but this still makes pop-out/on the road battery swapping unpractical. https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/nokia-g22
The way you could buy cases that replaced the back cover meant for a much thinner profile phone than the typical metal case wrapped in silicone.
Replaceable batteries are glorious. I never plugged-in my phone, just flipped the battery with one from the charger when I left the house. Instant 100% battery. Travelling? Just take a few charged batteries at a fraction of the weight of a power-bank and much more convenient.
The back cover coming off accidentally has never happened to me.
Ah, the memories of classmates playing soccer with phones in high school... phones could run MSN, browse websites (without JS! The .mobi site owners were just forced to make sites lightweight), play Java-based games, had replaceable screen covers, honestly what more should we want? That it's now open source Android instead of proprietary Symbian is great, but slap a touchscreen on it for web browsing and upgrade it from GPRS to 4G or so, and theoretically we could just have nice things.
How often do you need to replace your battery? Maybe twice in 4 years? What percentage of people keep a phone for more than 4 years? 5%?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hIoyb9L5g0
...but then stopped making removable batteries after that.
Cant stop laughing thinking about it, luxurious homes with all the trimmings then have the whole family gather around the extension cord. Like on a construction site. Imagine guns worked like this. We can glue in the cartridge and you'd be able to shoot people for many years? 6 shots should be enough for 3 years when the software expires.
So it has fallen out of style. There is no market for spare batteries and using them as range extenders is not common use. It seems like an outlandish thing to do now.
I think I went through three batteries on my Galaxy Note 2 (first Android phone) before upgrading. Apps dropping support became a problem... nothing wrong with the hardware at the time where I felt forced to trash it. Anyway, carrying an extra battery for long travel days was not a weird thing to do. I also remember non-tech people having spare batteries for Nokias (when they became more capable; not when the only use was calling your mom to say you were going to a friend's after school).
I and tens of millions other people used removable back cover phones for years before the sealed phone became the norm.
Edit: Can anyone explain why they think that this is wrong? I am genuinely interested.
I really used user-removable battery phones for close to a decade. I found no issues.
I suspect it is this: > Only forced obsoleting by the company. No other reasons exist.
While companies do want you to buy the newest version every year or two, it is more likely that cost-benefit analysis tells them to build the way they build; they know they must release newer better phones periodically because the competition will do this also. But to support older phones has a cost, and at some point those old phones don't generate enough revenue to justify the cost of supporting them.
And then you can’t think of reasons for the downvotes?
I see a pattern, maybe?
But then thickness and aesthetic "cheapness" is a secondary one.
A removeable cover and battery is always going to introduce a little bit of thickness, which on a thin phone is noticeable even if not major.
And then whether you have screws or the ridges for removing the cover, it just always feels a little "cheap". You can't get the same kind of rounded smooth glass or aluminum backing that wraps seamlessly around the edges.
And when people are comparing two phones in their hands, the one that feels more "premium" is often the one they'll go with if they feel they're already paying a premium price. This is an object they hold in their hand all day long. And if you live in a major city, it's really not a big deal to get your battery replaced after 2 years at an Apple Store.
Samsung Galaxy S5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1MDGQzNMYI
It's a thin, twisty rubber gasket held in place by a flimsy plastic back.
And in my experience with anything involving thin rubber gaskets, they degrade and just flat-out break incredibly easily.
E.g. with wristwatches, it's common knowledge that as soon as you replace the battery in a water-resistant watch, you shouldn't consider it water-resistant anymore. You might get lucky once or twice in recreating the same seal it had at the factory, but you should probably assume you didn't.
https://3dnews.ru/assets/external/illustrations/2014/03/25/8...
https://mobi-center.com.ua/image/cache/data/Jiayu-G5S-MTK659...
That phone was waterproof but had a special ridge around the back panel.
Spare batteries can only be used with the phone, whereas power banks are standard and usable with many other devices if needed.
Also, small phone batteries usually don't come with a carrying case. They're fragile and you could accidentally short them.
Not exactly the same thing, but I have a Garmin heartrate chest strap with a replaceable battery (no charging) -- in the US the cover swivels open to change, but in Australia it requries a screw, for child safety rules. I Thought that was interesting
I'm not sure if any countries have similar regulations related to larger Li-ion rechargeable batteries.
https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2022C00445
This is one of the delights of the Moto z series phones because they have magnetic batteries that can be swapped on and off with your bare hands without even having to open up a battery cover or power off the phone.
Let's bring back the glory days of Nokia phones that stand the test of time.
- nearly indestructible
- well priced
- back pops out
Nokia is doing the most sensible thing to reuse these as its differentiator.
I understand people taking about the OS. But Nokia has little control over the software and it has also never been its selling point for me with Symbian, and later Windows Phone.
I sure miss their wonky phones with weirdly arranged buttons and their random quirks.
Or have they always just done design - like Apple - and someone else manufactured them?
Now HMD make them, I think.
By the way: In 3 days iPhone battery replacement price will go up by $20, not such a good deal anymore. I can buy a budget phone at this price point.