The community around Linux phones is interesting. The phones do sell to a lot of people, but it seems a lot of those people come back to complain that Linux phones isn't what they expected it is. For some reason all the distributions for the PinePhone are bending over backwards
I think Linux phones have huge potential going forward. Personally, I’ve noticed that my usage patterns haven’t really changed in at least a decade. I use a fairly small number of apps like calendar, email, chat, media player, etc. The way these apps work hasn’t really changed, and if I could get those working well on a Linux phone then I really wouldn’t miss Android one bit.
As a side note, it’s really depressing to see how hardware keeps getting faster, but software bloat negates all the gains. If we could have an ecosystem of open source apps that are optimized for performance, then we could have phones that last for many years without having to keep replacing them. Imagine if with every update your software kept getting faster instead of slower.
Yeah same, I don’t use my phone for too much, I think with a little more progress I could potentially move over to it for the most part. I do hope android compatibility can be improved though, it would be the biggest barrier of entry down the line. Also I definitely agree with you on updates, it’s frustrating that technology keeps improving and getting more efficient and the most of the popular proprietary software doesn’t really evolve and gets less efficient.
What’s that looking like? I’m aware of Anbox but IIRC that runs a full Android runtime and I’ve seen mixed reports of it working.
Personally I’ve been kicking around the idea of an API compatibility layer for Android, so an Android app could be built as a standard Java jar and run on top of OpenJDK. I’m not concerned with binary APK compatibility, but there are many apps on F-Droid that I would like to run on non-Android Linux, perhaps without the baggage of something like Anbox. I don’t know what it would entail, if there is any interest, or if it’s even possible though.
Yeah, I think all the efforts right now emulate the runtime. Shashlik is another one I’ve seen. I agree something more like WINE would be better. The main work is in creating an API compatibility layer the apps could use.
I think Linux phones have huge potential going forward. Personally, I’ve noticed that my usage patterns haven’t really changed in at least a decade. I use a fairly small number of apps like calendar, email, chat, media player, etc. The way these apps work hasn’t really changed, and if I could get those working well on a Linux phone then I really wouldn’t miss Android one bit.
As a side note, it’s really depressing to see how hardware keeps getting faster, but software bloat negates all the gains. If we could have an ecosystem of open source apps that are optimized for performance, then we could have phones that last for many years without having to keep replacing them. Imagine if with every update your software kept getting faster instead of slower.
Yeah same, I don’t use my phone for too much, I think with a little more progress I could potentially move over to it for the most part. I do hope android compatibility can be improved though, it would be the biggest barrier of entry down the line. Also I definitely agree with you on updates, it’s frustrating that technology keeps improving and getting more efficient and the most of the popular proprietary software doesn’t really evolve and gets less efficient.
Yeah, having a decent Android compatibility layer would be amazing. Seems like there’s some promising work being done on that front already.
What’s that looking like? I’m aware of Anbox but IIRC that runs a full Android runtime and I’ve seen mixed reports of it working.
Personally I’ve been kicking around the idea of an API compatibility layer for Android, so an Android app could be built as a standard Java jar and run on top of OpenJDK. I’m not concerned with binary APK compatibility, but there are many apps on F-Droid that I would like to run on non-Android Linux, perhaps without the baggage of something like Anbox. I don’t know what it would entail, if there is any interest, or if it’s even possible though.
Yeah, I think all the efforts right now emulate the runtime. Shashlik is another one I’ve seen. I agree something more like WINE would be better. The main work is in creating an API compatibility layer the apps could use.
A change would be nice