Guys, work on improving Linux phone instead. Google is taking Android away from you and it just isn’t worth arguing with them about it. Let them hang themselves. Build a better alternative.
Platform is not the issue, apps are. Even on a Linux phone you will have to run android apps and you will have to install them from somewhere. And for most apps Play Store is the only place where apps are uploaded.
Fund Waydroid!
https://docs.waydro.id/usage/install-and-run-android-applications
You may want to install F-Droid to get applications graphically. Or use the Play Store if you installed a GAPPS image.
Still depends on Play Store.
Nobody needs apps. We had a world without them before. We can do it again.
Nobody needs mobile phones, we had a world without them, we can do it again…
Ok, you go and tell all the companies to stop using apps.
My car charger? Controlled with an app.
Location of car chargers? In an app.
My bike GPS? Controlled with an app.
My gym entry? An app.
Climbing wall? An app.
You tell all those companies to stop using apps and add control panels to everything, go back to paper maps and RFID entry cards. I’m sure they will do it if you explain to them that there are dozens of users that don’t want to register with Google. Dozens!
it sounds like you chose to patronize places that force you to use an app – there are alternatives that don’t require apps.
they’re sometimes inconvenient AF, but convenience is literally the reason why we’re brining climate change down upon us and how the epstein class has so much control over us.
I guess you’re right. I will buy a gasoline car so I don’t have to use apps to charge it and I will drive to a gym in a different town couple times a week so I don’t have to use an app to enter it. This will sure help climate change.
Are you suggesting there are no charging stations out there that can be used without an app? I have been driving electric for 13 years and know you are absolutely full of shit. Sit down.
Have you been driving electric in Spain? Or do you think EV infrastructure is the same in the whole world? Ignorant clown.
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I don’t need to. I just use something else. This sounds like a you problem.
Most of us don’t need apps, but they’re extremely convenient.
The point is separating convenience from profit-obsessed CEOs and surveillance-crazy governments.
PWA. Done
You wish it’d be that easy. Building a phone isn’t the difficult part; building an ecosystem around is a huge task.
Where I live, you are almost forced to own either an Android or an iPhone, otherwise it’s tough luck getting banking, secure net identification, way to interact with the government agencies, bus or train tickets, etc.
That’s not a tech problem, that’s a regulation problem. If I am required to have something to use a service, private or public provided, that service needs to provide what I need to use it. I’m not buying my bank an interface to me. I’m not buying my employer a way to log in. I’m not paying for someone else’s problems.
Agreed — but from the point of view of a private person, it doesn’t much matter what epithet you need to prefix the word “problem”, it still remains a problem.
From the point of view of a potential phone manufacturer, it also means that whatever you do and no matter how great your product is, very, very few people are ever going to use it at all unless they can use it in whatever they need to do; and that means you will probably fail as a manufacturer.
The endless challenge is that a phone needs to talk to the phone network. The radio manufacturers are deeply in bed with the surveillance state and they are absolutely opposed to free communication. Which means they will never allow a cell phone radio to work with free software.
Calling is something that works in e.g. Postmarket OS. The trickier parts are NFC payments, lack of apps. So it comes with huge drawbacks. Some apps can even require that your device is verified by google and you have no way of hijacking it.
Proprietary camera software is also a huge thing. Software can do so much thing and you pay for the software also, not just the hardware but you lose the software when you install something other than the factory default.
And battery optimization is very young in desktop grade linux OSes, you won’t get that good battery life as with android.
NFC and battery life are absolutely huge concerns. Cell tower stuff isn’t great either but if you absolutely had to many of us can live without cellular and just do VOIP.
Apps aren’t that big an issue, waydroid is a thing and the appification of the internet is detrimental anyway. Do it in a browser.
For myself I don’t consider NFC payments or the few apps that require device integrity auth. Not everyone falls into this category but a good percentage are. We need more modern open hardware. To the larger software point there is a lot of good Foss software out there even for phones. What we need is a open software center like a flathub that makes them easy to find and deploy.
That part works fine
Including voicemail, and RCS? Wow I need to check out this ecosystem again, thats exciting!
If we can get enough people to use Linux phones though, they’ll be pressured to allow them. However, most people won’t use Linux phones as their daily driver because of that. So it’s unfortunately a circle…
The problem is that most people are passive consumers now, but it’s slowly changing. Many of my friends who used to be regular normies having absolutely zero interest in technologies have recently switched to linux or FOSS apps and are now thamsalves FOSS enthusiasts. Heck, even my 80 year old grandma uses DeltaChat now.
AI chatbots eliminate 78% of the pain in the ass associated with getting a distro working in the real world. I’m off of win11 and on Mint. It wasn’t plug and play and permissions and ownership pisses me off to no end, but it’s working, Bottles is working, it looks great, and isn’t spying on me or constantly trying to sell me shit. My SO just last night said something shitty about how nobody uses Linux and I’m not special. My response was to say that pretty much every computer that isn’t a personal computer uses linux, and Microsoft has gone to absurdity in terms of restriction, spyware, and ads.
Congrats on beginning your Linux journey!
I dont even need a phone that can make calls anymore, i guess there’s a lot of sms TFA
chucked postmarket os on an old shitbox tablet and its great 👍🏻
looking forward to a spyware free future.
Which tablet is it? I’m considering buying something used and cheap to test pm os out.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_A_8.0_2015_(samsung-gt58)
i pulled it out of the ewaste bin ♻
Oh it’s from 2015. How’s your experience with it? Is it powerful enough to watch youtube for example?
im not exaggerating when i call it a shitbox.
could watch youtube in firefox or one of the app’s but would not recommend.
using it mostly to fuck around with postmarket (break, fix, rinse, repeat), test out DE’s (posh is by far the most usable, plasma mobile is rad but glitches out), KOreader makes a fantastic little e-reader, firefox is laggy and glitchy, forget the name of the rss reader i had before i just nuked it but device is good for that.
Oh okay, gotta something a little bit newer then 😅
Didn’t know about KOreader, thanks!
I’ve said this before, there should be a way to make VPN-Style VM that on the spot/on the fly emulates Android and is tricked into thinking your phone is a certain model gives it all bullshit details or is fuckin’ stupid enough you pay 1$ a year for a service plan that has a bunch of burner androids and you connect to one and your graphene is temporarily using an emulator that is also live connected to the device (like live booting from USB) to use said device’s verified details to trick the android servers into giving you permission to use the apps through graphene on the emulator.
Idk but at that point you’re better off having a burner android to reverse engineer the apps you want for graphene.
You could spin up an android VM on your home server and sort of pocket-Citrix that.
Disregarding the fact that Android phones are Linux phones, a so-called Linux phone will have exactly the same problems as a degoogled AOSP phone will, plus a bunch more
If you depend on proprietary google-dependent android apps then switching to a so-called Linux phone won’t help you because you will still need those apps, and if you’re willing to forego those apps and become “FOSSed up” then there is a vibrant free software ecosystem for AOSP-type operating systems.
Android forked a lot of code off Linux back in the day, but it’s very much its own thing. It was developed under totally different design pressures with different goals and solved problems a different way.
Android is NOT Linux. It could be argued it’s a descendant of Linux though.
Android is NOT Linux.
It very much is, by the most basic technical definition of being an operating system based on the operating system kernel called Linux. I am sorry if this upsets Linux fans but this fact is easily verifiable.
Note that when I say Linux I mean only the kernel, i.e. the thing actually called Linux, and not any of the assortment of operating systems built around it (this includes Android) or any Linux-adjacent projects like GNU, systemd, GNOME, wayland, etc. Any operating system that includes those is a Linux operating system if it’s built on the kernel called Linux, but only the kernel is a prerequisite for being “Linux.”
Regardless it’s not an answer to the problem posed by the OP, which is that “Play Store blocks Aurora Store.” Anyone using Aurora Store is doing so because they require an app from Google Play Store. Whether they are using a “Linux phone” or not is irrelevant at this point because if they are, they are probably using an Android environment to run proprietary Android apps that come from Google Play Store and require Google Play Services.
This is why I say “Linux phones” are for the most part a red herring in the mobile software freedom discussion. A “Linux phone with Waydroid” is just an Android phone with extra steps. It’s not like Wine/Proton which isn’t Windows but an entirely independent implementation of Windows API. It’s literally just running Android in a container. They would be nice to have at the final step of the freedom ladder after you’ve already removed yourself from the google ecosystem, but they are not the first step on the ladder.
no, the andorid kernel is no more a linux kernel than a linux kernel is a unix kernel. thats like saying macos is BSD.
Classic Graphene users, making this all about themselves. This hurts Aurora users, period.
Ironically, this hurts Graphene users the less because they can sandbox their google play services.
Classic Graphene users, making this all about themselves. This hurts Aurora users, period.
Edit: I ran into the same issue. For now, refreshing the anonymous Aurora account solved it.
- GrapheneOS isn’t John Android. Stop black and white thinking. You don’t have to fit in with people when you post to .ml.
- If you have read the thread you are posting (relevant message 18 hours ago as opposed to this post 13 hours ago), you would have seen that you can just press “reload accounts” to fix it.
people treating graphene like the only android OS drives me up the fucking wall, i’m sure it’s great but holy SHIT lineage has existed for years and years but… now it’s suddenly irrelevant?
Leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Lineage and GrapheneOS are not even in similar levels here. Yes, LineageOS (or any of its commercial forks) is great I’d you have anything other than a Pixel phone. Definitely beats having any stock Android. But having the choice and telling people that “GrapheneOS is not the only option” without context is intentionally guiding people that could potentially have a much more secure and way more private mobile experience look somewhere else just “because”.
I don’t pretend to know what tour reasons are, could be because of Micay, could be because the GOS team of developers has no filter, I don’t know. But even Louis Rossmann, who openly chose to get away from GOS because of Micay’s actions has said, time and again, that nothing even comes close.
Just wait til the next time you’re arrested and the cops easily get into your phone.
yeah, regular AOSP-likes that need you to manually flash them after support for your device is finally added are not particularly relevant compared to a security-focused fork that’s supported by several flagship phones at release. the latter can actually make it into the hands of the average person. the former, not so much. imagine trying to explain to your elderly mother how to flash lineage onto her phone.
Which flagship phones support graphene OOTB with no bootloader unlocking? I certainly haven’t seen any
GrapheneOS and Motorola are currently working on making their next flagships launch with GOS out of the box.
Keyword: currently working on
Downgraded to Aurora Store 4.8.3 and now working well for the moment.
Well, it took Google long enough to take away this workaround, if you think about it. I wish Alphabet burned in hell, let it be clear.
GrapheneOS user here. It seems to work right now.
Graphene also doesn’t really need Aurora, it’s fine.
It’s working fine for me while logged in. It’s always been crap when logged out. This is nothing new.
Isn’t the whole point of it to get apps without login/anonymously?
Install it so I don’t have to have Google Play. Yes, Google can see what apps I have installed, but they don’t have their code running on my device. I consider it a 99% harm reduction.
I hadn’t considered that. I might have to do that myself now that you mention it
for some people maybe, but if that was the whole point of the project then why would they even have the option to log in?
just tested it, at first i got rate limited(?) “server busy” but a minute later the updates went through fine
I’m having trouble installing most apps from Aurora since last Sunday.
Seems to be working for me (in the EU).
Seems to be working again, but the last couple of days there was no good solution.
Aurora still works for me for now on Samsung stock OS. I now mostly install Google Play apps with APKPure over Obtainium tho and only use Aurora for those not on APKPure. And most of my apps are from GitHub/GitLab releases and F-Droid. I disabled Google Play and didn’t login to Google account. I don’t want the requirement of a Google account to install an app and Play Integrity to run an app. It is by no means acceptable that a company, using a closed source implementation that also tracks user and breaks Android security model, can censor what apps a user can install and decide what security and privacy compromises a user needs to agree to just use the normal phone functionalities that they pay for and by no mean require those compromises technically. They are turning Android into a service and a prison like iOS did rather than a software.
This is exactly why all those ‘Custom ROMs are not the solution!!!’ believers are right.
Working fine for me
Successfully updated an app just now.
Time to install it. They wouldn’t block it if it sucked right?
It’s still running with me.
