Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.
Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. There is also a filter tool to easily specify your criteria of what must function to obtain a custom shortlist:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Special:Drilldown/Devices?DeviceType=handset
Then phones on the shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list, which seems to be exclusively Sony¹.
So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.
(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices
(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)
(update 2) Calyx OS has an interesting list some of which overlaps with pmOS
Calyx OS list
Device /Latest CalyxOS version /Release date
Pixel 8a /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 8 Pro /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 8 /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel Fold /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel Tablet /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 7a /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 7 Pro /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 7 /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 6a /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 6 Pro /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 6 /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 5a (5G) /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4a (5G) /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 5 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4a /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4 XL /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3a XL /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3a /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3 XL /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Fairphone 4 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Fairphone 5 /5.12.1-4 /2024-10-11
SHIFT6mq /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Moto G32 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Moto G42 /5.12.1-4 /2024-10-11
Moto G52 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market. Worth noting that these phones are supported by both pmOS and Calyx OS:
- Fairphone 4
- Google Pixel 3a
- SHIFT SHIFT6mq
¹ Caution about Sony: they are an ALEC member who supports hard-right politics. They were also caught using GNU software in their DRM shit which violated FOSS licensing in a component designed to oppress. Obviously buying a new Sony thing is unethical. But perhaps a 2nd-hand one is fine. It’s still dicey though because the 2nd-hand market still feeds the 1st-hand market and rewards the original consumer. Sometimes it’s clear you’re not buying from an original owner, like someone on the street with a box of 100+ phones.
(update) It would help if we could filter out all the phones with non-removable batteries. I can confirm that these have non-removeable batteries:
- BQ Aquarius X5
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The real answer is giving up on the concept of phones sadly. Laptop for life is much more realistic.
I’m with you there. I have defunded phones for sure and minimized the role of phones. I don’t even use smartphones as phones (no SIM chip). I think the only absolutely essential use case for me is to run OSMand (navigation) because it’s far too impractical to get a paper map for every city I set foot in.
OSMand is a resource hog. Crashes chronically when overworked. So maintaining OSMand seems to require keeping pace to some extent. Certainly the FOSS platforms will at least enable a phone to stay in play as long as possible – or so I hope.
You could try Organic Maps as an alternative to OsmAnd though it’s not so great either.
The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing, because of the mutually recursive escalation of web sites’ and browsers’ appetites for machine resources. A 2005 laptop that tops out at 512mb of ram simply can’t run browsers needed to use the modern web. I’m still using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011 with 4gb of ram, but I have older ones that are no longer viable because of memory and CPU limitations.
Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up, and the reasons for that are somewhat more valid than web bloat. The new codecs really do have better video quality at a given bit rate, in exchange for the increased cpu cycles.
I had some immediate objection to Organic Maps when I first heard of them. Was their website Cloudflared previously? ATM I don’t see what my issue with them was. Superficially they look like a decent 2nd option (which I say having not tried their software yet).
The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing,
Web browsing is such a shit-show even with the latest Debian on a PC that I have almost entirely rejected the idea of browsing from a smartphone. I simply will not invest 1 penny of money or 1 minute of my time chasing garbage services with a garbage device. There have been rare moments where “Privacy Browser” on my old AOS5 phone manages to reach and render a webpage but I have mostly given up on that idea. Even captive portals are a shit-show so I usually cannot connect to public wifi. Fuck it… it wasn’t meant to be.
Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up,
I’m on the edge of scrapping Youtube altogether because of Google’s hostile treatment toward Tor users and simultaneous relentless attacks on Invideous nodes. But up until a couple months ago I could usually fetch a video via Invidious and store locally. My 2008 Thinkpad has been able to handle every video fine so far. I have the Newpipe app on the phone but I’m not really driven to use the phone for YT videos.
Browsing on a phone or with Debian works ok for me with Firefox, though I don’t like Firefox that much.
I found Organic Maps preferable to OsmAnd but neither are that great. It should be possible to do something reasonable without a lot of CPU demands, given how dedicated GPS map navigation devices existed ih the early 2000s.
Yes if you ditch Youtube and anything else that requires modern codecs, that solves another issue. I’ve found Newpipe has broken a few times but it usually works, so that is what I use.
Modern apps and games (requiring GPU even) are another story, but let’s assume you don’t want to run them.
This leaves the question: if you want a BIFL smart phone but you don’t want to make phone calls with it, don’t want to run a web browser, and don’t want to watch videos on it, what DO you want it to do?
What are peoples’ issue with Organic Maps? (seriously - it would be interesting to know) I use it all the time, and it’s great. Some of the routes are sub-optimal, but not often. Finally you can search with postcodes (that has been a problem in the past).
Maybe it’s not perfect, but I only ever have to default to google maps when someone sends me a crappy shortened link to something. Once I get the actual address, i can swap back to Organic Maps. It used to eat battery on my Fairphone 2, but I had other problems with that phone too!. I love it, and the offline maps are perfect for when I am travelling.
I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.
I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.
It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.
I get terrible (not “suboptimal” but genuinely ridiculous) routes enough of the time to call the program not fully working. There is also a thing where if there are two routes of roughly equal quality, instead of choosing one and sticking to it, OM will keep trying to switch between them, asking for a lot of crazy U-turns. The POI search is also lame: if you
That’s weird, I only see 1 route choice when I use it.
enter “McDonalds” and there are 10 of them in the area, it shows them in some weird random order instead of nearest first.
True, that is a bit annoying, although it’s getting better, if you move the viewport over the area you want to search on (if you’re not there already), it seems to try and show local stuff first.
I do use OM in preference to Google Maps because privacy and offline etc., but it is only usable maybe 75% of the time. If I’m in a hurry or otherwise unwilling to make some wrong turns, or if OM messes up, I end up using Google. Google simply works a lot better. Ugh.
That’s a shame. It’s pretty good where I live, and I can find most things I need to travel to, although yes, the index could be better.
It would also be nice if OM’s voice directions included street names, and that map updates didn’t download entire new maps, but those are features to be engineered. Still, the California map data is over 1GB all by itself, that has to be re-downloaded once a month or so. De Lorme Street Map in the Windows 95 era fit all the US streets on a CD-ROM (700MB) so while OSM data might be richer, there’s still a bunch of bloat going on. And streets don’t change that often, so the monthly update should be tiny compared to the initial download.
Fair enough. I’m in the UK, and both here and in Europe, sub-country areas are available for download, which helps. Maybe the streets don’t change often, but load of POIs change from one month to the next. This is just 1 day of changes from https://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=countries:
A lot of it will be “trivial” metadata i’m sure, but still, there’s quite a lot of change going on!
I have a Fairphone 4 and would definitely give them the biggest recommendation I could.
Any part can be replaced with a screwdriver which is an order of magnitude better than I’ve seen with other brands. I dropped and broke my phone screen and although I had to buy a new screen, after that I had a phone working as if it was brand new.
I also got mortar into my usb charging socket and was able to replace the charging socket.
You might be able to tell that I’m not the best at looking after things, I’m working on this but in the meantime, fairphone have saved me at least two situations where I’d normally need to buy a new phone. Can’t recommend them enough.
I wish I could recommend Fairphone. I bought a “2” new a few years ago as my first smart phone, and while it worked, it wasn’t very robust. I had to replace the “bottom module” (USB charging port and microphone) because it broke, which is ok, these things happen. Then, about a year ago, it went wrong again. I went back to the online shop, and the bottom module was there again. I went to buy it… “out of stock”… “please try asking on the forums”… seriously? Go to the forums, loads of people wanting a replacement module, nobody selling theirs.
Soon after I get an email saying, “good news, android <some number> is now available for the Fairphone 2”, and they were singing and dancing about how it was a load of hassle etc. etc. to port. Great, but no use to me if I can’t get spares.
Much to the annoyance of my other half, I bought a Fairphone 3. After a while that started going buggy and not charging. There were a few other issues with it, so I thought I would send it back to get fixed. When I read the details of sending it back, they said to make sure it was backed up as it will be wiped “due to GDPR”… wtf??? That has nothing to do with GDPR - that’s your poor data hygiene.
My Fairphone 3 isn’t rooted, and I don’t use google accounts, so it would be very difficult to back it up properly. I understand, if it’s totally broken, there may be no way to retrieve the data, so you might loose it all, but that has nothing to do with GDPR.
I’ve not bothered sending it back, so it’s yet another chunk of e-waste. A mate gave me his old Samsung s20, so I’m going to use that until it breaks.
I really want the company to succeed, but at this rate, it’s cheaper and probably better for the environment if I just buy a second hand old “flagship” phone instead.
I am never buying Fairphone again 😢
Considering the price of a Fairphone you have a right to be upset. I suppose the only thing going for your situation is maybe the parts are worth something since they can be used to easily fix other Fairphones.
I know, but it shouldn’t be like this :(
Got nothing for you. Good luck.
Oh, man, I WISH this was a thing. I do buy cheap phones and run them until they absolutely can’t be used. My current phone cost $100 and it’s perfectly fine for what I do.
I do get jealous of the latest cameras on new phones tho. My phone cam sucks! lol
I’m surprised to hear a phone for $100 referred to as cheap. But I suppose it is relative to some phones fetching 4 figures. Crazy! In the past I would go to the shop of a carrier and ask what they have in the backroom which is still new in box but not current enough to expose on the store shelves. I got new phones between $5 and $20 this way, which were only 1 or 2 Android versions behind.
That’s still not good. It’s frugal but it still feeds the 1st hand market when the 2nd hand market is absolutely flooded with phones no one wants. Going forward, every phone I buy will be 2nd hand.
The street markets are flooded with cameras (both digital and film). If you’re not fussy about pocket space that could be worth considering.
Fairphone might be worth taking a look at.
If you just want to use a FOSS OS, LineageOS with a Google Pixel phones have the best support and will be the path of least resistance.
Current FOSS supported smartphones are mostly not really compatible with BIFL
Firstly, Rooting/ flashing non-manufacturer firmware voids your warranty. A phone without manufacturer support is going to struggle to be BIFL. If you’re able to flash the original ROM back on that protects you some, but if a failure leaves you unable to flash firmware then you’re SOL.
Also, the FOSS OS might be solid but many ports to specific phones are enabled by only a couple of developers doing it on a voluntary basis. You might well find multiple FOSS OS are being maintained by a single person who is really into keeping their phone compatible with multiple FOSS projects. Unless you’re going to be that person, you would want to check that’s not the case, because if that person upgrades you may find yourself without support which again is not BIFL.
The closest you’re going to get is probably something like the Fairphone. They’re designed to be long-term repairable, ethically produced and running FOSS. But they are also far from the cutting edge. Pick your poison.
Firstly, Rooting/ flashing non-manufacturer firmware voids your warranty. A phone without manufacturer support is going to struggle to be BIFL.
I just bought an all-metal sewing machine from like the 1960s. Of course the warranty is toast (though it was generous… like 25yrs or something). I would not say it’s not BifL on the basis of warranty expiry. It will likely last the rest of my life which could amount to another 50 yrs.
Most of what I buy outlasts the warranty. Then I push it far beyond what’s expected. But indeed smartphones are such an obsolescence shit-show out of the gate they will be the hardest product to push the lifetime on.
It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g. Also, the idea of a smartphone is to use internet services or at least web pages, and those invariably want you to use recently made phone hardware to deal with bloat. If you can get 5 years from a phone you’re doing ok.
Arguably 5G is a massive downgrade in easy deployabilty for most countries so 4G will stick around for a bit longer, but yeah, even 5G might not set you up for life.
Idk what the deployment issues are for 5g vs 4g, but I get the impression that at least here in the US, most new installs are 5g which means that 4g coverage will gradually worsen, then maybe go away. Same with 5g but not as soon, I’d guess.
The countryside will never be covered by 5G. The range is massively decreased due to the higher frequency. You would have to litter the forest and fields with antennas. 4G isnt going away any time soon unless we intend to cut off all sorts of infrastructure and farmers and hikers and emergency services from internet access.
4G has a range in the 10+ km area
5G is in the low hundreds of meters range so its a fancy city tech
terming 5G “fancy city tech” is more than a little harsh. 5G was never meant to exist on its own - it solves a lot of density issues exactly because of its limited range
It also conveniently offers more accurate cell phone tracking because of its limited range.
It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.
Indeed the amount of lifetime you get out of a phone depends on what you need. I don’t actually use a smartphone as a phone. My phone has no SIM chip inserted. Wi-Fi is not getting outpaced as quickly. If you have sufficient control over your device, you can reverse tether as well.
This is how my old AOS 5 device connects (2 ways):
① AOS 5 → Wi-Fi → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)
② AOS 5 → USB 2 reverse tethered → 16 year old laptop → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)My AOS 2 phone (from ~2009ish?) can also still connect via method ① but I have no use for putting it online.
What I care about is the phone-laptop connection so I can side-load f-droid apps, OSMand in particular. I will always be able to hack together a hotspot to update the OSMand maps.
and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.
You may have just helped solve a mystery for me. I was using an HSDPA stick to connect 2 yrs ago. Then one day I suddenly had no internet. Had to scramble to get another mobile broadband stick, which happened to be LTE – which worked. I bitched to the carrier. I thought maybe they pushed a faulty baseband update to my hardware and broke it. They claimed my modem just died. I thought no fucking way does a simple solid state USB device like that just croak.
Maybe they pulled the plug on 3g and didn’t inform anyone.(update) Nope… Just checked and it was this year that they pulled the plug on 3g… just last month for one carrier. So my mystery is still unsolved. Though I don’t suppose it matters… what good is a 3g modem now? I wonder if there are any hacks to get a 3g modem talking to a self-hosted fake tower.
Do you use that old laptop for anything else? That is probably drawing a huge amount of power just to reverse tether the phone, could definitely be accomplished with a extremely low power SBC nowadays
The old laptop is the same one I use for all computing. So using an SBC would just add to the energy consumption.
But an SBC could be interesting anyway because there could be moments when I would want a phone to connect without the laptop dependency. So I would be interested in hearing how it works. Does the SBC also charge the phone over USB? Does the reverse tethering software exist that can run on an SBC? It would be cool to have this configuration:
phone → USB → SBC → ethernet → router…
Especially cool if the SBC could run Tor and proxy all traffic over Tor (though I suppose that job would best be served by the router).
From a cursory search it seems possible to reverse usb tether on Linux so should be fine. Yes the SBC would charge the phone if the SBC had a good enough power supply.
Re: tor yes that could be done if you know how to configure Linux.
