The challenge isn't buying it, the challenge is being able to do phone things with it.
Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone. Most things will work but it takes one critical service that doesn't have a viable workaround, and you're forced to buy (and possibly carry) a "mainstream" phone just for that.
Banking, government, authentication, postal service and public transit apps are just some of the common categories that will, in the end, force you to use one of those systems, unless governments mandate viable alternatives. The QR-code based recaptcha that's being introduced will be another brick in the wall.
As an individual, it feels like my options are to either submit or try to live a hermit's life, bringing endless suffering and exclusion to myself.
> Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone.
Is it the phone or just the mobile operating system? I do most of my phone stuff on a tablet that I keep at home - where it's safer. I am currently using an Android phone (without an account) for GPS, phone calls (contacts), internet, games, email (alternatives to google), etc...
But for those critical and sensitive apps (banking, etc)... I consider those to be too dangerous to be walking around with.
So any phone will serve (I can wait to get home to check email for example).
That doesn't solve for services that by definition need to be accessed on the go, e.g. public transit, parcel pickup, luggage lockers, rental bikes, restaurant menus, paying for parking, etc. (some of these may not mandate phones in your area yet or may allow mobile web alternatives, these are just examples where I've seen strong pushes towards apps or at leas in many places).
We'd need regulation for that. Either a mandate that the digital option is optional, and services must have an alternative means, or a mandate that any app based service also has an equally viable mobile web option, making the app optional.
Tbh I see no reason why all of that couldn't just be a website instead of a native app. Menus should just be a website, transit should still be offering physical metro cards, the lockers & bikes could just as easily be a website.
Folks on HN won't like this ida but quite frankly I'd go a step further and have a mandate that services like these must offer an API for the public to use in order to bring their own app/solution. It'd be nice to not be limited to exclusively first party options. How ridiculous is it that there are so many different pay for parking apps, when if all of them just offered an API I could roll my one all in one parking web app, etc.
I'd even pay a subscription, like many of these services offer already, for API access instead.
You can exist, but life will be as inconvenient as it was in the 1990s (though importantly, it didn't seem inconvenient at the time, it was just the way things were).
That's not true, because in the 1990s there was no presumption that everyone has a major-vendor smartphone. Now, the ways to do things without a smartphone are often disappearing, so things are more inconvenient. For example, ticket machines and printed schedules for public transit are going away in many places.
I don't have any usable public transit where I live but the place where I'm familiar with it is Chicago and all the train stations have ticket machines. Bus stops no, but you can pay on the bus with a payment card, transit card, or an app. Cash fares are no longer accepted for some time.
I miss the old tokens they used to use. So simple, anonymous, easy to share with traveling companions, though could be annoying when you ran out.
I disagree. You cannot even book appointments in a lot of banks today, a thing you could do in the 90s. Like that, a lot of services are unavailable without a smartphone and its non-smartphone equivalent is not available anymore.
This might be country specific? Specifically dependent on laws in the fields of consumer-protection and keeping things universally accessible.
I don't own a smartphone. I have never owned a smartphone. There are inconveniences, and big organizations definitely try to push you toward the way of doing things which has the lowest costs for them - but there are no actual blockers. There is always a path involving actual humans, and regular phone calls (or emails or paper forms).
Reactions tend to be wistful variations of "I wish I could" or "but how do you?" - and it's really always about the most trivial inconveniences.
Not my experience. I'm in the USA, and there are still bank branches everywhere, I'd say as many as ever and new ones are being built. In fact within a mile of my house the finishing touches on the latest new one (full remodel of a former restaurant building) are just about done.
Why does this permeate the HN all
the time. You can 100% function without a fucking smartphone. My Dad doesn’t have one, he has zero-to-no trouble going to the bank and paying his bills and just about every other imaginable thing. If there was something he could not do and there were repercussions for it he’d be calling an attorney to rectify the situation. It is crazy to keep reading this over and over on HN, so weird
It's a bias, an in-bubble illiteracy effect, concerning the perception and analysis of realities (e. g. experiences) outside that bubble, mirroring an in-group's projections about an out-group. It is, in my decades of experience, a very common phenomenon in the IT sector.
> "My Dad doesn’t have one, he has zero-to-no trouble going to the bank and paying his bills and just about every other imaginable thing."
So far, that holds true for me as well (Germany).
> "If there was something he could not do and there were repercussions for it he’d be calling an attorney to rectify the situation."
The crux: the increasing friction brought on by rising technological entry barriers. In Germany you have at least the non-exclusion principle of Teilhabe (lit.: participation) which gives certain guarantees. But such achievements of democracy are continually under fire.
Because the real complaint isn’t “it's impossible to live without a smartphone”, it is “I want all of the conveniences of a smartphone without having one, and I want every business to cater to the small minority who don’t want to use a smartphone”.
It’s like complaining that it’s difficult to travel to another continent if you don’t want to fly. I want to go from LA to Paris in 12 hours without getting on a plane!
Technically, sure you probably can spend a large amount of time, energy, and money to find alternative non-smartphone ways of navigating through modern life.
Practically, you need a smartphone.
Engaging an attorney != practical
That's the thing. The larger amount of time, energy, and money we spent on doing banking in the 1990s was real. The web, and then mobile apps, made a lot of that more convenient. But it's not impossible to live the old way. You can still write paper checks, go to the bank to make a deposit and get cash, etc. It used to be normal, everyone did it, now it seems extremely inconvenient for most people.
Both because a dwindling minority of people do old things the old way; and because new things (eg Netflix and Uber) are designed for the new way, even if they don't absolutely require it.
Yeah, and lot of people assume that something doesn't exist because they aren't personally aware of it. Quite often there are people who are willing to serve those who don't make mainstream choices. Other times, it means that you simply have a different lifestyle from the mainstream. There's nothing wrong with that.
In Portugal you have to do that at the bank terminals, otherwise going to the counter implies paying a services tax, depending on the kind of customer one happens to be.
Yep, many older people right now don’t have a smart phone and never will.
As long as some younger people stay that course we should be fine. Hopefully we’ll see an increase of dumb phone adoption in a growing cohort younger adults. But the FUD spread in threads like this actually spreads misinformation and makes that less likely to happen
I recently skipped a concert at the YouTube theater in LA because my phone is too old for Ticketmaster or Hollywood Park apps. Even though you can go and buy a ticket at the box office they have to send you the ticket to the app. No option to print it or any non-app way.
(Depending on whether you mean "can't exist without a phone" or "can't exist without an Apple/Google monopoly ecosystem")
3. you don't need an Apple or Google account to scan a QR code and open a web page.
4. Why is it "scam" pricing? You're getting a discount from giving them your information with an app. Like Kindle charging more to remove adverts. Dislikable, scummy not scammy. (i.e. they aren't taking your money and providing nothing and then disappearing).
6. I think in the UK / Europe the employer would have to provide your fiancee with a company phone so she could access her workplace, and could not legally require her to have a personal phone with an employer managed/controlled app on it.
7. Does Google/Apple authentication require a Google/Apple app? I see "sign in with Google" on web pages on my Windows desktop. Google Authenticator app is a fairly standard OTP passcode app which can be done in many other programs, password vaults and browser plugins.
"You can check in on the Ryanair.com website or on the mobile App"
"If you checked in but cannot present your boarding pass on the app when you arrive at the airport, you will receive a free of charge boarding pass."
(This it is more difficult as their appears to be even fewer staff around than before)
Also:
"You can check in for your flight at the airport, but you will have to pay an airport check-in fee per passenger to cover the extra cost of the airport check-in service. Please see our Table of Fees."
> 3. Half of restaurants in my area do not have non-QR code menus, they just don't.
Not knocking this list, the shit is real. But I just had a lovely imaginary conversation with a server asking them what they would recommend and then trying something brand new.
Joke's on the server. The robot that will replace their job soon will be more than happy to regale you with any hallucinated information you would like about the subtleties of the menu.
When I go to a restaurant that has QR-only menus, I won't make a scene about it, but it lowers the mental rating I give the place and I'm less likely to return.
I dont have a personal smartphone (I do have a pile of them in my office for testing software I make) but I dont use one myself. Its fine, I can do my banking and whatever. I live in Ireland.
It’s always been the case. In previous eras people were “forced” to use mastercard / visa, Windows, AT&T, Western Union, East India Company, Templar bnking, etc.
I am not remotely defending the situation, past or present, just saying it’s a recurring theme.
I'd wager the majority of people on this site could afford $100-$200 for a separate phone that's solely used for apps that mandate Google/Apple services. As a bonus, using the "mainstream" phone with only those apps increases security, compared to having your banking apps on the same phone as other random apps.
No, but you will likely be inconvenienced to a similar level as losing your house keys, and lose access to important services. You won't immediately die, because most people can survive for quite some time on nothing but questionable river water and a piece of cardboard under a bridge, but there is a difference between survival and existing in society.
> Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone.
millions of people would like a word…
> Most things will work but it takes one critical service that doesn't have a viable workaround, and you're forced to buy (and possibly carry) a "mainstream" phone just for that.
Absolutely not, if there is “critical service” that requires an iPhone or Android you call an attorney.
> Banking, government, authentication, postal service and public transit apps are just some of the common categories that will, in the end, force you to use one of those systems, unless governments mandate viable alternatives.
There are now and there always will be alternatives
> As an individual, it feels like my options are to either submit or try to live a hermit's life, bringing endless suffering and exclusion to myself.
As an individual you can and should fight any system that forces you into buying a smartphone. Alternatives must exist even if they might be “incovenient” (e.g. have to do it browser vs. via some “App”)
I disagree, because the impact on my quality of life from fighting the fight is just not a level of sacrifice that is sensible.
> There are now and there always will be alternatives
The problem is that those "alternatives" often come with serious downsides, from higher cost, to massive inconvenience, to having to work around simply not having a service. And while most of the time it's possible to work around it, most people quickly hit the limit where the cost isn't bearable.
> I disagree, because the impact on my quality of life from fighting the fight is just not a level of sacrifice that is sensible
Interesting. I feel then that if this is the case we cannot complain then, no? If the fight is not worth fighting (I think that it is) than complaints about it are pointless (for the lack of a softer word…)
Sounds very much like HarmonyOS. I was just in a Huawei Store and I think from a UI/UX perspective, despite being quite new, it's incredibly slick and leaps ahead in great design and integration within the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Even saw it being used as Laptop OS and Mobile, the convergence is quite applaudable.
The kindest was that the store's staff advised against buying the device as it's quite painful to use it with Google's apk & blobs, because it drains more battery than when it's integrated with your system services directly. I told him, that maybe rare, but I'm actually happy to not use Google apps as much as possible and especially not within my operating system. Another point he made was that 5G'A is blocked by Google, about that I know nothing to be honest.
Some Android forks are indeed quite nice, but the issue has always been the updating model, upstream maintenance and compatibility. With Harmony OS a large cooperation with the consumers in focus and the one developing the entire hardware stack is behind the OS development and maintenance making it safer against supply-chain hacks and a deeper integration possible than any other OS.
The article starts with Murena, Punkt, Volla which are all based on Android. If you do this, then imho you must mention GrapheneOS, the by far better option (updates, privacy, security, organisation).
Google Pixel with GrapheneOS is the best non-Google phone... ;-)
As much as I like graphene it is literary running on google hardware (atm) and uses asop. Even if it is a really good option is you want to run degoogled and secure android.
you are being downvoted because the article considers de-googled versions of android acceptable. and neither are dependent on google in the sense that even if google stopped publishing android source altogether they could continue to develop the versions they already have. that's the whole point of Free Software and Open Source.
Yeah, and that's utter nonsense. Noone is really stepping up to develop Android beyond repackaging it.
If Google decides to remove a feature, GrapheneOS and other forks will end up without it too. If they stop publishing security patches, the forks end up insecure too.
It's just like all the Chrome "forks" when ManifestV2 died. None of them survived for more than a few versions until maintainers lost interest.
Calling any of these Google free is downright lying.
> Enjoy your freedom, break free from Google and Apple.
You can't escape it.
Your friends and employers and banks use it. The state will soon mandate it for ID. It's the accepted worldwide compute platform, and you're being the nail that sticks out.
Your usage is subject to breaking randomly, being unsupported, losing access or being banned by stepping outside the traffic lines, etc.
They'll use attestation, certs and signing, proprietary APIs, and the scale and might of trillions of dollars to force this.
The only way to "break free" and "enjoy your freedom" is via regulation and -- the better option -- trust busting.
The EU and ASEAN are the best bets for regulation. Getting another Lina Khan that works faster next time is the next best bet for regulation, and possibly a superior outcome that could result in a breakup opening up mobile for true competition.
Being weird in the 0.0001% will not last, nor does it help anyone else escape this monopolistic tyranny.
We need the government to pave the way for dozens of Apple/Google competitors. Or to horizontally split these two companies into dozens of "Baby Bells" that are forced to fight one another.
If a country can provide housing, roads, fire departments, public transit, etc. that might cover 98% of most people's use cases.
But perhaps that country is also fighting wars, committing genocide, perpetrating mass surveillance, propping up an oligarchy, manipulating currency, practicing authoritarianism, etc. ?
There might be points that need to be made and changes that need to be implemented, even if the average citizen or user doesn't directly see the impact or feel immediate exposure.
One of the reasons this is hard is that the general public doesn't understand the greater second and third order effects. And even if they do, they are typically inarticulate at expressing how this is dysregulated and dysfunctional to the broader economy and capitalism.
Luckily, there are plenty of very wealthy people that are disenfranchised by this that will loudly take up arms. Domestic competitors, business leaders, other impacted industries, etc. That's how and why this will change.
Tim Sweeney isn't the only one interested in this.
Maybe I am lucky in the USA, but every bank I’ve ever done business with can be accessed through a PC and web browser. If any of my banks should decide to remove that option, I just move over to one of the other thousands of banks in the USA.
I keep seeing this, but I've never signed into a single one of my banks, mortgage companies, stock brokers, or credit card companies on my phone. The phone might be used to get a code for 2FA via text, but that's the extent of it. Everything is done on my PC through a dedicated browser specifically for financial purposes. This applies to Chase, Fidelity, Schwab, Wells Fargo, Marcus, Morgan Stanley, Amex, and more. So theoretically there's no reason a Linux OS on a phone can't do any of these things without Google or Apple by simply masquerading as a PC.
"I live in a place that hasn't seen progress and still uses physical cash." Isn't really useful to those of us who live in places that don't even use cash. Also, I don't really want to go back to using physical cash thanks.
Yup. I have not tried using a non-GoogleAndroid or iOS smartphone, but what you describe perfectly reflects what I experienced when I went started to work for a large employer 16 y ago. I had been using Linux as my main OS on desktops and mobile computers for at least 15 y by then. Slowly the grind of hacking my system to access the VPN, check email on their Exchange server, open MS Word docs.. it all pushed me to MacOS from about 2015 - 2021. Eventually I could not abide by Apple's incompatible hold on my data, Gatekeeper (I really hate the concept that they must approve software I want to run on my own hardware) and the unrepairability of their machines.. so I am now on Win 11. Right now, considering the trade offs, I think this is the best choice. I see a lot of people extolling Linux lately, so maybe it is time to try going back.
Back OT, smartphones were always less open than the general purpose computers of yore. And it looks like they are increasingly a requirement for participating in many societies. In general I don't find this a good thing, but have little faith that regulators will 'solve' is because they have their own pitfalls (recent examples from EU: age verification and chat control).
I use a smartphone less than most people. Things I already could not do without a Google or Apple phone:
Use some banking apps. In fact I cannot use one banking app I otherwise would because it will only work if you have no non-store apps installed at all.
A regulatory requirement to prove my ID without using the mobile app would be a 20 min+ each way drive (plus walking, time doing it etc.) to another town.
> The EU and ASEAN are the best bets for regulation.
Did you read the recent HN stories about the EU's age verification app that will only work on attested phones? Lots of other governments (EU and non-EU) doping similar things.
> We need the government to pave the way for dozens of Apple/Google competitors. Or to horizontally split these two companies into dozens of "Baby Bells" that are forced to fight one another.
I have very little confidence that is likely. Politically governments are far more pro-big business and anti-competition than they have been in a long time.
> Being weird in the 0.0001% will not last, nor does it help anyone else escape this monopolistic tyranny.
Every single person who does not go along, is a a political and commercial argument not to remove alternatives. If I use a website and an app to bank or buy something, it pushes up the stats for the web app vs the mobile app.
> EU's age verification app that will only work on attested phones?
This is not a single unified front. Multiple battles are ongoing simultaneously.
There are strong proponents of anti-monopoly and digital sovereignty in government, just as there are those that want to push for a surveillance state.
Here are some recent and non-insignificant things that the EU and UK have required Google and Apple do:
- Support "side loaded" apps (as Google works to remove the ability)
- Standardize on USB-C
- Force alternative payments platforms
- Force Apple to stop requiring WebKit and WebKit runtimes
They're just getting started!
> I have very little confidence that is likely.
I have a great deal of confidence that the world is ready for this. Every non-US nation wants to break the stranglehold US tech has on their countries. The EU, UK, and ASEAN have a tremendous amount of power here.
We also have a huge reservoir of political support for breaking up tech monopolies inside the US. Lots of high profile politicians are ready to go to work on this, on both sides of the aisle.
Moreover, you have every single other company on the planet that wants this duopoly fractured. Entire industries that salivate over this.
It's just a matter of time and making sure we make these points articulate and loudly heard.
This is far more effective than trying to hack your device and proclaim "year of linux on android 2030". That doesn't work. It's a miserable experience and doesn't help a single other person.
>Your friends and employers and banks use it. The state will soon mandate it for ID.
You just buy a separate, cheap Android/Google phone for all these things. Emphasis on buying the cheapest one possible, so Google and Apple aren't making much money off you.
They are also less than 2 months away from the first deliveries of the Jolla Phone 2026, a new SailfishOS device they have designed and built from scratch. Over the past years the official Sailfish experience has largely been relying on Sony Open Device program - a co-operation which hasn't always been very smooth for the customers.
I have been daily driving SFOS on a Sony Xperia 10 III for the past 3 years and it works well for me. I think the 10 III is the current "peak Sailfish" at least among the officially supported devices but this should change once the new phones roll out in early July. For new orders of the 2026 phone they are currently aiming for delivery in September in the supported markets (EU, UK, Norway and Switzerland).
I have rage-quit apple for a C2 and the muscle memory still kicks in after months. The ergonomy of Sailfish is sometimes bizarre, the little top left dot for navigation for example. Still it does everything I need, just with a very bad camera. Let's hope the 2026 will fix that.
I've been on Apple for a couple of years after a decade on Android and I still haven't internalized all of iOS's inconsistencies. But admittedly I don't do much on my phone besides SMS, calendar, and maps, so using other apps is always a bit of initial relearning.
Oh but you don't usually need to care for the dot itself so much as it's just an indicator that you can do a middle swipe left/right to move between stacked pages.
I’m surprised that the Seeker is not even mentioned. I understand it’s Solana, it’s blockchain, whatever people think about it... to me it’s the only serious attempt at creating an app store that can compete with apple or google. What’s the point of independent hardware if the whole sw stack is them?
All of the copy seems to be built around Solana, "Web3" and crypto. It doesn't seem to have any appeal outside of that. It's not clear what the software even is. The docs [0] seem to indicate it's just Android, with some SDKs for interacting with the "Web3" stuff.
This isn't a "serious attempt at creating an app store that can compete with apple or google", it's just another "Web3" project. It's exciting to people within that ecosystem and utterly uninteresting to anybody who isn't.
The majority of these phones are running a modified version of Android. I wouldn’t call that non-Google. There is a total lack of diversity in the phone market. I’ve been trying to find a minimal feature phone for my kids and looked at Nokia, but non-Android Nokia phones don’t support enough US cellular bands.
At this point, I am thinking about connecting a stock Android phone to a server and access it via scrcpy from my laptop whenever I need to interact with some stupid app bs that could've just been a website.
At least this way I can keep the majority of bloat away from primary communications device.
Many years later and I'm still bitter that the tech press laughed Windows Phone out of the room straight to its demise. Yes it had very little developer support but at some point things were looking up. It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.
A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing
> The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete
As I recall Microsoft threw quite a lot of resources into Windows Phone.
My then-employer had apps for Android and Apple, and Microsoft literally paid for us to port it to Windows Phone. Microsoft brought Nokia, who had dominated the industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And Microsoft was early to the mobile party too - you could get an iPaq H3660 running Microsoft Pocket PC 2000, seven years before the first iPhone. Keyboardless Fujitsu and Compaq tablets ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2003, seven years before the iPad.
They weren't as good as what came later. Chunky, fragile devices, resistive touchscreens, stylus input with a tiny on-screen keyboard, worse batteries, worse wifi, barely any mobile data. And at the time, $500 seemed hugely expensive compared to a normal phone, even if these days there are plenty of $1000 smartphones.
But there's an alternate reality where Microsoft had a 'first mover advantage' and captured a big slice of the smartphone-and-tablet market.
Zune was also... not good. I was given one. It was defective. I think I got a warranty replacement and gave it to a friend who basically never used it as far as I know.
Nadella's Azure play basically saved Microsoft in my opinion. They totally blew mobile and desktop Windows and Office were declining markets and XBox was a sideshow.
>> It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.
I loved my Windows phones (especially near the end when you were getting Pixel & Apple level hardware for pennies on the dollar), but is this really true? They had limited hardware partners (and the disaster with Nokia), lukewarm carrier deals, absolutely no apps, but who were these "influential people" who made fun of it? If anything it seemed more like no-one was even aware of it. I remember the little press they did get being quite positive on the devices & OS, while critical of the broader ecosystem, which seems fair.
Given what Microsoft has done with the state of Windows with built-in telemetry, the attempts to add Recall, and now AI features they are adding to many customers dismay, you have them doing anything different with Windows Phone if it had gained traction than Apple and Google?
Eh, Microsoft got bored of developing their own browser and just pushes Chromium on their users now. Probably they would have just turned Windows Phones into another Android too.
Lack of applications. They decided to fix that by adding an Android subsystem, and nobody wanted to publish their Android applications to the Amazon store even with Amazon throwing gobs of money at publishers and only some APIs having been moved into Google Play Services.
That's so sad. I even clicked around on their page to find out how I could contribute as a developer, but their gitlab repo seems abandoned since way before the latest release and all "how to get involved" articles eventually point to 404 pages.
I moved to a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS a few weeks ago. I can do everything I need to, everything I want to, and with more control over my digital footprint and what data is being collected about me. I've completely moved off Google services.
The OS experience is pretty impressive for not being made by an evil megacorp. The hardware is fairly midrange, but midrange today is last year's top end, and unless you're some expert photographer or needing phone VR or whatever, it's a great, normal smartphone experience.
I'm donating to the open source devs who make my apps, and they respond when I ask for useful features instead of always enshittifying it. For the corpo apps, it pulls from Google Play.
Only to the extent you use Micro-G, and Micro-G mitigates a large portion of the Google data harvesting. The built in App Lounge does not require a Google login to pull downloads from the Play Store, so it's possible to remain entirely anonymous to Google.
I've only looked into one device en detail, the Jolla.
Okay, no touch typing, maps apps don't start or don't find your location, WhatsApp probably doesn't work and I guess I don't have to start with banking apps.
They keep saying "If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product". Okay, all fine and well.
But what will my phone still actually be able to do if / when I stop my subscription? Not a single clear answer besides "[…] gradual feature deactivation, and ultimately reverting to a device running AOSP".
What I miss a lot is to be able to have a kind of "virtual" android running in a cloud instance. That could look legit to Google to not be restricted by integrity check and all.
But there I could share access to my single instance to my multiple non Google non play store devices, eventually sharing access between multiple persons...
Like for example, every crappy things like banks nowadays requires their own shitty app. It might be a pain in the ass to share between phones or to reinstall if you lose or change your phone. And all these useless app consume really a lot of storage resulting in my phone's being always full.
That would be perfect to access it in a kind of remote access for use once in a while.
The challenge isn't buying it, the challenge is being able to do phone things with it.
Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone. Most things will work but it takes one critical service that doesn't have a viable workaround, and you're forced to buy (and possibly carry) a "mainstream" phone just for that.
Banking, government, authentication, postal service and public transit apps are just some of the common categories that will, in the end, force you to use one of those systems, unless governments mandate viable alternatives. The QR-code based recaptcha that's being introduced will be another brick in the wall.
As an individual, it feels like my options are to either submit or try to live a hermit's life, bringing endless suffering and exclusion to myself.
> Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone.
Is it the phone or just the mobile operating system? I do most of my phone stuff on a tablet that I keep at home - where it's safer. I am currently using an Android phone (without an account) for GPS, phone calls (contacts), internet, games, email (alternatives to google), etc...
But for those critical and sensitive apps (banking, etc)... I consider those to be too dangerous to be walking around with.
So any phone will serve (I can wait to get home to check email for example).
That doesn't solve for services that by definition need to be accessed on the go, e.g. public transit, parcel pickup, luggage lockers, rental bikes, restaurant menus, paying for parking, etc. (some of these may not mandate phones in your area yet or may allow mobile web alternatives, these are just examples where I've seen strong pushes towards apps or at leas in many places).
Out of all the examples you have presented everything had worked somehow without phones not so long ago.
Maybe, with the exception of online public transit status streaming. And public transit still works without it.
We'd need regulation for that. Either a mandate that the digital option is optional, and services must have an alternative means, or a mandate that any app based service also has an equally viable mobile web option, making the app optional.
Tbh I see no reason why all of that couldn't just be a website instead of a native app. Menus should just be a website, transit should still be offering physical metro cards, the lockers & bikes could just as easily be a website.
Folks on HN won't like this ida but quite frankly I'd go a step further and have a mandate that services like these must offer an API for the public to use in order to bring their own app/solution. It'd be nice to not be limited to exclusively first party options. How ridiculous is it that there are so many different pay for parking apps, when if all of them just offered an API I could roll my one all in one parking web app, etc.
I'd even pay a subscription, like many of these services offer already, for API access instead.
There was a time back in covid days where you had to have an app on your phone to go through customs clearance in Canada.
You can exist, but life will be as inconvenient as it was in the 1990s (though importantly, it didn't seem inconvenient at the time, it was just the way things were).
> as inconvenient as it was in the 1990s
That's not true, because in the 1990s there was no presumption that everyone has a major-vendor smartphone. Now, the ways to do things without a smartphone are often disappearing, so things are more inconvenient. For example, ticket machines and printed schedules for public transit are going away in many places.
I don't have any usable public transit where I live but the place where I'm familiar with it is Chicago and all the train stations have ticket machines. Bus stops no, but you can pay on the bus with a payment card, transit card, or an app. Cash fares are no longer accepted for some time.
I miss the old tokens they used to use. So simple, anonymous, easy to share with traveling companions, though could be annoying when you ran out.
I disagree. You cannot even book appointments in a lot of banks today, a thing you could do in the 90s. Like that, a lot of services are unavailable without a smartphone and its non-smartphone equivalent is not available anymore.
This might be country specific? Specifically dependent on laws in the fields of consumer-protection and keeping things universally accessible.
I don't own a smartphone. I have never owned a smartphone. There are inconveniences, and big organizations definitely try to push you toward the way of doing things which has the lowest costs for them - but there are no actual blockers. There is always a path involving actual humans, and regular phone calls (or emails or paper forms).
Reactions tend to be wistful variations of "I wish I could" or "but how do you?" - and it's really always about the most trivial inconveniences.
Not my experience. I'm in the USA, and there are still bank branches everywhere, I'd say as many as ever and new ones are being built. In fact within a mile of my house the finishing touches on the latest new one (full remodel of a former restaurant building) are just about done.
Why does this permeate the HN all the time. You can 100% function without a fucking smartphone. My Dad doesn’t have one, he has zero-to-no trouble going to the bank and paying his bills and just about every other imaginable thing. If there was something he could not do and there were repercussions for it he’d be calling an attorney to rectify the situation. It is crazy to keep reading this over and over on HN, so weird
> "Why does this permeate the HN all the time."
It's a bias, an in-bubble illiteracy effect, concerning the perception and analysis of realities (e. g. experiences) outside that bubble, mirroring an in-group's projections about an out-group. It is, in my decades of experience, a very common phenomenon in the IT sector.
> "My Dad doesn’t have one, he has zero-to-no trouble going to the bank and paying his bills and just about every other imaginable thing."
So far, that holds true for me as well (Germany).
> "If there was something he could not do and there were repercussions for it he’d be calling an attorney to rectify the situation."
The crux: the increasing friction brought on by rising technological entry barriers. In Germany you have at least the non-exclusion principle of Teilhabe (lit.: participation) which gives certain guarantees. But such achievements of democracy are continually under fire.
Because the real complaint isn’t “it's impossible to live without a smartphone”, it is “I want all of the conveniences of a smartphone without having one, and I want every business to cater to the small minority who don’t want to use a smartphone”.
It’s like complaining that it’s difficult to travel to another continent if you don’t want to fly. I want to go from LA to Paris in 12 hours without getting on a plane!
Technically, sure you probably can spend a large amount of time, energy, and money to find alternative non-smartphone ways of navigating through modern life.
Practically, you need a smartphone. Engaging an attorney != practical
That's the thing. The larger amount of time, energy, and money we spent on doing banking in the 1990s was real. The web, and then mobile apps, made a lot of that more convenient. But it's not impossible to live the old way. You can still write paper checks, go to the bank to make a deposit and get cash, etc. It used to be normal, everyone did it, now it seems extremely inconvenient for most people.
It is extremely inconvenient.
Both because a dwindling minority of people do old things the old way; and because new things (eg Netflix and Uber) are designed for the new way, even if they don't absolutely require it.
Yeah, and lot of people assume that something doesn't exist because they aren't personally aware of it. Quite often there are people who are willing to serve those who don't make mainstream choices. Other times, it means that you simply have a different lifestyle from the mainstream. There's nothing wrong with that.
In Portugal you have to do that at the bank terminals, otherwise going to the counter implies paying a services tax, depending on the kind of customer one happens to be.
Yep, many older people right now don’t have a smart phone and never will.
As long as some younger people stay that course we should be fine. Hopefully we’ll see an increase of dumb phone adoption in a growing cohort younger adults. But the FUD spread in threads like this actually spreads misinformation and makes that less likely to happen
This.
1. My bank doesn't allow to go in person without an in-app taken appointment.
2. My nephew can't play football in his team, because the team has an app to book/signal your availability. No other way.
3. Half of restaurants in my area do not have non-QR code menus, they just don't.
4. McDonald's will make me pay the scam pricing you get without the app.
5. My doctor gives documentation only and exclusively in digital form, on a special application that doesn't even have a desktop equivalent.
6. My fiance's office badges are smartphone-based. You cannot enter otherwise.
7. All the software she uses at work requires frequent Google/Apple/third party authentication.
8. Increasingly more European airlines exclusively accept in-app check in and documentation. You cannot print it. Ryanair's one of them.
I could go on for longer.
I recently skipped a concert at the YouTube theater in LA because my phone is too old for Ticketmaster or Hollywood Park apps. Even though you can go and buy a ticket at the box office they have to send you the ticket to the app. No option to print it or any non-app way.
Oh that true!
I've been in multiple clubs/events that you can enter exclusively after having downloaded the app.
(Depending on whether you mean "can't exist without a phone" or "can't exist without an Apple/Google monopoly ecosystem")
3. you don't need an Apple or Google account to scan a QR code and open a web page.
4. Why is it "scam" pricing? You're getting a discount from giving them your information with an app. Like Kindle charging more to remove adverts. Dislikable, scummy not scammy. (i.e. they aren't taking your money and providing nothing and then disappearing).
6. I think in the UK / Europe the employer would have to provide your fiancee with a company phone so she could access her workplace, and could not legally require her to have a personal phone with an employer managed/controlled app on it.
7. Does Google/Apple authentication require a Google/Apple app? I see "sign in with Google" on web pages on my Windows desktop. Google Authenticator app is a fairly standard OTP passcode app which can be done in many other programs, password vaults and browser plugins.
8. Ryanair says you can check-in on their website: https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-us/articles/12888891271953-Ho...
> 1. My bank doesn't allow to go in person without an in-app taken appointment.
What about other banks?
> 3. Half of restaurants in my area do not have non-QR code menus, they just don't.
That's crazy. I don't think I even saw 50% during COVID. Must be barely 5% of places that are QR only in the UK.
> 4. McDonald's will make me pay the scam pricing you get without the app.
Isn't it a scam even with the app pricing? The quality is so so bad these days I feel scammed even paying £1.50 for a burger.
> 5. My doctor gives documentation only and exclusively in digital form, on a special application that doesn't even have a desktop equivalent.
> 6. My fiance's office badges are smartphone-based. You cannot enter otherwise.
Are those compatible with disability laws?
> 8. Increasingly more European airlines exclusively accept in-app check in and documentation. You cannot print it. Ryanair's one of them.
That is not true for Ryanair.
https://help.ryanair.com/hc/en-gb/articles/12889016882065-Ca... :
"You can check in on the Ryanair.com website or on the mobile App"
"If you checked in but cannot present your boarding pass on the app when you arrive at the airport, you will receive a free of charge boarding pass."
(This it is more difficult as their appears to be even fewer staff around than before)
Also:
"You can check in for your flight at the airport, but you will have to pay an airport check-in fee per passenger to cover the extra cost of the airport check-in service. Please see our Table of Fees."
(Admittedly very very expensive)
> 3. Half of restaurants in my area do not have non-QR code menus, they just don't.
Not knocking this list, the shit is real. But I just had a lovely imaginary conversation with a server asking them what they would recommend and then trying something brand new.
I've had this conversation for real. The server's recommendation was that I scan the QR code.
That was my last time going to that restaurant.
Joke's on the server. The robot that will replace their job soon will be more than happy to regale you with any hallucinated information you would like about the subtleties of the menu.
When I go to a restaurant that has QR-only menus, I won't make a scene about it, but it lowers the mental rating I give the place and I'm less likely to return.
I walked into my bank the other day and sorted out something, without an appointment.
Just joined an informal queue (no digital queueing system! The humans used their eyes and brain to remember who next )
Handed over my physical debit card so they could locate my account.
What digital hellscape do you live in? UK here
I dont have a personal smartphone (I do have a pile of them in my office for testing software I make) but I dont use one myself. Its fine, I can do my banking and whatever. I live in Ireland.
It’s always been the case. In previous eras people were “forced” to use mastercard / visa, Windows, AT&T, Western Union, East India Company, Templar bnking, etc.
I am not remotely defending the situation, past or present, just saying it’s a recurring theme.
I'd wager the majority of people on this site could afford $100-$200 for a separate phone that's solely used for apps that mandate Google/Apple services. As a bonus, using the "mainstream" phone with only those apps increases security, compared to having your banking apps on the same phone as other random apps.
> Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone
If my phone breaks, I will die? :)
Perhaps it's this spreading of this lie that it's impossible to live without a phone that is contributing to the problem
No, but you will likely be inconvenienced to a similar level as losing your house keys, and lose access to important services. You won't immediately die, because most people can survive for quite some time on nothing but questionable river water and a piece of cardboard under a bridge, but there is a difference between survival and existing in society.
> Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone.
millions of people would like a word…
> Most things will work but it takes one critical service that doesn't have a viable workaround, and you're forced to buy (and possibly carry) a "mainstream" phone just for that.
Absolutely not, if there is “critical service” that requires an iPhone or Android you call an attorney.
> Banking, government, authentication, postal service and public transit apps are just some of the common categories that will, in the end, force you to use one of those systems, unless governments mandate viable alternatives.
There are now and there always will be alternatives
> As an individual, it feels like my options are to either submit or try to live a hermit's life, bringing endless suffering and exclusion to myself.
As an individual you can and should fight any system that forces you into buying a smartphone. Alternatives must exist even if they might be “incovenient” (e.g. have to do it browser vs. via some “App”)
> can and should fight
I disagree, because the impact on my quality of life from fighting the fight is just not a level of sacrifice that is sensible.
> There are now and there always will be alternatives
The problem is that those "alternatives" often come with serious downsides, from higher cost, to massive inconvenience, to having to work around simply not having a service. And while most of the time it's possible to work around it, most people quickly hit the limit where the cost isn't bearable.
> I disagree, because the impact on my quality of life from fighting the fight is just not a level of sacrifice that is sensible
Interesting. I feel then that if this is the case we cannot complain then, no? If the fight is not worth fighting (I think that it is) than complaints about it are pointless (for the lack of a softer word…)
Browser is great until it tells you that you need to use a mobile device.
This happens all the time on multiple KYC platforms in the US.
My laptop is an equally mobile device, they just don't recognize that.
So far, I have only found this with T-Mobile's app.
The good news is that I can go into the nearby T-Mobile store and have them deal with it.
Bingo.. we will all need to pick which prison we walk ourselves in to: Google or Apple
How about a second phone for the things you list?
Sounds very much like HarmonyOS. I was just in a Huawei Store and I think from a UI/UX perspective, despite being quite new, it's incredibly slick and leaps ahead in great design and integration within the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Even saw it being used as Laptop OS and Mobile, the convergence is quite applaudable.
The kindest was that the store's staff advised against buying the device as it's quite painful to use it with Google's apk & blobs, because it drains more battery than when it's integrated with your system services directly. I told him, that maybe rare, but I'm actually happy to not use Google apps as much as possible and especially not within my operating system. Another point he made was that 5G'A is blocked by Google, about that I know nothing to be honest.
Some Android forks are indeed quite nice, but the issue has always been the updating model, upstream maintenance and compatibility. With Harmony OS a large cooperation with the consumers in focus and the one developing the entire hardware stack is behind the OS development and maintenance making it safer against supply-chain hacks and a deeper integration possible than any other OS.
The next version of it, HarmonyOS NEXT is microkernel based, and they have two new languages of their own.
ArkTS, inspired in Typescript and similar nodejs runtime.
Naturally due to performance problems, they decided to come up with another one, also Typescript inspired, but ahead of time compiled, GC and effects.
It is called Canjgie.
This naturally is a big effort rebooting the whole ecosystem, it only works because Huawei could focus on the Chinese market after losing Android.
This article fails to mention GrapheneOS.
The article starts with Murena, Punkt, Volla which are all based on Android. If you do this, then imho you must mention GrapheneOS, the by far better option (updates, privacy, security, organisation).
Google Pixel with GrapheneOS is the best non-Google phone... ;-)
GrapheneOS doesn't fit the criteria of the list.
https://grapheneos.org/faq#preinstalled-devices
As much as I like graphene it is literary running on google hardware (atm) and uses asop. Even if it is a really good option is you want to run degoogled and secure android.
Murena (/e/ os), Punkt, Volla use aosp
I’m waiting to see what they come up with for the Motorola partnership. Hopefully it’s interesting.
GrapheneOS requires a Google Pixel (currently) though. That's why they omitted it I imagine
I hear the requirements for running Apple's mobile OS are quite stringent too.
You might want to re-read the headline.
Please try a bit harder to respond within the context
GrapheneOS is a Google OS - it's a slightly modified Android developed by Google and continues to be dependent on Google for updates.
(Murena /e/OS is similar. No, slamming the downvote button won't make either of them any less Google dependant OSes.)
you are being downvoted because the article considers de-googled versions of android acceptable. and neither are dependent on google in the sense that even if google stopped publishing android source altogether they could continue to develop the versions they already have. that's the whole point of Free Software and Open Source.
Yeah, and that's utter nonsense. Noone is really stepping up to develop Android beyond repackaging it.
If Google decides to remove a feature, GrapheneOS and other forks will end up without it too. If they stop publishing security patches, the forks end up insecure too.
It's just like all the Chrome "forks" when ManifestV2 died. None of them survived for more than a few versions until maintainers lost interest.
Calling any of these Google free is downright lying.
> This article fails to mention GrapheneOS.
From Wikipedia: "GrapheneOS[b] (/ˈɡræfiːn.oʊˈɛs/) is a free and open-source, privacy- and security-focused, Android-based operating system"
So still Android.
I use a Librem5 Linux phone. With the default PureOS operating system.
Enjoy your freedom, break free from Google and Apple.
Have a full Linux computer in your pocket that you can also use for calling.
See also the discussion on this post: https://mastodon.social/@janvlug/116504044251287290
> Enjoy your freedom, break free from Google and Apple.
You can't escape it.
Your friends and employers and banks use it. The state will soon mandate it for ID. It's the accepted worldwide compute platform, and you're being the nail that sticks out.
Your usage is subject to breaking randomly, being unsupported, losing access or being banned by stepping outside the traffic lines, etc.
They'll use attestation, certs and signing, proprietary APIs, and the scale and might of trillions of dollars to force this.
The only way to "break free" and "enjoy your freedom" is via regulation and -- the better option -- trust busting.
The EU and ASEAN are the best bets for regulation. Getting another Lina Khan that works faster next time is the next best bet for regulation, and possibly a superior outcome that could result in a breakup opening up mobile for true competition.
Being weird in the 0.0001% will not last, nor does it help anyone else escape this monopolistic tyranny.
We need the government to pave the way for dozens of Apple/Google competitors. Or to horizontally split these two companies into dozens of "Baby Bells" that are forced to fight one another.
If a phone can make calls, send texts, read emails, and take pictures it already covers 98% of my use cases.
Bad analogy, but it will rhyme:
If a country can provide housing, roads, fire departments, public transit, etc. that might cover 98% of most people's use cases.
But perhaps that country is also fighting wars, committing genocide, perpetrating mass surveillance, propping up an oligarchy, manipulating currency, practicing authoritarianism, etc. ?
There might be points that need to be made and changes that need to be implemented, even if the average citizen or user doesn't directly see the impact or feel immediate exposure.
One of the reasons this is hard is that the general public doesn't understand the greater second and third order effects. And even if they do, they are typically inarticulate at expressing how this is dysregulated and dysfunctional to the broader economy and capitalism.
Luckily, there are plenty of very wealthy people that are disenfranchised by this that will loudly take up arms. Domestic competitors, business leaders, other impacted industries, etc. That's how and why this will change.
Tim Sweeney isn't the only one interested in this.
Banking basically has to be done via phone now.
Maybe I am lucky in the USA, but every bank I’ve ever done business with can be accessed through a PC and web browser. If any of my banks should decide to remove that option, I just move over to one of the other thousands of banks in the USA.
That or you can simply go in to a branch office.
I keep seeing this, but I've never signed into a single one of my banks, mortgage companies, stock brokers, or credit card companies on my phone. The phone might be used to get a code for 2FA via text, but that's the extent of it. Everything is done on my PC through a dedicated browser specifically for financial purposes. This applies to Chase, Fidelity, Schwab, Wells Fargo, Marcus, Morgan Stanley, Amex, and more. So theoretically there's no reason a Linux OS on a phone can't do any of these things without Google or Apple by simply masquerading as a PC.
Find a better bank I guess. I’ve never used my phone for banking of any kind ever.
The only time I go into a bank is to deposit cash, and that is very rare.
I have no idea why people think in-person banking is superior, it is a pain in the arse.
That said, my bank predates all the fintechs by decades and was phone-first before smartphones.
Sadly, that's not a great answer where most banks are going towards the same direction. It's also convenient to use a phone for banking.
If you never hang out with friends and pay them via a QR code, sure.
I know I live in Oregon or whatever but a lot of people use cash.
"I live in a place that hasn't seen progress and still uses physical cash." Isn't really useful to those of us who live in places that don't even use cash. Also, I don't really want to go back to using physical cash thanks.
I thought y’all just bartered with rhododendrons and cutthroat
I suppose that's region dependent. I have never used (or seen someone use) a QR code to pay.
Yup. I have not tried using a non-GoogleAndroid or iOS smartphone, but what you describe perfectly reflects what I experienced when I went started to work for a large employer 16 y ago. I had been using Linux as my main OS on desktops and mobile computers for at least 15 y by then. Slowly the grind of hacking my system to access the VPN, check email on their Exchange server, open MS Word docs.. it all pushed me to MacOS from about 2015 - 2021. Eventually I could not abide by Apple's incompatible hold on my data, Gatekeeper (I really hate the concept that they must approve software I want to run on my own hardware) and the unrepairability of their machines.. so I am now on Win 11. Right now, considering the trade offs, I think this is the best choice. I see a lot of people extolling Linux lately, so maybe it is time to try going back.
Back OT, smartphones were always less open than the general purpose computers of yore. And it looks like they are increasingly a requirement for participating in many societies. In general I don't find this a good thing, but have little faith that regulators will 'solve' is because they have their own pitfalls (recent examples from EU: age verification and chat control).
I use a smartphone less than most people. Things I already could not do without a Google or Apple phone:
Use some banking apps. In fact I cannot use one banking app I otherwise would because it will only work if you have no non-store apps installed at all.
A regulatory requirement to prove my ID without using the mobile app would be a 20 min+ each way drive (plus walking, time doing it etc.) to another town.
> The EU and ASEAN are the best bets for regulation.
Did you read the recent HN stories about the EU's age verification app that will only work on attested phones? Lots of other governments (EU and non-EU) doping similar things.
> We need the government to pave the way for dozens of Apple/Google competitors. Or to horizontally split these two companies into dozens of "Baby Bells" that are forced to fight one another.
I have very little confidence that is likely. Politically governments are far more pro-big business and anti-competition than they have been in a long time.
> Being weird in the 0.0001% will not last, nor does it help anyone else escape this monopolistic tyranny.
Every single person who does not go along, is a a political and commercial argument not to remove alternatives. If I use a website and an app to bank or buy something, it pushes up the stats for the web app vs the mobile app.
> EU's age verification app that will only work on attested phones?
This is not a single unified front. Multiple battles are ongoing simultaneously.
There are strong proponents of anti-monopoly and digital sovereignty in government, just as there are those that want to push for a surveillance state.
Here are some recent and non-insignificant things that the EU and UK have required Google and Apple do:
- Support "side loaded" apps (as Google works to remove the ability)
- Standardize on USB-C
- Force alternative payments platforms
- Force Apple to stop requiring WebKit and WebKit runtimes
They're just getting started!
> I have very little confidence that is likely.
I have a great deal of confidence that the world is ready for this. Every non-US nation wants to break the stranglehold US tech has on their countries. The EU, UK, and ASEAN have a tremendous amount of power here.
We also have a huge reservoir of political support for breaking up tech monopolies inside the US. Lots of high profile politicians are ready to go to work on this, on both sides of the aisle.
Moreover, you have every single other company on the planet that wants this duopoly fractured. Entire industries that salivate over this.
It's just a matter of time and making sure we make these points articulate and loudly heard.
This is far more effective than trying to hack your device and proclaim "year of linux on android 2030". That doesn't work. It's a miserable experience and doesn't help a single other person.
>Your friends and employers and banks use it. The state will soon mandate it for ID.
You just buy a separate, cheap Android/Google phone for all these things. Emphasis on buying the cheapest one possible, so Google and Apple aren't making much money off you.
Great comment
>We need the government to
Since they'll never, any marketers scrolling by: this is your time to scheme your way into the Linux phone promotion/sales game.
Jolla still exists:
https://jolla.com/
They develop Sailfish, a non-Google Linux-based mobile OS that can apparently run Android apps decently in a sandbox.
They are also less than 2 months away from the first deliveries of the Jolla Phone 2026, a new SailfishOS device they have designed and built from scratch. Over the past years the official Sailfish experience has largely been relying on Sony Open Device program - a co-operation which hasn't always been very smooth for the customers.
I have been daily driving SFOS on a Sony Xperia 10 III for the past 3 years and it works well for me. I think the 10 III is the current "peak Sailfish" at least among the officially supported devices but this should change once the new phones roll out in early July. For new orders of the 2026 phone they are currently aiming for delivery in September in the supported markets (EU, UK, Norway and Switzerland).
I have rage-quit apple for a C2 and the muscle memory still kicks in after months. The ergonomy of Sailfish is sometimes bizarre, the little top left dot for navigation for example. Still it does everything I need, just with a very bad camera. Let's hope the 2026 will fix that.
I've been on Apple for a couple of years after a decade on Android and I still haven't internalized all of iOS's inconsistencies. But admittedly I don't do much on my phone besides SMS, calendar, and maps, so using other apps is always a bit of initial relearning.
Oh but you don't usually need to care for the dot itself so much as it's just an indicator that you can do a middle swipe left/right to move between stacked pages.
Ah yes, that explains it all! I'm still learning how to unlearn.
I’m surprised that the Seeker is not even mentioned. I understand it’s Solana, it’s blockchain, whatever people think about it... to me it’s the only serious attempt at creating an app store that can compete with apple or google. What’s the point of independent hardware if the whole sw stack is them?
You mean https://solanamobile.com/seeker ?
All of the copy seems to be built around Solana, "Web3" and crypto. It doesn't seem to have any appeal outside of that. It's not clear what the software even is. The docs [0] seem to indicate it's just Android, with some SDKs for interacting with the "Web3" stuff.
This isn't a "serious attempt at creating an app store that can compete with apple or google", it's just another "Web3" project. It's exciting to people within that ecosystem and utterly uninteresting to anybody who isn't.
0: https://docs.solanamobile.com/get-started/development-setup
The majority of these phones are running a modified version of Android. I wouldn’t call that non-Google. There is a total lack of diversity in the phone market. I’ve been trying to find a minimal feature phone for my kids and looked at Nokia, but non-Android Nokia phones don’t support enough US cellular bands.
At this point, I am thinking about connecting a stock Android phone to a server and access it via scrcpy from my laptop whenever I need to interact with some stupid app bs that could've just been a website.
At least this way I can keep the majority of bloat away from primary communications device.
Every such post brings tears to my Nokia history filled eyes...
Things could have been so different.
Many years later and I'm still bitter that the tech press laughed Windows Phone out of the room straight to its demise. Yes it had very little developer support but at some point things were looking up. It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.
A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing
The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete, not the press.
Not many tech products exite me less than the concept of a Microsoft Windows 365 Copilot Cortana phone.
> The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete
As I recall Microsoft threw quite a lot of resources into Windows Phone.
My then-employer had apps for Android and Apple, and Microsoft literally paid for us to port it to Windows Phone. Microsoft brought Nokia, who had dominated the industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
And Microsoft was early to the mobile party too - you could get an iPaq H3660 running Microsoft Pocket PC 2000, seven years before the first iPhone. Keyboardless Fujitsu and Compaq tablets ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2003, seven years before the iPad.
They weren't as good as what came later. Chunky, fragile devices, resistive touchscreens, stylus input with a tiny on-screen keyboard, worse batteries, worse wifi, barely any mobile data. And at the time, $500 seemed hugely expensive compared to a normal phone, even if these days there are plenty of $1000 smartphones.
But there's an alternate reality where Microsoft had a 'first mover advantage' and captured a big slice of the smartphone-and-tablet market.
Zune was also... not good. I was given one. It was defective. I think I got a warranty replacement and gave it to a friend who basically never used it as far as I know.
Nadella's Azure play basically saved Microsoft in my opinion. They totally blew mobile and desktop Windows and Office were declining markets and XBox was a sideshow.
Windows phones were great at the time, everyone I knew who had a Lumia loved it, but yeah imagining what it would be like today makes me shudder.
Yes, and let's not forget Stephen Elop's 'Burning Platform' Memo
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2031
Paywalled for me
>> It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people.
I loved my Windows phones (especially near the end when you were getting Pixel & Apple level hardware for pennies on the dollar), but is this really true? They had limited hardware partners (and the disaster with Nokia), lukewarm carrier deals, absolutely no apps, but who were these "influential people" who made fun of it? If anything it seemed more like no-one was even aware of it. I remember the little press they did get being quite positive on the devices & OS, while critical of the broader ecosystem, which seems fair.
Given what Microsoft has done with the state of Windows with built-in telemetry, the attempts to add Recall, and now AI features they are adding to many customers dismay, you have them doing anything different with Windows Phone if it had gained traction than Apple and Google?
> A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing
Initially read this ending on … amazon
Please Universe, don’t give us the Amazon Phone as alternative.
Intel fumbling smartphone's cpu felt like this too.
Eh, Microsoft got bored of developing their own browser and just pushes Chromium on their users now. Probably they would have just turned Windows Phones into another Android too.
Why not Blackberry as the third ecosystem? They used QNX, a respected realtime OS, and had a history of making appealing, highly functional phones.
Lack of applications. They decided to fix that by adding an Android subsystem, and nobody wanted to publish their Android applications to the Amazon store even with Amazon throwing gobs of money at publishers and only some APIs having been moved into Google Play Services.
Sure, but the same applies to Windows mobile. Why favor Windows over Blackberry mobile devices for a 3rd ecosystem?
The phone was terrible.
I really want to try one of these one day: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/promoted/
But I haven't dared yet because I kind of expect it will not be able to replace my current phone.
Ubuntu Touch was amazing, way ahead of Android and iOS when it came out, the touch gestures were so much better than what was available.
But then it's just maintained by very few people nowadays and half abandoned.
You can buy a used Pixel 3a if you want to toy around with it, they cost nothing.
That's so sad. I even clicked around on their page to find out how I could contribute as a developer, but their gitlab repo seems abandoned since way before the latest release and all "how to get involved" articles eventually point to 404 pages.
Is anyone successfully running Android inside a container in Linux, for their daily apps?
This was the only way to run Bedrock Minecraft for a hot minute on my kids machines
I moved to a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS a few weeks ago. I can do everything I need to, everything I want to, and with more control over my digital footprint and what data is being collected about me. I've completely moved off Google services.
The OS experience is pretty impressive for not being made by an evil megacorp. The hardware is fairly midrange, but midrange today is last year's top end, and unless you're some expert photographer or needing phone VR or whatever, it's a great, normal smartphone experience.
I'm donating to the open source devs who make my apps, and they respond when I ask for useful features instead of always enshittifying it. For the corpo apps, it pulls from Google Play.
/e/ OS lied about the security and how "degoogled" the phone really is because it sends data to Google for MicroG
Only to the extent you use Micro-G, and Micro-G mitigates a large portion of the Google data harvesting. The built in App Lounge does not require a Google login to pull downloads from the Play Store, so it's possible to remain entirely anonymous to Google.
I've only looked into one device en detail, the Jolla.
Okay, no touch typing, maps apps don't start or don't find your location, WhatsApp probably doesn't work and I guess I don't have to start with banking apps.
What would a mobile OS look like if the browser became the operating system and apps were sandboxed WASM instead of native APKs?
I guess what would be the advantage? You move up another layer of software. Is it any different from the OS?
Maybe someone could revive FirefoxOS
this is what we need
Palm webOS has entered the chat!
I'm writing this reply from an AuroraOS phone (a descendant of Sailfish OS).
Yes, it is quite hard to get a non-duopoly smartphone..
I looked at Punkt.
They keep saying "If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product". Okay, all fine and well.
But what will my phone still actually be able to do if / when I stop my subscription? Not a single clear answer besides "[…] gradual feature deactivation, and ultimately reverting to a device running AOSP".
Doesn’t really inspire confidence.
Swiss privacy phones? https://www.punkt.ch
What subscription?
It makes me sad that the F(x)tec Pro1 X never got a successor. It looks like a very cool phone.
So which one has the biggest chance to be Android/iOS alternative?
Many many years ago, smarphone users had these choices:
Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, PalmOS... what else?
Windows phone still had the best ux of any smartphone, I just wish the ecosystem was there. To this day nothing even comes close to smart tiles.
Wonder how this works in a byod corp environment?
Given how many of these were running android, I'm surprised Mudita Kompakt wasn't listed.
A less drastic option is get an Android phone and put Lineage Android on it. https://lineageos.org/
There's a bunch of officially supported phones but most Android phones will have unofficial support also.
HarmonyOS from Huawei is no longer based on Android, but it’s not an open OS.
I usually buy either Xiaomi or Oppo phones and I am pretty happy.
Still a "Google phone" as per the definition of this article. They're looking for Linux-based non-Android phones.
Which brand do you prefer? I'm currently looking at both Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Oppo Find x9 Ultra.
Are Xiaomi phones still legal in the EU with their proprietary chargers? All phones need to have USB-C and USB-PD now.
Which proprietary charger? I always had Xiaomi phones and they always use USB ports.
Xiaomi uses a proprietary charging protocol, I believe it is called Hypercharge. It also requires a proprietary cable with an extra pin/chip.
Looks like they opened the protocol, https://new.c.mi.com/global/post/1895204
Also, it's only for fast charging, you can use any other charger or wire without an issue.
You can charge it just fine with regular usb-c charger. So not a problem.
At very limited charging speeds though. That goes against the USB-PD mandate.
The wife has a Xiaomi phone, we live in EU.
It was sold normally as any other cellphone.
> But can I run my apps?
> Well, probably, yes.
Even with "probably" as a qualifier, this is disingenuous.
Not even Android has caught up to the highest tier of apps available on iOS.
> highest tier of apps available on iOS.
which apps do you mean?
What I miss a lot is to be able to have a kind of "virtual" android running in a cloud instance. That could look legit to Google to not be restricted by integrity check and all. But there I could share access to my single instance to my multiple non Google non play store devices, eventually sharing access between multiple persons...
Like for example, every crappy things like banks nowadays requires their own shitty app. It might be a pain in the ass to share between phones or to reinstall if you lose or change your phone. And all these useless app consume really a lot of storage resulting in my phone's being always full.
That would be perfect to access it in a kind of remote access for use once in a while.
err, what? not a single mention of grapheneos in the entire article?