- Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
- flash a recovery.img,
- load into recovery mode (which, depending on the phone, might need extra work)
- wipe some caches,
- select new os/rom image,
- pray it doesn’t brick your phone.
You’d think someone would’ve learned a thing or two from the easy graphical installations linux and even windows have been offering since the late 2000s.
Because if it was easy you wouldn’t feel the need to buy a new one every few years.
purposefully. they dont want you messing with their device. its that simple.
“Their”?
Yes. In the minds of executives, we’re paying to use their devices instead of purchasing it. They don’t believe that we should have the right to do whatever we want with the device we purchased.
These executives are from the era where it was a quarter for every sms message. Still chasing the gravy train.
ha, you werent under the impression you were buying a device, were ya?
youre buying a software license that happens to come with a piece of hardware.
youre buying a software license that happens to come with a piece of hardware.
They claim that, but they’re lying.
yeah but their lawyers have louder voices. it kinda sucks how they obfuscate our rights.
Exactly, its like if I claimed online that I had a million bucks - even if I weren’t lying, it doesn’t matter unless the right people believe my claim. It’s the same premise here really, the truth only counts when you actually have power sadly.
They’re only lying as long as people can continue to over and over find their way around the obstacles they place in the way, and it gets harder all the time. They have more money and more resources and more organization than the hackers trying to defeat them, they’re winning the war of attrition. We may be able to make small breakthroughs here and there, but overall we continue to lose more and more territory, because the amount of effort is disproportionate to the goals. Most of what’s left of the custom ROM community has given up on the losing battle with manufacturers and providers and changed focus to the various freephones but even they have their own troubles and are fragmented and short-lived. Between carriers, manufacturers, and content providers the whole mobile ecosystem is designed to be impenetrable. It is intentionally a fortress full of deadly traps and open source supporters have no hope to breach it anytime soon.
Just like you can’t break a consumer’s product, but The Crew is closing down in march and ubisoft made no end of life effort meaning everyone will have useless software after the servers are down.
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Yes, they think it’s their device even after they sold it. The FTC really ought to be making it abundantly clear that they’re wrong, but it’s been regulatory-captured, so…
Fairphone makes it as easy as they can to install /e/OS or any other custom ROM, probably because they believe in selling the phone as the hardware itself, with you being able to choose your OS.
like it should be. like we are doing with PCs.
but a fairphone does come with a very uncompetitive price tag, trust me, i own one.
Assuming price isn’t an issue, would you recommend it? I’ve been looking into them for my next phone whenever this pixel decides to die.
definetely, i’ve only owned xiaomi and huawei devices that were on the brink of not working at all sometimes. compared to that, my Fairphone 4 is pretty reliable.
although the camera could be better, it’s perfectly usable. take a look at my cat trying to figure out what a cordless drill is.
i would call CPU performance “good enough” and GPU performance “kinda bad for the money”. even though fortnite, star rail and genshin impact run at a stable 30fps on low settings at 100% resolution.
and the battery lasts the day only if you’re lucky.
all in all, if has been my companion for one and a half years now and i don’t regret spending full price on it. i imagine the Fairphobe 5 being even better, it supposedly performed very well in mkbhd’s blind camera test.
and don’t get me started about the ability to repair this thing. i’ve had it disassembled down to the motherboard multiple times, there are no adhesives in there, like at all. the CPU has some kind of hard thermal pad.
How’s audio for videos or calls, or auto brightness? Any other annoying things? I’m interested in getting one when my phone eventually dies, but Linus from ltt was having a lot of annoying issues with it.
i have the FP4, and there are definetely some small things. but the major ones all get patched in a couple of weeks. the smaller issues might be bunched into a larger update. there was also the issue of ghost touch with my model, but after contacting support they sent me a replacement screen to swap in.
if you are aware of a certain issue and want to wait until they fix it, they have a changelog for every model. here’s the one for the FP5: https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/18682800465169-Fairphone-5-OS-Release-Notes
that notification thing is really annoying, but i’m certain they are aware of that and are trying to fix it ASAP. if linus is complaining about your product, that’s a lotta bad press.
edit: forgot to answer your questions. volumes are fine and adjustable. although the loudspeaker isn’t as loud as i would expect it sometimes. auto brightness works well, but it does sometimes stay bright after going into a dark room. usually i just nudge the brightness down, and it’ll work after that.
The web-based installer for GrapheneOS is very easy to use. The catch is that it only works for Pixel phones (and only those that are still receiving updates).
If you don’t mind me polling your opinion: do you recommend Graphene for someone previously used to Cyanogen / Lineage? I recently upgraded to a Pixel 8 from quite an old handset and I’m not particularly fond of the stock ROM. Much has changed since the last time I had to think about this stuff! I primarily care about privacy, and use my cell for little more than phone calls, messaging, and its camera.
Yes- I’d recommend Graphene to anyone who can live without Google Pay. I’ve only been using it for a month but everything has worked without issue and with the added benefit of “storage scopes” and Google Play sand-boxing.
Mine works, but some banking apps won’t work if they require full SafetyNet compliance. So that could be a deal-breaker for some people too.
Pay or Play?
I mentioned both. Google pay does not work in graphene. Google play works in graphene and has additional sand boxing implemented.
I decided to install Graphene before looking up the installation and was blown away by how easy it is. I’d been on stock android for years and was expecting a similar experience as OP describes. My very old custom ROM folder is filled with files with names like ‘confirmedsafeblob’ and ‘bricksafe’ that I don’t even know what they are anymore but speak to some past misery. Then beep-boop done with the web installer.
It used to be easy… When people were actually making custom ROMs for everything and you could literally just plug the device into your PC and run a program to do everything. I don’t think there is anything inherently in most phones stopping this; it’s the lack of people developing custom stuff for every piece of hardware out there. Some phones do actively try and thwart custom ROMs, such as Samsung with their Knox bullshit, but most don’t need to; nobody is hacking them in the first place.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’
Phones by and large are seen as a locked system: you specifically choose to buy Android or iOS and stick with that.
There’s really no incentive for companies to make different OS installs easy. I’d say there’s plenty of reasons not to: do you really want to give the average user that much power to fuck up their phone? I assume there’s also some security implications if they made it too easy to fiddle with.
So yeah, it’s difficult because you’re fiddling with something that wasn’t meant to be an end-user thing in the first place.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love it if they made phones much more open in terms of hardware and software, but the big guys aren’t going to do it.
That doesn’t really make sense. Every paragraph, except the 2nd, also applies to PCs, yet you can install a different OS.
The reason is quite simple: more money from users.
Well, PCs have been quite non changing compared to phones over the decades (not saying they don’t change but way way less).
Linux didn’t become user friendly very quickly.
PCs aren’t phones -They have different expectations and histories.
Would you ever consider buying individual parts, and building your own gaming phone?
The end result is still the same: Less consumer power,.
Absofuckinglutely yes I would.
The big phone manufacturers banded together to extinguish that modular phone startup because it would have been too good for consumers. Then they made it harder to swap out phone batteries to punish us for dreaming.
Edit for sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonebloks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AraI assumed the non swappable batteries was to improve the waterproofing.
“Yes of course. We’re crushing orphans in our machine for their own good, because we care about orphans.”
It was to reduce the cost of making phones water resistant.
Probably similar to how manufacturers tell you it’s for your own safety and “think of children!”
The modular phone was a nice dream but IMO a fairytale dream, even Apple have had problems fitting all the needed stuff together so good luck with a Lego phone except if it’s the size of a brick.
Now it’s probably the time for a linux/free/foss phone, as IMO they start to be both standardised and actually quite enough for the moment;
My old Xiaomi 9 pro that goes used for 80€ used in mint condition has 6GB RAM 128GB storage, SD card, octo core CPU etc. That’s close to my penultimate PC. The next next next version (Xiaomi 12Pro) has about the same specs except the camera stuff.
That’s when FOSS people can start to dig into stuff, not when specs changes crazily every year.
Would you ever consider buying individual parts, and building your own gaming phone?
Yes! Such a phone (that’s also sufficiently mainstream and modern) is a dream come true. I want no selfie camera, I have no use for that. I want a decent camera that’s totally inside the body (no bump, no need for 5+ cameras). I want a newest Snapdragon. I want a physical fingerprint reader. And literally no major phone manufacturer is gonna make such a phone.
Especially the Snapdragon one is pretty much incompatible with all the other things - newest Snapdragon equals whatever else is trendy, which means under screen fingerprint reader, 5+ cameras with a huge bump on the back and the tiniest possible selfie camera on the front which makes the display look uglier (I think I’ll be okay with under screen selfie cameras once they hit the mainstream).
If I got the option to buy a modular phone where all this would be as optional modules, it would be so great! I wouldn’t have to spend $1000 every time I want the newest Snapdragon and get all the other cool things I have no use for.
We would like to do that - lime we do with PCs - because we’re nerds. It would be a veeeery small market, just like people who build PCs
But then everyone’s pc was built somewhere by someone. Smartphones could use the same model. It would improve competition between specialised parts manufacture, premade units could be priced according to the sum and performance of their parts, ewaste reduction when people can upgrade only the part they want. There is a lot of consumer upside whether you build or buy premade.
I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.
I have been tweaking my phone ever since Nexus 3 age. And only recently settle in the default MIUI/HyperOS and that is only after unlocking and removing a bunch of bloats.
Really? You don’t hear users complaining about bloat, duplicate apps, phones that no longer get updates, or laggy UIs? My Redmi phone has good hardware and became so much better when I installed a different ROM on it.
Yeah, xiaomi mi 9t with pixelos. Then Universal Android Debloater, disable all the telemetry (wish I could just use this thing without google, but thats a topic for another day), got a new case and battery. It literally feels like i just bought a new phone even though this thing will be 5 years old!
Everyone around me uses iPhones and I hear no complaints. And the folks who buy Android tend to prefer Samsung here, which seems to get decent updates.
I’d never even heard of Redmi, but Googling it, it appears to be the entry level line of Xiaomi. When you buy a budget phone from an already budget brand, I’m not surprised that the user experience out of the box isn’t that great.
I’ve had Sony, Nexus and Samsung before. The consistent pattern was that they all had bloat on the phone, made software decisions that benefited them, not me, and after a certain age tended to slow down. I know Apple is even worse about that, so I never even consider them seriously.
I bought this phone because I could put the software I wanted on it (and it has an ear phone jack and SD card slot). I wouldn’t consider it if I couldn’t. My tendency to drop phones horribly also pushes me to a cheaper tier 😁.
I know I’m not the average user, but I’ve helped people with carrier phones that had fine hardware, but filled with shitty apps and services that were there to just harvest their money/information.
Samsung is riddled with bloatware.
It’s that bad these days? I’ve only had one Samsung phone, three phones ago, and it didn’t really have any bloatware on it, except their own Galaxy store app thing.
It’s horrible. I really like the hardware quality a lot aside from battery life, but the software they add is horrible. Tons of useless stuff like their AR Zone augmented reality app. They also make it impossible to uninstall or even disable. Really annoying.
That would certainly annoy me if I couldn’t uninstall some bullshit thing like that. I don’t imagine a phone NEEDS that to just work.
Guess I’m not returning to Samsung any time soon.
I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard an average user say: ‘I like my phone’s hardware, I just wish it had a different OS.’
I’d say that happens mostly because they don’t even know there are alternatives. Also, like machinin said earlier, bloat is a very common problem in Android phones, even high end stuff from big companies, Samsung being one of the worst offenders in that regard.
The average user doesn’t know the phone doesn’t need half of that shit, so he just shrugs and carries on.
In summary, the corporate bean counters don’t want to give up control over your device. That’s really all it boils down to. They’re not doing anyone any favors, that’s for sure. It’s pure greed
This story only makes sense on its own momentum.
I do remember reading somewhere that smartphones don’t have a standardized bootloader like PCs do with BIOS and UEFI, and that it can vary between manufacturers and devices. Could be wrong about it. Also some manufacturers really don’t want you to be able to install custom software, like Samdung in North America. If you buy a Samdung device in NA…even if it is carrier unlocked… the bootloader will be impossible to unlock.
Adding to the “no standard bootloader” point: you can’t boot your typical smartphone from a DVD or USB stick like you do for a PC. The procedure to flash a new rom is probably meant only for recovery purposes by tech support, rather than the end user
Unlock bootloader (depending on vendor, you have to do an online verification),
A few years ago, there were huge issues with reseller unlocking the bootloader to inject ads on the phones they sold, which forced many android phone manufacturers to add online verification with long wait time to prevent bulk unlock.
That may be an excuse they used, but I doubt that was really their motivation.
GrapheneOS is a really easy process, hardest part is unlocking the bootloader (which isn’t hard at all).
Rest of the process is just clicking 3* buttons on a website and you’re done.
*Some buttons you have to click multiple times
Well, I don’t have a pixel phone and they’re not officially sold in my country :/
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can confirm. the hardest part is getting a pixel phone
There are a lot of reasons here which are correct, but one huge Factor when I was working with custom roms was the fact that the actual underlying hardware driver and firmware were a black box. Generally speaking you would need to harvest the binary files that made things like the camera, gps, and/or touchscreen work. Sometimes it wasnt too hard if you were going from one android skin to another that used the same underlining operating system, but if you wanted to make serious changes, and the phone manufacturer wasn’t great at sharing, it could take a very long time to figure out what data needed to be passed to the camera to make it turn on and be available to use. What got even worse is if you wanted to upgrade your android version (5 to 6 lets say), where android made serious changes under the hood, you ran the risk of having these blobs not even work with the system. They would expect something that android no longer passed or provided. Or they were using some deprecated API to make their function a accessable. It just became impossible to do without being able to recompile the binary only portions that weren’t subject to the gpl. As android has gotten more security conscious it has made things even more complicated.
I can’t answer your question, but is quite unfortunate. It really shortens the lifespan of many phones as they stop receiving OS and security updates after awhile (and in many cases, right away).
I don’t think most users care about that. I certainly use mine until they get slow and stop holding charge.
People I work with tend to get a new one when their provider pokes them to get a new phone, since way too many people think a phone contract should cost £50 a month and that the phone is somehow “free”.
Google should push third parties to a default build of Android that Google maintain, rather than having to update and maintain their own. Imagine if you had to go to Dell or Lenovo or ASUS for your Windows updates? The current Android ecosystem is nonsense.
Because Linus Torvalds decided to license Linux under only version 2 of the GPL back in the day (instead of the recommended “2 or any later version”), which means Linux’s license can’t be upgraded to version 3 and thus devices running Linux (including Android) will forever remain vulnerable to Tivoization.
Thus once again proving that GPLv3 is the best license. At least he didn’t use a corporate bootlicker license like MIT.
We know exactly what would’ve happened if Linus had picked a permissive license instead of a copyleft one: it’s called “BSD” and it’s a lot less popular.
linux couldn’t be as big as today with gpl3
Because vendors realized they’ve made a mistake. They’ve lost control they can’t regain. Same thing with game consoles.
So, it’s actually a feature for the companies selling you phones.
For many reasonable vendors, this process is very unlikely to brick your phone, and requires minimal effort to unlock the bootloader or load/change the recovery.
However, many phone vendors (Xiaomi was the one example I know) subsidize phone price with data surveillance and ads; so they don’t want users to use other OS, as it hurts their revenue.
GrapheneOS’s guided installation is simple enough anyone should be able to install it IMO.
Provided you must use a google device
