[SOLVED] Will Linux Phones ever become commercially viable and decrease to a price point of 200-400 USD?
Don't say, hey android has Linux in it, yeah no, idc, I want to know how far we are from buying a Linux phone at a price point of 200 USD.
A Linux phone is one which is built completely on Linux, uses Linux apps and most important has a terminal.
I don't want a Linux Phone for privacy, although that's a great reason, but I want it for the freedom it provides me. Hell, I don't care if Android itself comes with a terminal and has similar features to Linux, I just want a Terminal which can install apps, where I can write commands and it will execute it. Complete Control on my phone and how it behaves is what I want.
I want to tell it when to sleep, when not to sleep, when to boot, when to edit a file and how, when to take a screenshot and what to do with it and where to save it, etc, etc. I hope you get the idea.
Before the rise of Android and ios I'd have said it was possible, but the goal posts have shifted pretty far. Unless something backed by a corporate entity or government rises Up, it's a no. A chromeos type thing for smartphone is not going to happen for mass market, because there is already Android.
Discounting Android, the last mile of what a smartphone is capable of can not be accomplished in Foss manner, without end to end verified OS images and some kind of secure enclave for banking and "security" features, carriers and banks are not going to get on board any more. Convenience features like DRM video streaming, casting also probably are not achievable either
True, with the goalposts. Nowadays we are happy if we can root/custom ROM and are still able to access our banking apps.
I went back to a pixel, as I couldn't get my oneplus with lineageOS to do Android pay, after custom roms on all my phones since the HTC Dream, I have been running stock for the last 18 months, kind of miss it
There is a way to get it working, but it's a pain and a half in the rear and you never know when they will kill the workaround.
We do banking with general purpose computers. How do you figure banking will be a sticking point?
Things like androidpay/apple pay type functions require a chain of security checks, on Android it's levels of safety net. some banking apps require similar
Ive been on Graphene OS for a few months now and can confirm that banking apps work, but Google Wallet does not. One of my banking apps required me to toggle off hardened malloc in favor of Android's standard malloc though, which definitely had me raising an eyebrow.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about banks it’s that they were still using ie 8 when nobody else was.
I think you're totally right! It's kinda hard to use banking apps with a custom ROM already.. Unless some big corporation makes a move into something different we're gonna be stucked in the iOS and Android chains ..In that case I wish Microsoft would have been successful with their mobile OS so other companies had the guts to launch their own and compete in a more fragmented market
I can stream DRM content just fine on my Linux PC though what would be different about a phone?
At 720p you can, not 1080p or 2160p - Linux meets minimal widevine
Oh really? Damn that's crazy never realised
Could've sworn I've watched stuff at 1080 though I usually hate watching anything lower res than that