This will become increasingly important as Google has boiled the frog too fast while trying to force its new store policies + banning sideloading; however, all of the pieces are now in place for them to try again in a year or 2, which history shows us they will. It’s certainly time to start toying with Linux phones if you haven’t already. This year I picked up an Xperia 10 to flash Sailfish OS on—which has rough edges (many of the hardware issues should be fixed in the next release), but Android App support bridges some of the gaps in application support.
I agree with the ethos but "banning installing" wouldn't have been correct here.
There should be terminology for installing from the source of your choice which doesn't carry the marginal or sinister connotations of "sideloading" though.
"Freeloading" would have been a good one but... yeah
Doesn't feel like any conspiracy.. Isn't sideloading installing through adb instead of from the system itself? (by clicking on an APK or using an app Store like Xiaomi/Googled/Huawei/Fdroid)
I just bought a second Fairphone 4 just to play a bit with pmOS. I'm really surprised by the state it is. It's not fully usable as a daily driver yet, but with some work it can get there. Waydroid works also pretty good. Of course, the major problem are banking apps and similar. I hope that some progress can be done in this direction. And, who needs working audio, if you can have python and git in your phone!? :P
I made a partition for Nix on mine so I have all the tools I need while not relying on Jolla to package things (the installable package list is quite barren). My audio works from the speakers, but the patches to make the headphone jack (something you Fairphone users no longer know of :P) work won’t come til the next release. For banks, I just use cash or log into the website on my laptop if required—while I will refuse goods/services that require an apps to the fullest extent possible (couldn’t get around TicketMaster which was a real blood-boiler beyond just the “phone required” aspect).
Did you test apps that need sensors and notifications? If I want to run an OpenStreetmaps apk (there's no good way to run OMS on Linux natively), do I get GPS and compass heading? Do I get turn-by-turn navigation? Even if the app is in the background?
But for the reason an antiquated os like postmarketos are suggested is that the project is being opportunistic thinking this is a chance they can be relevant. Additionally, the population of HN has more sentimental view on these legacy operating systems and view it as a chance to go back to the past and use software they are familiar with.
I had an Xperia for awhile. I liked it while it was new, but after a year the back started peeling off.
Pretty lousy for a phone that was supposed to be waterproof. At that point I realized that the Japanese change out their phones every 6-12 months, thus Sony didn't realize that the market demands much longer reliability in a smartphone.
They do a good job contributing upstream to the kernel & are one of the few phones out there that still allow users to unlock the bootloader & they support headphone jacks + microSD cards.
I think this stuff is super important, simply because there is a ton of stuff we can't do using our phones today.
Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware.
That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing could also enable life-saving applications. And unlike todays Internet where a database query in Cloudflare or a DNS bug in es-east-1 can disrupt half the services we use, this kind of technology really could withstand major attacks on infrastructure hubs, like the Internet was originally designed to do.
Twenty years ago, if you told me that by today we'd have smart phones with eight or more cores, each outperforming an average desktop computer of the time, with capacitive OLED touch screens, on a cellular network with hundreds of megabits of bandwidth, I'd find it believable, because that's where technology was headed at the time.
If you said that they'd effectively all be running either a port of OS X or a Linux distribution with a non-GNU but open source userspace, I'd consider that a somewhat unexpected success of open-source software. I would not at all expect that it would be as locked down as video game console.
The more time passes, the less I use my phone for, and the more likely I am to whip out my laptop to accomplish something, like it's 2005.
The open source components in your android phone are suffering from what FSF called "tivoization" a few decades ago. They can't reasonably be replaced without breaking security measures, a pretty high barrier for most users, even sometimes for advanced users. It removes the biggest benefits of being open source.
>Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere.
(if dumbed down) What's are the gaps in features and functionality between what you're describing and what might be achievable today (given enough software glue) with an SDR transceiver and something like Reticulum [1] on an Android?
SDR + something like Reticulum or Yggdrasil would definitely provide the infra or network fabric for the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
However, a normal Android, e.g. a Pixel 7, can't to my knowledge be turned into a web server or a podman host for containers. (I know of people hosting websites on old Androids that are flashed or hacked).
Given phones already have a WiFi/WLAN radio chip, it's a shame to need extra kit for connectivity.
It's something that's been on my mind a lot recently and so you provoked me into writing down a series of scenarios in story format that illustrates what SHOULD be possible using current hardware, were it not, as dlcarrier says, locked down like a games console.
I installed PmOS on my old Xiaomi redmi note 9 with KDE Plasma Desktop. It works remarkably well, with the exception of sound. I am using it as a full Linux PC when I am on the go with my large power bank and a full sized folding keyboard/track pad.
For my use case it's beyond great, albeit the small screen and the aarch architecture I can develop small projects as if I was on my PC.
My current phone OP13r doesn't is supported yet by PmOS, when someone does it Im gonna try to install it on one of the slots.
Lineageos maintains a list and you can filter for devices with official bootloader unlock https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/. Buy only these devices to signal to these companies that this matters.
Noteably OnePlus 13 and Pixel 9a, both 2025 phones, can be unlocked.
If someone want something also quite recent and cheaper in this supported list there is also motorola edge+ (2023) with good specs. I got myself refurbished with perfect condition for just 240usd.
It's a shame phones didn't get anything similar to BIOS back in a day.
Imagine if every laptop manufacturer had not a couple of incompatible sensors, but a whole unique boot system only allowing you to boot a crippled version of Windows ME.
I've never seen UEFI in any mainstream Android device.
The problem is... in the x86 world, even the most modern systems around still ship with decades of garbage. INT 10h and VBE, every x86 system still speaks it - either directly in the card, or emulated in BIOS/UEFI compatibility layers, so even a basic "hello world" can get video output, 09h/16h gives you keyboard input, 13h gives you disk I/O, 14h a serial port.
That means that at least the initial bringup for a second-stage bootloader is incredibly easy, less than 40 lines of assembler code [1]. And when you write a tiny operating system, as long as you're content with that basic foundation of 640x480 and text output, it will run on any x86 compatible PC or server.
On anything ARM, that's outright impossible to do and that is a large part of the problem. ARM is power efficient, but it comes at a serious cost. The low level bringup will be handled by the board's ROM, similar to PC BIOS/EFI, but after control is passed to the OS it gets different - all the OS gets is the devicetree stating "here's the memory addresses and interfaces of the hardware in the system", but you still need to write drivers for each and every individual thing from the bottom up, there is no framework for even most basic hardware interactions.
Yeah, the requirement to build and provide device trees for most mobile devices is the huge issue. For all of the garbage we have gotten from buggy ass ACPI tables on assorted PC’s, it’s absolutely true that it solved a lot of headaches with hardware discovery/enumeration.
It’s really too bad that ARM had adopted ACPI as part of their SystemReady certification. It does work, and not reinventing the wheel is always a wise where feasible, but I think we could absolutely push something better.
If anyone wants a table for the testing devices (which are arguably still quite stable!), here's a table I put together by scraping the site a few months ago:
Readit News
It's called installing. Language matters and I see no reason to concede this point in Google's favour.
There should be terminology for installing from the source of your choice which doesn't carry the marginal or sinister connotations of "sideloading" though.
"Freeloading" would have been a good one but... yeah
"Side" being.. from your computer
Did you test apps that need sensors and notifications? If I want to run an OpenStreetmaps apk (there's no good way to run OMS on Linux natively), do I get GPS and compass heading? Do I get turn-by-turn navigation? Even if the app is in the background?
eOS is basically what you are looking for for most phones or GrapheneOS (pixel only)
https://grapheneos.org/
But for the reason an antiquated os like postmarketos are suggested is that the project is being opportunistic thinking this is a chance they can be relevant. Additionally, the population of HN has more sentimental view on these legacy operating systems and view it as a chance to go back to the past and use software they are familiar with.
I had an Xperia for awhile. I liked it while it was new, but after a year the back started peeling off.
Pretty lousy for a phone that was supposed to be waterproof. At that point I realized that the Japanese change out their phones every 6-12 months, thus Sony didn't realize that the market demands much longer reliability in a smartphone.
Dead Comment
Think mesh networking, resilient ad-hoc application clustering, non-Internet P2P, like Freifunk but everywhere. We shouldn't have to depend on Google or any of the big tech companies for anything except the hardware.
That would offer much more freedom. There are also contexts where this kind of thing could also enable life-saving applications. And unlike todays Internet where a database query in Cloudflare or a DNS bug in es-east-1 can disrupt half the services we use, this kind of technology really could withstand major attacks on infrastructure hubs, like the Internet was originally designed to do.
If you said that they'd effectively all be running either a port of OS X or a Linux distribution with a non-GNU but open source userspace, I'd consider that a somewhat unexpected success of open-source software. I would not at all expect that it would be as locked down as video game console.
The more time passes, the less I use my phone for, and the more likely I am to whip out my laptop to accomplish something, like it's 2005.
(if dumbed down) What's are the gaps in features and functionality between what you're describing and what might be achievable today (given enough software glue) with an SDR transceiver and something like Reticulum [1] on an Android?
SDR + something like Reticulum or Yggdrasil would definitely provide the infra or network fabric for the kind of thing I'm thinking of.
However, a normal Android, e.g. a Pixel 7, can't to my knowledge be turned into a web server or a podman host for containers. (I know of people hosting websites on old Androids that are flashed or hacked).
Given phones already have a WiFi/WLAN radio chip, it's a shame to need extra kit for connectivity.
It's something that's been on my mind a lot recently and so you provoked me into writing down a series of scenarios in story format that illustrates what SHOULD be possible using current hardware, were it not, as dlcarrier says, locked down like a games console.
Here you go:
https://ianso.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-we-dont-have.html
For my use case it's beyond great, albeit the small screen and the aarch architecture I can develop small projects as if I was on my PC.
My current phone OP13r doesn't is supported yet by PmOS, when someone does it Im gonna try to install it on one of the slots.
Noteably OnePlus 13 and Pixel 9a, both 2025 phones, can be unlocked.
Imagine if every laptop manufacturer had not a couple of incompatible sensors, but a whole unique boot system only allowing you to boot a crippled version of Windows ME.
The problem is... in the x86 world, even the most modern systems around still ship with decades of garbage. INT 10h and VBE, every x86 system still speaks it - either directly in the card, or emulated in BIOS/UEFI compatibility layers, so even a basic "hello world" can get video output, 09h/16h gives you keyboard input, 13h gives you disk I/O, 14h a serial port.
That means that at least the initial bringup for a second-stage bootloader is incredibly easy, less than 40 lines of assembler code [1]. And when you write a tiny operating system, as long as you're content with that basic foundation of 640x480 and text output, it will run on any x86 compatible PC or server.
On anything ARM, that's outright impossible to do and that is a large part of the problem. ARM is power efficient, but it comes at a serious cost. The low level bringup will be handled by the board's ROM, similar to PC BIOS/EFI, but after control is passed to the OS it gets different - all the OS gets is the devicetree stating "here's the memory addresses and interfaces of the hardware in the system", but you still need to write drivers for each and every individual thing from the bottom up, there is no framework for even most basic hardware interactions.
[1] https://gist.github.com/MyCatShoegazer/38dc3ee7db9627ff3a20e...
It’s really too bad that ARM had adopted ACPI as part of their SystemReady certification. It does work, and not reinventing the wheel is always a wise where feasible, but I think we could absolutely push something better.
https://pastebin.com/Wq4fWyvj
If anyone wants the code for scraping and reformatting, let me know.