Adrian Kuschelyagi Malacoda.

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  • 16 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2020

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  • Except this isn’t a privacy community, this is a FOSS community, and OP mentioned they wanted an app on F-Droid, not anything about privacy.

    I believe the idea that “FOSS is only about privacy and nothing else, therefore proprietary apps with no network access are the same as FOSS apps” is absurd and harmful to the free software community, so I downvoted you based on that. Privacy is important but free software is much more than just privacy.



  • What’s that looking like? I’m aware of Anbox but IIRC that runs a full Android runtime and I’ve seen mixed reports of it working.

    Personally I’ve been kicking around the idea of an API compatibility layer for Android, so an Android app could be built as a standard Java jar and run on top of OpenJDK. I’m not concerned with binary APK compatibility, but there are many apps on F-Droid that I would like to run on non-Android Linux, perhaps without the baggage of something like Anbox. I don’t know what it would entail, if there is any interest, or if it’s even possible though.


  • I mean, what I want is a phone that I can own to the fullest extent possible. GNU/Linux is a plus, because I already use it on desktop and am familiar with it. Lack of Android apps is not much of a concern for me, although I have it on my todo list to learn how to develop replacements.

    The PinePhone “does what I want it to do.” I can flash a new image very easily or boot from SD card if I feel the need to. It’s easy to get root and I have full access to my filesystem. It really is “like a computer in my pocket.” It needs polish but this is my ideal conception of a smart phone.

    Android devices, despite also using Linux, present numerous hurdles to me that suggest that although I paid money to receive them, I don’t really own them. It feels like I have to go to ridiculous lengths just to get something that is as powerful as the OS I have on my PinePhone. Simply flashing LineageOS isn’t enough, I have to then patch Magisk onto the boot.img and reflash it (and apparently I have to do this every OS update as well!), then to enable apps to actually access the SD card I have to install a Magisk module, but of course that doesn’t actually do what I need to so I eventually stumble on this app on F-Droid that seems to work. Now I have a text editor that can access my SD card, something Mobian provides to me out of the box.

    This suggests to me that I have a different conception of a “smart device” compared to most people. Truthfully, though, I don’t really have an issue with Android from a UI or usability perspective, I would not have a problem with an Android OS that didn’t have the restrictions Google places on it - but then we’d lose SafetyNet and proprietary apps would complain about root and we can’t have that…