So, are we going to get any European alternatives to android?
It’s just a slow locking down to stay in control… We just need to all shift to proper #Linux phones instead of linux-by-google. Could be nice to see some European moves there. There are plenty of good developers within the EU. The biggest issues would be in funding that development and to market it properly to artificially kickstart adoption of such a platform. There are already phones made in Europe; Fairphone is Dutch, I think?
And you think Fairphones are made in Europe? They are made in China, just like all the iPhones and Google Pixels.
Fairphone is indeed Dutch, and they even make a point on their website of paying a decent living wage to all Chinese workers making their phones.
Typed from my Fairphone 4 running /e/OS
There’s virtually no choice for building competitive phones in Europe. The tech just doesn’t exist there. After decades of buying all electronics in China, China was the only country progressing in manufacturing. So FairPhone is really as European as it gets.
There’s virtually no choice for building competitive phones in Europe.
Or anywhere else for that matter. Know of any good phone made in Canada?
So FairPhone is really as European as it gets.
Indeed, and that was not an irrelevant consideration when buying one. As is often the conclusion when discussing FairPhone… “Yeah, that’s far from perfect but it’s truly the best they could do given the circumstances”.
There is Gigaset who makes phones in a factory in Germany. But their phones are locked with Google play services, and they never attracted ROM development, they also don’t attract the general public to start with.
By all rights there should be more such production in Europe. If not existing, than startups should be planned given the geopolitical mess.
Yes, but something like that will take a long time.
There is all the manufacturing know how and the need to make the manufacturing process economically viable. That is certainly not something that can be done overnight, but also certainly something that can be done.
But the materials are a way bigger mess. The literal materials you need in order to make that phone are not available here.
You need to start with a reliable supply of rare earths, and good luck doing that in Europe (the extraction is, with current industry practices, really quite polluting).
China developed the deposits they have in some regions and we were all too happy ti never have to do that crap again domestically. Then they put rare earths under export control, so that if you want rare earths in your products (and you do, you really do) you have to manufacture in China.
So yes, we really need to have an alternative, but your next phone is definitely going to be made in China just like the one you have now. And probably the one after that too.
We have some European alternatives to Android.
- Ubuntu Touch Germany 🇩🇪
- Postmarket OS Europe 🇪🇺
- Sailfish OS Finland 🇫🇮
I used postmarket os in past and I can recommend it… it has terminal for people who want to tinker with it but it can be used without terminal. Os is very easy to use and supports many devices, their support channels are hosted on matrix
What hardware works probably for it to be a daily phone? Looks like none have the camera more than partly working and most have worse problems.
Pissed me off phones aren’t just like PCs. They shouldn’t need Device Tree and custom ROMs. We should be able to install whatever OS we want and be confident it can work.
This really could use some EU regulation. But probably not a very simple issue (especially the cameras I believe)
More like a derivative, they consistently port stuff over from Lineage, which is just a distribution of Android, which is in turn based on a gazillion other OS project starting from Linux.
In the end either it’s good enough to have the “headquarters” of this specific project in Europe, no version of Android can be considered European enough, as it all depends way too heavily on Google.
There is also a decent chance of Google making Android closed source in the medium term anyway, but the last several releases of Android have not exactly added mindblowing features, and I don’t have a tremendous amount of interest in whatever kind of enshittified cloud dependent AI infested mess they have planned next.
Hardware support is the main issue for me, all of these 3 none support my phone (Pixel 3)
Odd as Ubuntu Touch is fully optimized on the pixel 3a.
It’s been mostly this way for a while reason why it takes a little bit before lineageos releases the next version. AOSP is just fully down stream. What will be concerning is when those releases get longer and longer. As another comment said we all just need to figure out linux phones. Been eyeing a pine phone for a while now should probably pull the trigger.
I would recommend against the pinephone. While the hardware is well supported, the hardware sucks. Voyager in Firefox runs at around 4 fps, while the battery percent drops every minute and the back of the phone is uncomfortably hot.
You would be better off with a Pixel 3a, oneplus 6 or poco f1, which are all supported by PostmarketOS. While many hardware features don’t work on these phones, they all have rudimentary camera support and have actually good SOCs that perform well.
More spyware please!
I’m trying to degoogling my life for quite long time. This is what is curreently missing:
- wallet: only apple, samsung and google solutions out there for all Europe. There is a EU project that unfortunatlely cannot be used in the UK. I mean, to understand how sick the system is, think that most of all credit cards out there are owned by the US.
- Family link, something to managed kids devices
There’s hope for the wallet thing in the future.
https://f-droid.org/packages/net.taler.wallet.fdroid/
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
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wallet: my current solution is Garmin Pay. For that you need a compatible Garmin watch. Once the card is added to the watch, all the payment is done without even passing by the phone, just communication between watch and payment terminal. Garmin watches work really very well with Gadgetbridge. Cards have to be added via the Garmin App, and possibly via a phone running a stock OS (mine didn’t work from the aftermarket ROM, but may be bank dependent)
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Family Link: For other options you may need to do a factory reset and install a device manager app, that then needs to be enabled via ADB. Or use a custom ROM. No pleasant options out there.
