FSF announces Librephone project

> What does it matter if you can run a completely free software stack on your phone, if your bank software (or your required government ID, as is looking depressingly likely) requires you to run a Big Tech approved phone OS?

What does it matter if you can use any OS you want if your phone is filled with SoCs which are bugged and backdoored by the state? The reality is that you need both free hardware and free software. I can always tell my bank to fuck off and move my accounts to one that gives me freedom to use the mobile OS of my choosing, and if there isn't a single bank on earth willing to do that I can always simply refuse to use my cell phone for banking. I'd much rather have to limit myself to only the options of desktop, or laptop or, ATM, or phone call, or drive thru, or walking into my branch than put up with having no control over or trust in the hardware and software I use on a mobile device I carry with me so often.

Banks and national id apps already work on GrapheneOS. Sometimes you just need to msg devs and ask them to use a different OS attestation method - see link 1. This battle is won already.

1.: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

There is one solution to this problem that many people reading this message can contribute to:

Make sure your app has a progressive web app version that has feature parity with the store apps. That way, the app will work on phones like the librephone, and, if Apple or Google decide to kick you off the store, you and your users have some recourse. As a bonus, it’s compatible with open source — users can modify the app and install it without jailbreaks, root or (for now) sideloading.

React Native supports this (and can mostly be bundled with electron for mac/win/linux support).

Are there other stacks people can recommend?

I think this is the right place to start.

A free OS will empower developers to implement technical workarounds that could trick these apps into working there. If the OS is tightly controlled, we have no recourse.

Even in the worst case scenario, we could use a cheap big-tech-approved phone for these applications (a glorified digital token) and use the free phone for everything else. When there's enough adoption and trust in the new phone, non-technical avenues are available to influence these organizations to accept the alternative.

It becomes much harder to force attestation on people if there's a significant user base that runs alternative operating systems.

I hope all the things you mention never become mandatory some day because I currently use my phone for voice and text only. Sooner than later I plan to get rid of my phone all together. I'm gonna surprise the phone company and get a land line. That means any online service that uses SMS/text to verify me will fail.

Well you're partially right. After all, the "big tech approved phone OS" is actually Linux, so just having a free OS isn't enough to prevent it from being co-opted and turned into a locked-down platform.

But the partially wrong part is, we can make our own platform. PCs let you install and run any software you want, because it's an open platform. If we make an open platform smartphone that can compete on features with the closed behemoths, and that then becomes popular enough, then banks may offer apps on that.

But this is tricky too. Linux already has issues getting official support from corporations. We'd need our open platform to be compatible with the closed ones, so that it's easy for banks to run their apps on our open platform. There are already ways around this, like virtual machines to run Android, or other methods. But the closed behemoths may try and end-run around this, like DRM. So we'll still need to advocate for our rights and compatibility.

Yeah... Corporations and governments are starting to push remote attestation. There'll be little point to a free computer if it gets us denied service everywhere. At this point we're gonna end up marginalized, like second class citizens of society.

The time is right, but I still don’t think this project can accomplish much because people are generally happy with their phones.

That said, the phone market is huge. They could sell enough devices to fund future development which might be good enough even if it doesn’t slow down Apple or Google. At least then there will be a device for those of us who are not happy with the state of things.

Indeed, this is the right time. I really want to daily drive a linux phone, but i dont want to buy a used phone. I hope this brings more hardware support for newer phones.

I'm willing to suffer a rough beta or alpha experience, but let me use modern hardware of my choice.

If rich techies on this website want to support something worthwhile, here you go

If prior "Linux phone" projects have taught me, it's that "based on desktop Linux" is a great way to have a ton of apps that install just fine, but can't meaningfully be used.

Not even just "requires a mouse/keyboard", but a lot of things of the form "assumes a reasonable screen size", ...

If they wouldn’t have then X years later there would have been first beta release and zero apps on it except for a calculator app, a notes app, a calendar app, and maybe a mail app developed by the core developer team. The post would have definitely reached the top of hn, so that’d be a plus.

It makes a lot of sense to me. There's a huge amount of work that's already been put into the Android ecosystem that can be used in a free software phone.

Trying to build a non-Android Linux phone that is competitive is just not practical at this point. It would require an enormous amount of funding.

Inertia is a hell of a thing.

Seems like a smart decision to me since that's what everything phone related builds to as a lowest common denominator anyway.

It's an incredible waste and an amazing example of how useless the FSF is today. Instead of supporting real Linux phones they're focusing on trying to degunk Android even more.

App compatibility is a thing, you know.

I like postmarketOS, but it always felt to me more like a pet project than a real OS, for that reason.

yes, but it's probably the quickest path to market with a reasonably certain customer satisfaction.

Doesn't stop you on working from there once that milestone is reached.. I would certainly welcome more alternatives in light of the recently announced changes from do-no-evilG

This is the big barrier here, and unfortunately, it is legally impossible to open source.

In most countries, the spectrum that cell phone carriers use is licensed to the carrier, under the condition they only connect devices that are guaranteed to comply with the requirements of using that spectrum. The end user (i.e. the person with the phone) has no license to use the spectrum. So in order to get regulatory certification, basically every modem has to be locked down so that the end user cannot operate it in a way that would violate any rules or regulations for using that spectrum.

So basically, it's illegal to have open source modem firmware. At least, as long as cell phones are operating on spectrum that isn't open for public use.

Ultimately, if you want to open source a modem, you first need to build your own cell phone network.

Not insurmountable, given the availability of srsRAN.

https://www.srsran.com/

I for one am up to the idea of breaking android off Google due to the same reasons of chrome - conflict of interest since Google is an advertising company.

Yep, with DMA sometimes. I've heard this same thing on the Pinephone forums iirc during the early years.

That's really as far as they need to go; if the userland is compatible with Linux, it can use all of the work that KDE and other organizations have put into building mobile interfaces.

These projects have stuff that works, but the lack of firmware for chips that can connect to modern cell infrastructure means that they can't really create an appealing product. The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed, and I hope the FSF makes it farther than everyone else has.