Linux phones are still behind android and iPhone, but the gap shrank a surprising amount while I wasn’t looking. These are damn near usable day to day phones now! But there are still a few things that need done and I was wondering what everyone’s thoughts on these were:
1 - tap to pay. I don’t see how this can practically be done. Like, at all.
2 - android auto/apple CarPlay emulation. A Linux phones could theoretically emulate one of these protocols and display a separate session on the head unit of a car. But I dont see any kind of project out there that already does this in an open-source kind of way. The closest I can find are some shady dongles on amazon that give wireless CarPlay to head units that normally require USB cables. It can be done, but I don’t see it being done in our community.
3 - voice assistants. wether done on device or phoning into our home servers and having requests processed there, this should be doable and integrated with convenient shortcuts. Home assistant has some things like this, and there’s good-old Mycroft blowing around out there still. Siri is used every day by plenty of people and she sucks. If that’s the benchmark I think our community can easily meet that.
I started looking at Linux phones again because I loathe what apple is doing to this UI now and android has some interesting foldables but now that google is forcing Gemini into everything and you can’t turn it off, killing third party ROMS, and getting somehow even MORE invasive, that whole ecosystem seems like it’s about to march right off a cliff so its not an option anymore for me.
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3 - voice assistants. wether done on device or phoning into our home servers and having requests processed there, this should be doable and integrated with convenient shortcuts. Home assistant has some things like this, and there’s good-old Mycroft blowing around out there still. Siri is used every day by plenty of people and she sucks. If that’s the benchmark I think our community can easily meet that.
Of all the things that my phone is supposed to be able to do this is the one thing I never touch. It has never worked better for me than just doing it with my own two thumbs.
Does anyone actually use their voice to control their phone (not voice typing)?
RCS text messaging is another to consider, at least in the US. The carriers implanted it in a proprietary way, so only Apple and Google apps have it. It’s a poor substitute for an IM/chat app and not private and secure like it was promised due to poor implementations, but it’s still far better than plain SMS. I still have people I can’t get to use Signal or another secure IM app.
The Android Auto is the only one I’d be sad about. I love not having to use my phone’s screen for navigation and the navigation built into most cars is crap and expensive to keep maps and data updated. I like being able to use any navigation app, though Google Maps/Waze is still the only one I’ve found that has both live traffic info, which is extremely important with my city, and reading the street names rather than just “turn left” it says “turn left on some street” so I don’t have to look at the screen as much.
I use GrapheneOS and that’s what I won’t be able to replace once I finish my Immich and Home Assistant self host setups to replace Google Photos and Google Home/Nest, but st least they are sandboxed a bit.
Though Google has been moving to make it even more difficult to use their apps on these alternate OSes. Like I just found that Google Photos latest version pops up a not closeable error screen if it doesn’t have full “photos and video” access. Doesn’t work with the limited access or storage scopes that come with GrapheneOS, at least for now. I have photos I don’t want google to scan and index even if they are not being uploaded, which they do now. It’s obviously a ploy to get access to your data since it used to work fine. Now, I just use the mobile website instead until I have time to get Immich totally working and get people to switch if they want to see my stuff or share with me.
I was wondering what everyone’s thoughts on these were:
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It doesn’t work on GrapheneOS either, so I got separate devices I carry with me that do the tap-to-pay instead, and they’ve been a godsend. They’re super compact as well and came for free when I opened the accounts.
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I don’t own a car, on ebike I use my screen.
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Normally I use my fingers. If they’re not available I yell cuss words at my phone until they’re available again.
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tap to pay, voice assistants, carplay…everything I hate about modern phones. Don’t threaten me with a good time, Linux.
This is pretty cool, the fact that you can run android apps on Waydroid is awesome. I might try POST-marketos on an old s9 I have lying around.
So in other words they’re perfectly suited for day to day use?
I have zero need for any of the janky bullshit features you listed, so this is great news!
What phones are adviceable these days for a daily driver? Is there any of them where ALL of the hardware does actually work? As in, most of the ones I’ve seen in the past had major bugs blocking from using either the mobile network, the camera, the sensors or just about everything that wasn’t just the screen and touch input. I have a spare Pixel 7 and a Pinephone Pro (that I never got to work too reliably) I keep around for possible testing of stuff.
Ive heard hood things about the FLX1 but I havent tried it myself.
Im very tempted.
I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t 1 April… seriously, it’s called the
furry phonefuriphone?..Ha, if that’s your first association, I think that might say more about you than about the phone :P
(Which is not a bad thing.)
It’s an interesting discussion to witness in these posts: convenience vs privacy and control.
The convenience and integration you get with commercial products like IOS or Android comes at a price. Everything that matters to you on a daily basis bundled together in one convenient package means that all things which define you as a person are conveniently interconnected for corporations to sell out your data for everyone who wants it.
GPS: your current whereabouts at any moment in time and a complete history of where you have been in the past
Payment functions: what you are buying and where you have bought it
Communication (Messengers, Phone): Who you communicate with and what you are talking about
Photos and Videos: Real life evidence from all the stuff mentioned above.
Web Browsing: Interests and Needs which will be used against you in a totalitarian surveillance state, at a glance
If you in 2025 still think this convenience is there to please you as a consumer I have bad news for you.
Convenience and interconnection of services look nice and useful but at the same time they’re a privacy nightmare that makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a bedtime story for children.
What this all comes down to: Strictly airgapping the boundaries between the different services is the only way to have a modicum of privacy. Photos do not belong in a cloud controlled by someone you don’t know and should be taken from a separate device. Navigation belongs on a separate device with no internet connection, payment should not be done with a personal identifier at all (if avoidable) etc. Living your life this way might seem terribly inconvenient, but as someone who was alive at a time where all this convenience didn’t exist I can tell you it has its advantages too. You’ll rediscover what really matters.
i, too, was alive at a time when all this convenience didn’t exist but a large part of the world has moved on with forcing privacy nightmares.
some of these “conveniences” are requirements for people. i keep a lot of my personal digital activities isolated (offline gps, minimal invasive app usage on my phone, custom ROM, blah blah) but when i have to travel for work, i am required by the company to use ride sharing (relies on gps), commercial messengers, and other invasive commercial apps (that rely on phone based payment systems). typically i pick up a stock android phone and a pay as you go plan for this to use as a “burner”, using false information where possible.
sure i guess i could quit my job and go hang potatoes in somebody’s garage for $0.13 USD per year but i’ve made my bargain with the devil.
the lines between privacy and convenience are fuzzy and ever moving. it’s best to approach this with a bit of threat modeling first. figure out what you’re actually worried about and what you can tolerate, then decide how much convenience you’re willing to suffer.
Someone did do some work on reimplementing the Android Auto Client Server API.
Just needs time and interest.
God i wish I was smart enough to contribute to these things
Claude code can help
No it can’t. Why would someone maintaining a code base want to read and debug code submitted by someone else who didn’t even bother to write it, especially if I’m not already using Claude code or another vibe code generator.
1 - tap to pay
I still don’t see why phone-based tap-to-pay is even a good thing. What, I should hand over all my financial credentials to Google or Apple or Microsoft in addition to my bank? I think not. I’ll just keep using a physical card, thank you. (Which, by the way, can often still use tap-to-pay as most modern cards have RFID chips embedded. No different than with your phone, except it’s not tied to one of the big oligarchs, even less so if you use a credit union as opposed to a bank.)
2 - android auto/apple CarPlay emulation
Bog-standard bluetooth is more than enough for me.
3 - voice assistants
Why would I need a voice assistant? I can find out information almost as easily just using a search engine. And if I’m driving, I’m not so busy as to be unable to pull over to the side of the road if I absolutely need to check something. Or, you know, get everything ready before I go. At the further risk of yelling at clouds despite my relatively young age (I’m in my early 30s), I think voice assistants and IoT things are largely just fluff that over-complicate things in a world that is already over-complicated.
1 - you arent. You dont need to. They have it other ways. Tap to pay is done on device with a revokable token. If the device is stolen, the token can’t be easily accessed and can be remotely wiped at any time, unlike a stolen card which you have to call in to disable and even that doesn’t always go over well. 2 - Bluetooth doesn’t give me maps or a UI to access my music, podcasts, etc. 3 - feature parity wins people over. You aren’t going to bring people in to the ecosystem by selling on having less. You can sell on mandating less, but opening with “here are the things a Linux phones CANT do” will never get this off the ground.
That’s the problem. The things you think “people” need is what they already have and it can’t be different. “I want to trust everything on a company online but I want my data to be private and safe.” You have to choose. For those people who think they “need” what you say, they already have apple and Google.
Just like Linux was never meant to replicate windows “features” like cortana and others, and it didn’t, and it works for those who don’t want those things which is why they want Linux.
The requirements for Linux to have your “needs” would make me not want it, and then it would just be a poor version of apple without the trillions of dollars that come with it. It wouldn’t please either side.
The things open source people care will always be a minority. It’s sad but it’s the reality.
The requirements for Linux to have your “needs” would make me not want it,
This is a ridiculous thing to say about something as frivolous and nonmandatory as NFC tap to pay & being able to use a Maps app in your cars dash.
It’s not the existence of the option. It’s the requirements it brings.
Which companies will this phone need to shake hands for that to work? What price will they have to pay? What risks does it bring to my privacy on that phone? What requirements will they have? Banks, car companies, credit card companies etc are not the kind of company I want to see involved in my system.
If magically you can have those agreements without any risk for me, then I’m happy with it. But it’s impossible. You want a different product than mine with those needs.
I need freedom and trust in my system and I would like convenience. You need convenience and would like freedom and trust. It’s a matter of how much you have to sacrifice of one to get the other. It’s a personal choice.
For example, even before Android shitified itself, tap to pay wouldn’t work if you have root or most custom roms. Is it the price I have to pay for your option? Limit how I can use my phone so that Banks can trust it? Imagine if I couldn’t use sudo on Linux because someone wants to bend over to a bank?
I would look for a different system.
Do you own a bank account? A credit card? A car?
Your requests aren’t interoperable with the daily life in 2025. Your incredibly niche requirements instead ensures that the general public cannot have access to a usable reasonably private OS outside the hands of corporations.
If you want these requirements you can rip the code out yourself and load it as a custom ROM, stop being anti progress for things as frivolous and solvable as this.
Not that I own all these, but what do they have to do with my phone? I don’t see any connection to those except where I wanted to create it.
I’m not stopping you from wanting your apple/Linux phone. Or anyone from making it. I’m just saying that I believe that my interests are similar to a lot of people who care about open source, and therefore:
-The people who care about open source will not support that enough to be successfull (currently, as more people keep saying stuff like “I just can’t live without this convenience” it might change).
-The people who care about those conveniences that much don’t care about open source, privacy or freedom, and they won’t support it either. They will only support it if it’s even more convenient and lazy, and for that the apple/Linux phone would have to be even more evil than the current options.
So in my mind it’s a dead end, and I personally I don’t support it. But go for it! And I do believe that over times those conveniences will be seen more and more as needs and soon we might have a Linux phone I wouldn’t want to use. But good for those who want it.
BUT just to be clear, I desperately want a Linux phone, yes! But my concerns are stuff like: does the hardware work well? does the camera work well? Does the GPS work well? What about signal with the telecoms? Battery lifre? You know, mostly hardware related with the software.
Tap to pay, car play, siri, all those things can be on the list, but way down on the bottom.
I feel like you’re conflating some things here. Tap to pay is more private and secure than a bank card, and is more private than most cryptocurrencies. Cash is obviously better, but it is increasingly looking like it might be phased out of some places eventually (I really hope not, but is a legitimate concern). However, you are right that it’s not open source and relies on trusting big companies that don’t like user freedom.
So I would say that some of the people using tap to pay don’t necessarily not care about privacy more than convenience. Some of them just want to be able to use money in places where cash is dying out.
I don’t use tap to pay personally.
Everyone here just saying “oh I don’t use that therefore no one needs it and should just lose it and switch to a Linux distro” is not helping anyone. This person told us their requirements to switch. How hard is that to understand for anyone. They also told us the requirements of most of the population. This concept should not be so hard to understand. Everyone has features they need in certain products. Some people don’t care how headphones sound they just care that they make sound others are really picky audiophles. It’s all preference
Who said that? There is a lot of comments saying “I dont use those features maybe i should switch” but I dont see a single comment telling others to switch.
Help a non-techy out. I’ve fully switched my computers to Linux (fedora workstation, silver blue, and ubuntu). Been Linux only for several years now. Silverblue is probably my favorite. I’m willing to make the switch for my phone, too. But there are a few things I’m pretty reliant on:
My banking apps, cash app, and, embarrassing as it may be to admit, Grindr.
Any chance of getting those?
You can run Android apps on a Linux phone via Waydroid, but banking apps could be an issue if they force these Google intrgrity checks. Grindr probably does not?
Anyway, you should be able to fire up Waydroid on your Linux desktop and test this beforehand. I have never done this myself, so I might have misunderstood something.
Grindr doesn’t even work on GrapheneOS, it’s security checks are insane. I tried the modded Grindr app and they instantly banned my account, so I decided the app isn’t worth my time.
I think problem number 1 might be solvable if GNU Taler succeeds in europe as the digital euro backend. https://taler.net/
Of course this would only apply to people in the EU, but who knows, others might follow.
Never heard of it. I’m not from Switzerland, but what is this exatly and how can I support it?
Switzerland has GNU Taler. They launched it there a few months ago, lucky for you. Check its website: https://taler-ops.ch/de/
You just kind of need to wait for merchants to use it. Could become mainstream somewhere around 2028.
From wikipedia:
GNU Taler is a free software-based microtransaction and electronic payment system. Unlike most other decentralized payment systems, GNU Taler does not use a blockchain. A blind signature is used to protect the privacy of users as it prevents the exchange from knowing which coin it signed for which customer.
The wallet is like cryptocurrency wallets in that when you lose it (lose your cryptographic keys or phone), you lose all the money inside of it. So you must keep it safe like your own physical wallet. It works with NFC, so it can replace Google Pay or Apple Pay or whatever.
It also works offline, which is awesome. Though you do need to be online sometimes to refresh your digital money or they expire and become unspendable. The expiry is set by the GNU Taler operator.
Do keep in mind that receivers are NOT anonymous. Only senders are anonymous. This is by design and is there to apply tax to merchants and also combat fraud, etc.
You can learn how it works by reading their docs: https://docs.taler.net/
The FAQ is also a good thing to read: https://www.taler.net/en/faq.html
Yeah, Android Auto is definitely the thing I didn’t think I needed and now can’t live without.
I have no idea if there can be a foss alternative that would work with existing cars…
What does Android Auto do?
Your phone takes over your car screen as a second display, so you have decent and up-to-date navigation apps like gmaps or waze, with instant alerts etc, instead of those garbage GPS navigation devices.
Ah ok. Well, the decent alternative to all that is Tesla.
I switched to GrapheneOS like 4 years ago and at first I was bummed that I could no longer tap my phone to pay. But it’s fine. I still go out with my wallet in my pocket, so it’s no problem to just tap my bank card really… I’ll take privacy over convenience thanks
I havent taken my wallet with me in years. I prefer tap to pay as it is more secure than a physical card which can get lost or stolen.
Hahahahahaha. No.
This is the most unhelpful kind of comment where you basically shame someone for having preferences. Why people feel the need to make their callousness public instead of just shutting up, I never know.
Security can be measured objectively. It’s important to call out misinformation.
How is a disposable token locked behind passwords and/or biometrics, remotely erasable, unique between each vendor a transaction takes place in inferior to……a string of unchanging digits in a physical card?
You didn’t “call out misinformation.” You laughed at a differing opinion. That’s not an argument. That’s a noise.
Seriously, the Linux community has tons of helpful, super smart people, but mixed in with them are these obnoxious snobs like you that just embarrass the rest of us.
Because phone passwords are usually short and biometrics are public knowledge (usernames, not passwords)
You have a trade off between security and convenience. Phones are devices made for convenience. They are insecure, by design.
So better to have NO passwords or biometrics at all then? Your argument doesn’t make sense.
