I have a F(x)tec device. It had the issue were it no longer boots when the battery is fully depleted. It also came with Android vs Linux. It is now e-waste. To my knowledge the company died off.

I have a PinePhone. That was just a toy gadget and nothing of value as a daily driver. Another e-waste device.

I have a FuriLabs FLX1S. It is a complete pack that is mostly plug and play. The latest update improves a lot. Wayland layer works great for when you need to run an application that has no Linux equivalent, such as Kore. It still rough around the edges.

1) Chatty, SMS application, needs more features to better incorporate modern SMS communication protocols.

2) The phone dialer takes too long to start up.

3) The microSD path is hard-code so it does not play nice when being encrypted drive were /run path is used.

4) Gnome Files works better the the Index file manager but there is no proper tie-in for password management. This means you must enter your encrypted microSD password every time after a reboot.

5) Convergence station cannot handle an ultra-wide, 3440x1440, screen monitor.

6) Firefox has a buggy user experience were there is no way to hide the tabs listing or options popup from with-in the application. One must swipe out of the application into the desktop and go back to Firefox.

7) Some of the UI time out settings are too short. Such as watching a video in full screen mode. Press to show the controls and by the time you start engaging with them the controls auto-hide again.

8) Don't know of a way to export SMS history from Android and import to Linux.

Once it is a little more polished the FLXS1 will become my daily driver. It has become my Bluetooth music player. I also use it more than my actual phone daily.

Both Furiphone and F(x)tec phones are Halium devices. They rely on Android layers underneath the GNU-like userspace. They don't really work as actual "mobile Linux" phones at all, so they're not a particularly good representation.

I had a pinephone and switched from phosh to plasma-mobile. The hardware was very limited but with plasma it was much much better at least.

Tell your government that selling your citizenship to foreign businesses is not OK.

So EU "digital sovereignty" still means hitching most critical functionality to Google?

will try the new jolla phone, it allows you to toggle app support for android apps.

Sailfish has some proprietary stuff to deal with the Android & Sony as well as Qt being Qt. Much of their software is open source—& collaborative with translations & forums for feedback. Out of the box, you on Sailfish you get root support which lets you actually be the device owner. You are allowed to install whatever software from wherever you want… things Android no longer is. It’s not a flawless platform, but Android in practice gives you so, so little control over your actual device.

There are actually some people using a GNU/Linux phone as a daily driver for years. I'm one of them.

> Developing and maintaining a mobile operating system is a hugely expensive endeavor.

I agree, it feels like trying to write a new browser from scratch.

> The best option would be to use /e/OS or GrapheneOS

I would highly recommend GrapheneOS (disclaimer: I used both for years).

[dead]

The top of the article addresses this a bit: yes, Android in theory is AOSP [Android Open Source Project] which is still Linux based. (For now, lots of rumors every Android release that a kernel switch is coming.) But AOSP has lost a lot of power as Android moved so many things to Google Play Services [closed source], which leaves room for Linux-based phone OSes that disown/disavow AOSP entirely because what's the point of playing ball with a half-closed ecosystem anyway? (The article discusses the Ubuntu Touch fork still seeing some maintenance despite Canonical giving up and decides on Sailfish OS.)

You can build various, vastly different operating systems around the same kernel. When people refer to "Linux phones", they usually mean the family of systems often referred to as GNU/Linux distributions, which Android very clearly doesn't belong to.

So you are stuck in the walled garden. Alternatively, you could find a bank not forcing the duopoly on you. Worked for me.

Pixels with GrapheneOS are your best and safest bet.

In my specific case, I couldn't use Pixels because the terrible PWM on the screen was painful to me. Bought a cheap Motorola G Power 2024 with an IPS screen. Never logged into Google. Used Obtanium and FDroid for most things. Used Aurora for the one Play-only app that I needed. Running Netguard (a non-root firewall) with a whitelist so almost nothing phones home. Deleted or disabled almost all the non-essential built-in apps.

I like the Moto but wouldn't recommend it due to the lack of OS updates. But this setup could be easily duplicated on almost any Android without needing root or roms.

Ironically, Google Pixel phones are the best phones for leaving Google behind.

The have an unlocked bootloader and are the only phones supported by GrapheneOS [1].

If you don't want to go to GrapheneOS, any Android phone should be able to use F-Droid.

[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

I'm happy with my Fairphone FP4 with LineageOS, but that just one datapoint.

> too few apps

Temporary. The age of LLM aided development is current.

But which apps exactly are you missing?