this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Where are all the open source phone OSes? Where are the OS agnostic capable hardware phones? Technically some do exist, but I don't think they have any significant market share. Hope I'm wrong though.
In the "waiting for funding" room.
If people don't care enough to finance projects like Fairphone, etc... while they are still in the growing pains, then those projects will never be able to last during a digital consumer war, let alone provide a product that has enough mass appeal that it makes sense to build and commercialize on auto.
Google slowly suffocated all the 3rd party rom vendors.
Essentially every browser that's not Firefox or Safari is reskinned Google chrome for a reason. Because it's insanely expensive to build and maintain browsers. Mobile operating systems aren't much different in this regard.
That's not exactly true. There are several FOSS mobile OSes, such as PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, and the various Android ROMs. Once it's compatible, keeping that OS updated is relatively simple.
The issues with mobile OSes are:
Basically, supporting a new phone has a lot of upfront work with very little ongoing work.
Web browsers, on the other hand, need to stay updated with constantly shifting web standards, they're a huge malware target so they need to keep up on CVEs, and pages are getting more complex causing performance and rendering issues, and everyone blames the browser. Supporting a new platform is generally trivial, but the ongoing work is immense.
They're very different beasts.
Not to mention just about every "serious" app (gov't, banking, etc) check safetynet before even turning on. (Hell I've had a gov't app refuse to start because I had developer options enabled, on a completely 'clean' phone)
So emulating them isn't gonna work and websites do not always prioritize working on mobile anymore ("just install the app")
Yeah, YMMV certainly applies. But the good news is you can try it out on your current phone before committing.
They are in the same room with all the third-party support for them, ESPECIALLY from state-built applications that are increasingly being required to do administration stuff and mandatory banking apps that are required for online payment and even opening their websites these days.
That room does not exist.