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Small Phones are Dead and We Killed Them
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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As a small phone lover, here's the thing: we don't consume as many phones or as many services as (general) big phone people.
It's not only about the size of the community. It's that our phones are tools generally at our service and not the reverse.
Hopefully Linux phones are not so far away from usable in the next couple years.
I said the same thing in like 2013. :(
It seemed more likely back then than it does today. Ubuntu and Firefox were both developing mobile OSes around that time.
What's the closest thing to a viable option nowadays?
I think a Pixel running Graphene is the closest viable option. Out of the pool of bespoke built to run GNU/Linux phones, it might just be the PinePhone Pro. It's the one suffering the least from critical existence failure.
Try calyx for a stable, truly Google-free pixel experience.
Plus it looked like Web Apps were gonna become huge.
I know the words "web app" send some on Lemmy into a frenzied rage, but they'd be amazing from a platform agnostic perspective.
Imagine if the biggest barrier to entry for new smartphone OSes (app support) was gone. It'd be huge.
But seeing it as a threat to their business models (don't get that 30% cut if it's not through the App/Play stores), Apple and Google have had pretty shitty support for them.
If a Linux phone was out today and had good hardware and software, it'd still fail just like Windows Phone and BlackBerry OS did. WebApps would give it a strong chance though.
Agreed. I'd like to add that web apps are much better today than they were 10 years ago. We have notification support, touch support, etc. A well-made progressive web app is basically the same as a native app now — or it would be with halfway-decent OS support, anyway.
The fact is, a ton of common apps are just web wrappers anyway, even on desktop. Like Discord, Slack, and Steam. Even Outlook is moving in that direction.
It is indeed quite dire. My hope lies in that the recent attempts have been more upstream first oriented where lots of distros run on phones. They do not work well yet but that approach might just get us there eventually.
Another thing that gives me hope is that phones do not change much any more. Much easier to catch up to a stagnated market.
RIP Ubuntu Edge
They got so close to the Kickstart goal