I wrote a long article about whether Linux phones will become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly.
You can also read it as a PDF or ODT document, which looks much better in my opinion. I hate the styling in WordPress.
Feedback welcome.
amosbatto, they are a viable alternative right now.
We are short before singularity and it is because of this bridge… of knowledge.
I keep wondering: will Android and/or iOS devices ever become a viable alternative to Linux phones?
Apple started their attempts pretty quick, merely a few months after we’ve got GNU/Linux smartphones, although their first result would better be described as a “feature phone” and Linux already had those much earlier. Google took a bit longer to come up with its proposition, yet neither of them are anywhere close to be able to replace GNU/Linux phones yet.
I tried - I had carried an Android device as my secondary phone for some 2-3 years in the past, and I have had an iPhone sitting in my drawer for years, and I can see that they’re just not up to the task. Simple things remain utterly confusing or even impossible to achieve with these devices, and they seem unable to provide even the basic feeling of control that you would expect over a device you’re supposed to own. You’d think that about 20 years would be enough to get these rough edges polished, and yet we’re still here. Will Google and Apple ever up their game and finally create a device worth switching to? I have my doubts, but we’ll see.
Really?
Surely neither Google nor Apple has any interest in providing a phone that gives control to the user and/or respects the user’s privacy.
If anything, Google is moving in the opposite direction, by starting to lock up the developers; and if passkeys really take off then the duopoly have the opportunity to lock things up even more; and then there’s dodgy apps being pushed by all and sundry.
Clearly though “viable” depends on the user’s requirements and the user’s priorities.
Ha ha!
I often wonder what would have happened if Motorola and Nokia hadn’t squandered their early leads in mobile Linux and FIC had given OpenMoko the resources that needed. It is kind of sad how Google and Android ended up dominating the mobile world, and all the phone makers that were destroyed (Motorola, Nokia, Ericsson, Palm, Blackberry, etc.) because Android commoditized them.
Motorola released the A760 with EZX (Qtopia+Java, based on MontaVista Consumer Electronics Linux) on August 22, 2003, but it used 7 different flavors of mobile Linux (LJ, JUIX, MotoJUIX, EZX, MotoEZX, MotoMagX) between 1999 and 2010, and failed to unify its efforts behind one flavor and give it the resources that it needed until it was too late with MotoMagX. Motorola had the idea of using Java apps back in 1999, long before Android.
Nokia launched the Nokia 770 internet tablet with Maemo in November 2005, but the civil war between Symbian and Linux inside the company prevented the company from properly unifying its efforts behind Linux until it was too late with the N9 with Meego in 2011.
FIC released the OpenMoko Neo 1973 on July 9, 2007, which was 10 days after the first iPhone was released and 15 months before the first Android device (the HTC Dream) was released.
Worth noting that Neo1973 was announced two months before iPhone was. It’s kinda funny to read reactions at the time today 
However, there was Trolltech’s Greenphone even earlier! And OpenMoko itself has its roots in the OpenEZX project.
Fun fact: Neo Freerunner was the first globally available phone able to run Android - at the point when that was made possible, HTC Dream was still only available in the US. I played with it a bit on my Freerunner back then, but it did not seem like a viable alternative
I would like to see a Window Mobile rk3588s phone.. because why not more viable alternatives..
I am with dos.
I use an ipod touch to call my nonagenarian grandfather (after the end of Skype, which was our go-to option for 20 years) - otherwise this ipod stays at home and does very few things besides calling home and I am very often irritated by why can’t I do this or that.
The legendary Brian Kernigham spoke at some point about smartphones not too long ago that he loves having unix-like supercomputers in his pocket, but sadly he can’t do anything with them.
My last iphone (before trying my luck with a Cosmo Communicator and then the Librem 5) did the same thing my last Nokia did before the iphone “revolution”: messages, calls, maps with turn-to-turn nav. And the iphone is sadly much larger and the battery barely lasts for a day.
I enjoyed your article and read the majority of it. Thank you! My only comment is that PostmarketOS is a totally viable alternative and it works. It works well with a variety of phones which have superior specs to the Librem 5. The only drawback (that I can see) from using, say, a OnePlus 6 or 6T is they contain proprietary software blobs for certain aspects of their hardware. Yet the stack is Linux, is mostly secure (I think?), and will receive software updates for a the foreseeable future.
Mobile Linux has always been a white knuckled monkeybranching from working device to another a few generations down the line. I started with a Sharp SL-5500 Linux tablet, made a short stop on an openmoko, then to the Nokia N900, a Pinephone, a short failed stay at a pinephonepro(thanks fr the no-warranty pine64), and now hopefully a long stay on a Librem 5. For a while I experimented with a Cyanogen-LineageOS tablet, but I am much happier with my Pinetab2 which is real Arch Linux and not an OS where I simply don’t know how everything works.
I have for the last 26 years been wondering when the next monkeybranch will appear to swing toward and always hoping it will be an upgrade. ANd I am always hoping it will include our redlines from the Neo900 like the hardware kill switch for the modular modem, but I want a modem which also will not cook the phone.
the fear is always what webos has become in the evil locked down tivoized LG smart/spy TVs(they buffer room voice audio for months waiting for a wifi connection), we even started to see hints of it in the Nokia Linux(libcherry) though it never really had a chance to present itself.