French company iodé introducing iodéOS, a privacy-oriented Android operating system based on AOSP. The company’s business model appears to revolve around selling refurbished and pre-installed smartphones.
That refurbished-device approach is notable on its own, as it extends the lifespan of existing hardware and reduces electronic waste instead of encouraging constant hardware replacement cycles
iodéOS seems focused on balancing privacy protections, usability, compatibility, and accessibility for ordinary users who want less tracking without dramatically changing how they use their phones
These android blob driver phones will remain short lived and un-upgradeable. Most require already dated components, the exact same issue is present even in linux with libhybris; those troublesome android blob drivers. Even the N900 fully linux phone though has a similar problem with blob drivers because the component list had hardware onboard that was protected by a NDA which prevented developing open source drivers so we were stuck with a forever kernel version, you could recompile with new stuff but never upgrade.
I only address the inability to upgrade but realistically those blobs could really be doing anything with full root access along side a modem running it’s own cloaked OS and network stack sharing memory over DMA with the main OS CPU.
It is a terrible trainwreck of hardware designed for maximum hostility to the user and then giving a little back with familiar Linux or rooted android CLI and GUI as a little treat for users.
So far only Openmoko, GDC, Purism, and Pine have even tried to produce really open user respecting things with those precious FOSS drivers using the hardware available on the market that conforms with those needs.
I like it a lot; I’ve been using it for almost 3 years now, exclusively with applications from F-Droid (plus a couple of downloaded .apk files from my VPN provider and Proton Mail).
So, not so new. Just probably not as well publicized as /e/OS, grapheneOS, etc.