Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.

Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. There is also a filter tool to easily specify your criteria of what must function to obtain a custom shortlist:

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Special:Drilldown/Devices?DeviceType=handset

Then phones on the shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list, which seems to be exclusively Sony¹.

So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.

(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices

(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)

Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)

(update 2) Calyx OS has an interesting list some of which overlaps with pmOS

Calyx OS list

Device /Latest CalyxOS version /Release date
Pixel 8a /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 8 Pro /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 8 /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel Fold /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel Tablet /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 7a /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 7 Pro /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 7 /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 6a /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 6 Pro /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 6 /5.12.2-2 /2024-11-04
Pixel 5a (5G) /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4a (5G) /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 5 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4a /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4 XL /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 4 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3a XL /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3a /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3 XL /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Pixel 3 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Fairphone 4 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Fairphone 5 /5.12.1-4 /2024-10-11
SHIFT6mq /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Moto G32 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11
Moto G42 /5.12.1-4 /2024-10-11
Moto G52 /5.12.1-2 /2024-10-11

So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market. Worth noting that these phones are supported by both pmOS and Calyx OS:

  • Fairphone 4
  • Google Pixel 3a
  • SHIFT SHIFT6mq

¹ Caution about Sony: they are an ALEC member who supports hard-right politics. They were also caught using GNU software in their DRM shit which violated FOSS licensing in a component designed to oppress. Obviously buying a new Sony thing is unethical. But perhaps a 2nd-hand one is fine. It’s still dicey though because the 2nd-hand market still feeds the 1st-hand market and rewards the original consumer. Sometimes it’s clear you’re not buying from an original owner, like someone on the street with a box of 100+ phones.

(update) It would help if we could filter out all the phones with non-removable batteries. I can confirm that these have non-removeable batteries:

  • BQ Aquarius X5
  • Chewie@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    I don’t mean OM gives me a choice of routes. Rather, say there are two reasonable ways to reach the destination. OM chooses route A, says turn right, ok fine, I turn right. Then after a few seconds, OM changes its mind and wants route B instead. So it says take a U turn and go this other way, oops! But if you do that, it changes its mind AGAIN, and you end up going in circles.

    Weird, i’ve never had that happen to me!

    Re downloading a subset of the maps: yes I can do that, but then I have to predict which ones I’ll need, just another thing to remember. I have all the California maps installed so that if I suddenly decide to drive to Barstow or something, I don’t have to

    Ok, but what’ the alternative process?

    figure out which counties I’ll traverse, since they are all already downloaded. What I really want is to download ALL the maps, the whole world, might be 50GB or whatever, but that’s ok, we can buy 2TB microSD cards now. If that download was a one-time event with occasional small updates I could deal with it, but I don’t want to do the whole thing every cycle.

    Sure, it’s not as efficient as it could be, but maybe that will change with time. They are pretty good at adding features to it fairly regularly.

    • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

      I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

      Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

      • Chewie@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

        Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean by that.

        I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

        Fair enough

        Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

        Yes, that’s exactly how it works. I get tracked enough without adding my location data, so however useful it is, I can live without it.