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Buy an iPhone and you might get 4-5 years of official software updates. Android phones typically get 1-3 years of updates… if they get any updates at all. But there are ways to breathe new life into some older Android phones. If you can unlock the bootloader, you may be able to install a custom ROM like LineageOS and get unofficial software updates for a few more years.
The folks behind postmarketOS want to go even further: they're developing a Linux-based alternative to Android with the goal of providing up to 10 years of support for old smartphones.
That's the goal anyway. Right now the developers have only taken the first steps.
[...] At this point the developers behind postmarketOS are a long way from creating a fully functional OS that works on a single phone, let alone an operating system that will provide a decade of software updates for dozens of different devices. But it's a laudable goal that could help keep your aging phones useful (and secure) long after your phone maker stops pushing official updates.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Friday August 18 2017, @01:23AM (4 children)
There may well be issues making this happen.
Case in point: I have an HTC OneMax [htc.com] which I purchased in early 2014.
It's a nice phone. With fingerprint and IR Blaster support too!
However, it runs Android 4.4 (KitKat) [android.com] and HTC will not be releasing any upgrades. As such, I'm left without the more granular permissions model and a host of features in later versions of Android.
I want those features and the more granular permissions model. So, I unlocked my phone and installed (what was then called Cyanogenmod) LineageOS [lineageos.org], only to find that fingerprint support was missing and IR Blaster functionality was piss poor.
I investigated and determined that the functionality wasn't built in to the LineageOS (or any other) custom ROM for the OneMax. I even set up a build VM and configured and built my own custom ROM. But no soap.
This is because HTC hasn't released documentation/API access to their fingerprint or IR Blaster hardware for the OneMax. Unless and until they do (fat chance!), fingerprint and IR blaster functionality will be nonexistent or minimally functional on any Android platform that's not the HTC stock.
The moral of the story is that similar issues will likely exist with a great many phones. It's a shame too, as my OneMax works great even after 3.5 years and will likely work just fine for years to come.
I can get basic functionality and even the latest Android version, with a variety of custom ROMs. But if I want support for the fingerprint scanner and IR Blaster, I'm out of luck.
I will almost certainly check out postmarketos and play around with it, assuming there's support for my processor family, but I imagine it won't have the vendor specific hardware support either.
More's the pity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @02:15AM
I don't know why, but I'm hearing the "Linux/OSS support for video cards, wifi, etc" all over again.
How this evolved for desktop version of Linux is sorta known - I fear that the best that can happen would be the same binary blobs approach in smartphone area.
The worst that can happen? Better support will never happen: unlike the desktop/laptop hardware market, the interest of smartphone manufacturers is to (planned) obsolete a hardware as reasonable soon as possible - the lack of hardware/firmware spec is a feature for them, not a bug.
If you really want to continue to use an old smartphone, you'll have to trick yourself into thinking: "Who the hell needs fingerprint scanner anyway? Biometrics sensing potentially leads to biometrics collection, which is a bug, not a feature"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Friday August 18 2017, @04:30AM
That's true but it's not really a moral. The moral of the story is that swinehood hath no remedy. You bought a pig, you have a pig, you can put the pig in a dress and paint it with lipstick but it's still a pig and it's still going to wallow in the first mud puddle it finds.
The smartphones are pigs. They're defective by design, they aren't supported or supportable. They were not made for you, they were made for the phone company and the 'security' agencies, and nothing you can do will ever change that fact.
Trying to support this junk in any way whatsoever is a counterproductive waste of time.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 18 2017, @09:17AM (1 child)
Lucky you could unlock the bootloader at all. The next problem is as you discovered hardware support because API documentation is not a thing for these manufacturers.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday August 18 2017, @09:21AM
And the remedy is likely boycott and definitely some aggressive reverse engineering.