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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: 2) by jmorris on Friday August 18 2017, @01:39AM (1 child)
There is a rule in Open Source, you don't need a complete product when you make a wide announcement but you need "plausibility." That is a vague sense in most potential developers that the project has demonstrated the concept is sound, there is a working implementation of some basic level of functionality, etc. This project only works tethered to a PC because it lacks a keyboard or any hardware support other than display and storage. Everything else is, maybe it partially works but it isn't usable yet. In other words you are expected to load it in the knowledge that you won't have a phone as such and by the time it progresses that hardware will be abandoned.
I say the hardware you dedicate to the project will end up abandoned because it is simply too ambitious. Picking a half dozen well understood and widely deployed (among developers i.e. older Nexus and such) devices and making them usable devices, then adding additional hardware as developers step up to do the work would have been much more "plausible." Launching a new "Open Source smart phone OS" in $current_year is plenty ambitious enough, announcing one that will also crack the nut of thousands of virtually undocumented handsets at the same time is folly.
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @02:19AM
By the time it reaches enough maturity, the project will transit from PostMarketOS to MenoPauseOS, no matter the age of the developers initially involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford