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Linux-Based postmarketOS Project Aims to Give Smartphones a 10-Year Lifecycle

posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 18 2017, @01:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the defeating-planned-obsolescence dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

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.

Source: https://liliputing.com/2017/08/linux-based-postmarketos-project-aims-give-smartphones-10-year-lifecycle.html

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday August 18 2017, @02:15AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 18 2017, @02:15AM (#555674) Journal

    But if I want support for the fingerprint scanner and IR Blaster, I'm out of luck.

    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.

    but I imagine it won't have the vendor specific hardware support either.

    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
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