Technology

It also says:

It is currently unknown whether these companies would aim for compatibility with existing Android apps or follow the path of Huawei's latest HarmonyOS NEXT, which removes Android app support entirely

So, it's not clear yet.

The US/China decoupling is happening everywhere.

de-Googled android sounds even better. The story is cooler than the title!

Waydroid is pretty nice, integrating the Android apps as regular apps in the Linux UI.

postmarketOS?

Honestly, I think the old FirefoxOS could do well these days. Literally everything an app can do can be done by a browser with a decent caching/local storage scheme. Slap a decent camera on that and it would be amazing.

I would love to have a phone that I could just plug into a USB C dock and use as a normal computer. They've got plenty of processing power for that now. Every single program I use except for games could run on a phone if it used normal GNU/Linux.

I was given an old Chromebook tablet by a friend that wanted to get rid of it, and it just happened to have mainline Linux support. I was able to get postmarketOS running on it, and got gnome shell mobile as the DE. It works, and works well. The apps that support the touch interface and are made to be responsive, etc work really well, and the waydroid integegration works fantastically well. I was able to get android version of jellyfin working, with vlc, and a few other apps I use daily. All this in 4GB of ram, I'm really impressed! This screenshot was running gnome shell I think, I've since switch to the 'mobile' variant of it, and running system monitor with android vlc and android jellyfin running, zoomed out so you could see all the apps running at once.

Its time for a Linux phone, I put in an order for the 2nd batch of this phone, hopefully they start shipping soon, they supposedly already shipped the first batch to users.

https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1/

I don't believe that they're likely to do GNU/Linux. I bet that they're going to do a fork of Android off AOSP or something like that.

Android's had a huge amount of work put into it to make it suitable to be a consumer mobile phone OS, and the companies here aren't doing this because they want stuff that GNU/Linux does, but rather because they're Chinese companies worried about a US-China industrial decoupling and its risks for them. Like, they were okay with the technical status; what changed was that they started to worry about having the rug pulled out from them.

That being said, I can at least imagine that helping GNU/Linux phone adoption. So, think about what happened with video games. There were some major platforms out there -- MacOS, iOS, Windows, various consoles, Android, GNU/Linux. That fragmented the market. Trying to port software to all platforms became a huge pain. What a lot of game developers did was to target a more-or-less platform-agnostic engine and let the engine handle the platform abstraction.

If the mobile OS space fragments further -- like, Android splits into "Google Android" and "China Android"

my guess is that that'll help drive demand for platform-agnostic engines to help improve portability, and porting one engine to GNU/Linux is a lot easier than every individual program.

Exact! And please no bloatware!!

Oh wait, before anything else : NO, and I really mean NO AI and/or VR shit. Just none. None A T A L L

Is this the year of the Ubuntu Touch Smartphone?

Probably not, but it should be.