https://jleightcap.srht.site/blog/openphone.html
Smartphones are Shit: the Case for LineageOS and the Pinephone
# 20 min read
published 2022-04-08
Jack Leightcap
Contents
- Intro
- Longevity: Hardware
- Longevity: Software
- Open Source
- Open Source and Smartphones
- LineageOS
- PinePhone
- TL;DR: Where to Go From Here?
Intro
Don't smartphones... kind of suck? How many times have you had to
replace a phone in the past 10 years? Do you have a drawer of random
crap with a growing pile of phones, or have you tried to absolve some
regret and taken a few trips to an e-waste "recycler"? The battery no
longer holds a charge; it gets way too hot; replacing a cracked
screen costs more than just getting a new phone; new updates are
unbearably slow; updates stop altogether; support stops altogether.
Longevity: Hardware
Compare your phone to a desktop computer: while not perfect by any
means, most desktop computers are so modular they can be Ship of
Theseus'd many times over. Does a fan start making a horrible noise?
You can probably find a replacement on eBay for pretty cheap if you
know what to look for. Even if you're not tech-savvy, you can pay a
premium to have a repair shop fix the fan for you.
Bit of an unfair comparison considering you don't keep a desktop in
your pocket -- what about something like a laptop? Historically,
laptops have been pretty repairable, but as time goes on less and
less so. Spill a drink on your laptop keyboard, have fun,
MacBook Keyboard Replacement
Apple Really Doesn't Want You To Fix This - MacBook Keyboard
Replacement, (c) 2022 Hugh Jeffreys via Invidious
If you can sacrifice some 'sleekness' and a maybe a little bit more
weight, laptops sold in bulk to companies or schools are becoming the
last bastion of laptop repairability. I'm writing this on a laptop
from 2008 that's held up just fine with a battery replacement and
some memory upgrades made easy by a very repairable design.
x200
Laptop Repairability: X230 Exploded View, (c) 2022 XY Tech
Smartphones? Repairability and modularity are actively avoided by
manufacturers. Just taking apart a modern iPhone is a
warranty-voiding, screen-cracking, glue-ripping operation. If your
battery doesn't hold a charge, even if every other component of the
phone is working just fine, the implicit (and even sometimes
explicit) goal of smartphone manufactures is for you to just buy
another phone.
The issues this runs up against are Circular Economy and Planned
Obsolescence, see M. Barros, E. Dimla: From Planned Obsolescence
to the Circular Economy in the Smartphone Industry: an Evolution
of Strategies Embodied in Product Features via sci-hub
Longevity: Software
Hardware's lifespan is always finite; everything breaks eventually.
The more frustrating source of turnover is software obsolescence.
Apple has a very good stated support window of 5 years, but as
developers engineer software targeting only the newest and most
powerful phones, you start to notice updates making your apps slower.
Eventually you stop getting updates all together. The same applies
for the other major smartphone operating system Android.
This is the tragedy of modern software: we've built abstract software
systems that can be replicated infinitely at no cost, don't
inherently degrade, don't wear out with use; but ever-increasing
demand for more complexity and novelty makes software "rot" just the
same as hardware.
Open Source
But... how can I get stuff done on my 2008 laptop while my 2018
smartphone struggles to open Slack? Like, installing Windows on this
laptop is totally possible, but Microsoft has no financial incentive
to support this hardware let alone test their products' usability on
it. This means, as far as Microsoft is concerned, I can either use
something way too slow to be usable or something that stopped
receiving security updates half a decade ago.
A remedy is Open Source.
"What is open source?" is easier to answer by describing what it is
not. The code that runs on an iPhone, for example, is totally
inaccessible to the end user. If you've wondered why something was
broken, even if you might have the skills to fix it, you have no
power besides complaining to Apple and hoping they eventually bless
you with a fix. While much less user-facing, the same applies to
hardware design. Sure, this makes sense for Apple from a consumerist,
hyper-capitalist perspective; Apple doesn't want other companies to
freely benefit from their novel engineering efforts. From a longevity
and sustainability perspective: this closed source model leads to
repairability being at best a marketing feature rather than design
principle. But plenty of incredible engineering work has been done
totally opposite this philosophy: under open source! Even if you
don't personally care about the internals of how some hardware or
software works, imagine if repair shops or volunteers had access to
hardware and software designs -- these accessible designs would allow
support for old phones far beyond what manufacturers intended!
In contrast to releases of iOS (the very base software that makes up
an iPhone), a fully open-source alternative -- the Linux kernel -- is
cautious to the point of paranoia about both backwards compatibility
and hardware support. The open-source internet browser Firefox has
consistent releases and a community maintainers that make accessing
the internet on weaker computer hardware easy. Plenty of older, more
light-weight software and protocols like RSS or IRC -- even email! --
certainly aren't flashy but allow living in the modern digital age
without overabundant resource use.
This is the promise of open source. While profit-driven companies
have little to no incentives to support end-of-life devices, open
source builds on a collective commons of labor. The motivations for
open source can seem totally counter-intuitive under a system of only
closed source choices, but open source technology forms the backbone
of the internet, develops the tools used to build almost all software
projects, and provides user-facing software like Firefox.
I think a reasonable objection and unique challenge in open
source is not environmental sustainability, but labor
sustainability. With no corporate backing structure, is this
something you can or should rely on? I'd argue yes: see J.-F.
Boujut, F. Pourroy, P. Marin, J. Dai, and G. Richardot, Open
Source Hardware Communities: Investigating Participation in
Design Activities via sci-hub
Open source technology, While no means a magic bullet and certainly
having its own unique set of challenges, has proven itself more
suitable for sustainable technology.
Open Source and Smartphones
LineageOS
If this sounds promising, what's a solution that exists now, even if
imperfect?
A part of the common smartphone operating system Android is already
open-source (the Android Open Source Project, AOSP). The
functionality of AOSP, however, is only a very core piece of an
Android smartphone. Google itself adds its own closed source software
that allows access to the Google Play Store, the assumed default for
downloading new Android apps. Different phones use different
hardware, and phone manufacturers (Samsung, Motorola, Google) also
have proprietary software specific to that hardware.
A current solution, building on top of AOSP, is LineageOS. What
LineageOS does, to oversimplify an incredible amount of effort, is
reverse engineer and provide replacements for these closed source
pieces of software. The result is an open source Android smartphone
operating system with a much longer support window, allowing phone
hardware to be useful long after intended.
If this sounds promising, and you're at the point of needing a new
phone, consider:
* Finding a smartphone supported by LineageOS. Buy one second hand!
Maybe find a broken phone -- otherwise e-waste -- and see if it can
be repaired. Other projects similar to LineageOS exists that
support an ever wider set of hardware.
More in line with an overarching goal of hardware sustainability,
an exciting project is the Fairphone which is close to a drop-in
replacement for existing Android phones. See T. Wernink, C.
Strahl, Fairphone: Sustainability from the Inside-Out and
Outside-In via sci-hub
* Installing LineageOS. If you are somewhat tech-savvy, the
instructions are very well written and easy to follow. If not,
consider finding a repair shop familiar with Android phones; or
even some online vendors sell phones with LineageOS
pre-installed.
This is what I use personally and would recommend to most people.
LineageOS on a OnePlus
my OnePlus phone showing the LineageOS logo
If you have previously used an Android smartphone, LineageOS will
feel very familiar. You can choose to use something like F-Droid as
an open-source equivalent of the Google Play Store or install
proprietary software on top of LineageOS that allow access to the
existing pool of Android apps if needed.
But, there are some limits to this:
* The hardware that LineageOS runs on... is still proprietary!
LineageOS alone doesn't solve problems like batteries being
impossible to replace or no availability for replacement parts.
* The software isn't even fully open source! The lingo for this is
binary blobs, meaning there's some small closed-source 'blobs' of
code deep in LineageOS that control small pieces of hardware.
Of these binary blobs, the most fraught is the software used for
the modem. The modem alone makes the goal of a totally open
smartphone nearly impossible. Qualcomm has a legally-approved
monopoly over effectively forcing use of proprietary software for
any smartphone. See E. Hagemann, Essential Facilities, Essential
Patents, and the Essential Oversight of Qualcommm via SSRN
PinePhone
So, if you want a true open source phone, both hardware and software,
what can you do? A promising project with a very active community is
PINE64's Pinephone. The Pinephone doesn't build on AOSP and instead
is a totally group-up approach using the Linux kernel directly. This
is not something I'd recommend unless you're truly dedicated to open
source and want to be early to the first generation of open source
telephony.
Pinephone with SXMO
my Pinephone running a Linux distribution with SXMO
I've used a Pinephone intermittently, and my experience is that
* Using the tools I'm familiar with from desktop computers to do
things on my phone is fantastic. My phone feels more like an
extension of how I use computers already rather than being a
walled-off monolith.
* Being familiar with and preferring modest software on a very old
computer is useful. RSS feeds, mpv+youtube-dl, IRC, email all
work great right out of the box.
* Transferring a phone number is ideally as easy as putting the SIM
card in the phone. I had a lot of issues with this, but the
issues were just a result of Verizon being a terrible company.
* Software support is still early in development. A lot of what
most smartphone users would consider required is not available.
For example, alternatives to navigation apps like Google Maps are
still very early in development. When you go to a bar you get to
be the weirdo that doesn't have Venmo and can't scan the dumb QR
code menus.
But... I really hope the Pinephone succeeds! It's one of the very few
ongoing projects I'm genuinely excited about. I would love to use the
Pinephone as my daily use phone. I think the Pinephone gets as close
as possible to the desktop computer idiom and makes smartphones feel
like what they really are... just a really small computer!
That modem issue I mentioned for LineageOS? The Pinephone
community is actively working to reverse engineering and provide
a replacement to the standard binary blob. It's an isolated
effort and not going to be included in any stock installation --
other projects don't want the legal culpability. This is an
awesome example of a distributed open source community taking on
an issue that would never be tackled otherwise. See:
pinephone-modem-sdk, EG25-G reverse engineering
TL;DR: Where to Go From Here?
The next time you reach the end of an artificially short smartphone
lifespan, I'd encourage you to stop the cycle of predestined e-waste
and refuse to support the companies that make it happen. Buy a phone
second-hand.
LineageOS is a mature, user-friendly software solution that exists
now. But, it's a stop gap. I hope soon the Pinephone is a viable
solution for the first smartphone -- both hardware and software -- that
isn't shit.
read this on gemini: gemini://jleightcap.srht.site/blog/openphone.gmi
(c) copyright is cringe