Finding a BifL smartphone
Finding a BifL smartphone
Hardware far outlasts software in the smartphone world, due to aggressive chronic designed obsolescence by market abusing monopolies. So I will never buy a new smartphone - don’t want to feed those scumbags. I am however willing to buy used smartphones on the 2nd-hand market if they can be liberated. Of course it’s still only marginally BifL even if you don’t have demanding needs.
Has anyone gone down this path? My temptation is to find a phone that is simultaneously supported by 2 or 3 different FOSS OS projects. So if it falls out of maintence on one platform it’s not the end. The Postmarket OS (pmOS) page has a full list and a short list. The short list apparently covers devices that are actively maintained and up to date, which are also listed here. Then phones on that shortlist can be cross-referenced with the LineageOS list or the Sailfish list.
So many FOSS phone platforms seem to come and go I’ve not kept up on it. What others are worth considering? It looks like the Replicant device list hasn’t changed much.
(update) Graphene OS has a list of supported devices
(and it appears they don’t maintain old devices)
Pixel 9 Pro Fold (comet)
Pixel 9 Pro XL (komodo)
Pixel 9 Pro (caiman)
Pixel 9 (tokay)
Pixel 8a (akita)
Pixel 8 Pro (husky)
Pixel 8 (shiba)
Pixel Fold (felix)
Pixel Tablet (tangorpro)
Pixel 7a (lynx)
Pixel 7 Pro (cheetah)
Pixel 7 (panther)
Pixel 6a (bluejay)
Pixel 6 Pro (raven)
Pixel 6 (oriole)
So Graphene’s mission is a bit orthoganol to the mission of Postmarket OS. Perhaps it makes sense for some people to get a Graphene-compatible device then hope they can switch to pmOS when it gets dropped. But I guess that’s not much of a budget plan. Pixel 6+ are likely not going to be dirt cheap on the 2nd-hand market.
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It doesn't and can't exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it's a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g. Also, the idea of a smartphone is to use internet services or at least web pages, and those invariably want you to use recently made phone hardware to deal with bloat. If you can get 5 years from a phone you're doing ok.
yeah, and that is baked into the SoC, so it's not like you could even just make a phone with a swappable antenna/modem module
It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.
Indeed the amount of lifetime you get out of a phone depends on what you need. I don’t actually use a smartphone as a phone. My phone has no SIM chip inserted. Wi-Fi is not getting outpaced as quickly. If you have sufficient control over your device, you can reverse tether as well.
This is how my old AOS 5 device connects (2 ways):
① AOS 5 → Wi-Fi → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)
② AOS 5 → USB 2 reverse tethered → 16 year old laptop → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)My AOS 2 phone (from ~2009ish?) can also still connect via method ① but I have no use for putting it online.
What I care about is the phone-laptop connection so I can side-load f-droid apps, OSMand in particular. I will always be able to hack together a hotspot to update the OSMand maps.
and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.
You may have just helped solve a mystery for me. I was using an HSDPA stick to connect a yr or 2 ago. Then one day I suddenly had no internet. Had to scramble to get another mobile broadband stick, which happened to be LTE -- which worked. I bitched to the carrier. I thought maybe they pushed a faulty baseband update to my hardware and broke it. They claimed my modem just died. I thought no fucking way does a simple solid state USB device like that just croak. Maybe they pulled the plug on 3g and didn’t inform anyone.
Arguably 5G is a massive downgrade in easy deployabilty for most countries so 4G will stick around for a bit longer, but yeah, even 5G might not set you up for life.
You can always make a bridge/hotspot that will do what you need. You are only limited if you are fussy about pocket/backpack space.
Idk what the deployment issues are for 5g vs 4g, but I get the impression that at least here in the US, most new installs are 5g which means that 4g coverage will gradually worsen, then maybe go away. Same with 5g but not as soon, I'd guess.
The countryside will never be covered by 5G. The range is massively decreased due to the higher frequency. You would have to litter the forest and fields with antennas. 4G isnt going away any time soon unless we intend to cut off all sorts of infrastructure and farmers and hikers and emergency services from internet access.
4G has a range in the 10+ km area
5G is in the low hundreds of meters range so its a fancy city tech
5g exists at different frequencies, just like 4g.
The lowest 4g frequency is 410mhz, and the lowest 5g frequency is 450mhz
The range of a 5g tower can be the same or higher than a 4g tower depending on the frequency used.
I think your confusion seems to come from the existence of 5g mmWave, which is sometimes uses synonymously with 5g. But 5g mmWave towers actually make up only a small fraction of 5g installs, the majority is using the same frequency band as 4g, and when comparing 5g to 4g at the same frequency then 5g actually even has a small range advantage
Isnt the bandwidth also gonna dip to 4G levels tho if you drop the frequency to those levels?
It will be slower than 5g mmWave, but faster than 4g at the same frequency
terming 5G “fancy city tech” is more than a little harsh. 5G was never meant to exist on its own - it solves a lot of density issues exactly because of its limited range
It also conveniently offers more accurate cell phone tracking because of its limited range.
Ah thanks, I had thought it was the same frequency but different protocol. Good to know. I do see phones starting to have satellite capabilities now, though at first just for texts.
The guy you answered to is actually not correct, see my reply to him. 5g can and does use the same frequencies as 4g, the upper frequency limit is just higher but those are only used in dense cities. Rural 5g installations use the same low frequencies as 4g and get better range than 5g at those frequencies
Yeye i wrote a reply correcting myself with an excerpt of wikipedia. Thanks for pointing that out.
As Anivia pointed out 5G does apparently come in lower frequency aswell for higher range. That does drop the bandwidth quite a bit, but its still gonna be as good or better than 4G in terms of bandwidth. So my original comment was a bit too critical maybe.
5G can be implemented in low-band, mid-band or high-band millimeter-wave. Low-band 5G uses a similar frequency range to 4G cellphones, 600–900 MHz, which can potentially offer higher download speeds than 4G: 5–250 megabits per second (Mbit/s).[3][4] Low-band cell towers have a range and coverage area similar to 4G towers. Mid-band 5G uses microwaves of 1.7–4.7 GHz, allowing speeds of 100–900 Mbit/s, with each cell tower providing service up to several kilometers in radius. This level of service is the most widely deployed, and was deployed in many metropolitan areas in 2020. Some regions are not implementing the low band, making Mid-band the minimum service level. High-band 5G uses frequencies of 24–47 GHz, near the bottom of the millimeter wave band, although higher frequencies may be used in the future. It often achieves download speeds in the gigabit-per-second (Gbit/s) range, comparable to co-axial cable Internet service. However, millimeter waves (mmWave or mmW) have a more limited range, requiring many small cells.[5] They can be impeded or blocked by materials in walls or windows or pedestrians.
There is a workaround for this, which is to use a service like JMP.chat to redirect SMS to XMPP, at which point you only need to ensure internet which is a bit of a lower requirement than specific networks (but of course may still become more limiting over time)
Looks like a quite useful service. Thanks for mentioning it. But $5/month is a bit much for that. I would love to SMS people from an XMPP app but it would have to be cheaper, or pay per msg.
We have a perfectly functioning iPad1 (2?) and a somewhat younger Android tablet. There are no OS updates, you can't install any new software, and on most cases even browsing is broken.