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.
What you are tying to achieve is literally the goal of PostmarketOS. For supported devices, PMOS should continue working for a very ling time when compared to more hacky custom roms. I use a Oneplus 6 and have used both divestOS and PostmarketOS on it and it is well supported by both.
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.
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.
I have a Fairphone 4 and would definitely give them the biggest recommendation I could.
Any part can be replaced with a screwdriver which is an order of magnitude better than I've seen with other brands. I dropped and broke my phone screen and although I had to buy a new screen, after that I had a phone working as if it was brand new.
I also got mortar into my usb charging socket and was able to replace the charging socket.
You might be able to tell that I'm not the best at looking after things, I'm working on this but in the meantime, fairphone have saved me at least two situations where I'd normally need to buy a new phone. Can't recommend them enough.
I have a Fairphone 4, as well, and I bought it for the very same reason. The previous phone was not a high end model, but it worked well enough for me until the battery just died from one day to the next. Was nothing I could do as it was glued and soldered, and there was no way for an amateur like me to replace it, so all of that still working hardware had to be recycled. That first made me angry, then it made me think, and I looked around and found the FP4 with its promise of being able to replace not just the battery but everything else as well, as well as extensive, long term software support. I have seen two major Android version updates already, and regular security and feature updates, so I am very happy with my buying decision.
As others have mentioned, there are no good BifL options. Based on what I gather from your post, your best option is probably getting 2nd hand devices and following behind by a few years. You can probably keep a 3-year-old device for 7 or 8 years (which is ages in the smartphone world), then "upgrade" to another 3-year-old device at that time.
For this, I'd recommend something popular like a Pixel. They have a number of options for alternative OSes (Graphene and LineageOS are both good options) and they've done well for me as long-term use phones.
I've bought my last couple phones on Swappa, and I've had no issues with any of them. Sold one on there too, and they're pretty vigilant (they manually review posts before they can go public).
Fairphone might be worth taking a look at.
If you just want to use a FOSS OS, LineageOS with a Google Pixel phones have the best support and will be the path of least resistance.
GraphineOS seems to set the benchmark for secure de-googled android phones and has a very short list of supported devices. I think I'd suggest starting with one of those, and once support eventually drops, if you're comfortable with a reduced security capability, looking to lineageOS or similar. I think if Graphine supports a phone, it's pretty much guaranteed to have support on the more general OSs.
For a while I looked at ruggedized smartphones (some with removable batteries!) that were supported by lineageOS and others. I didn't find one I was convinced would hold up as long as I wanted, and I had security concerns so I ended up getting a decent secondhand phone with guaranteed security support for a few years and putting it in a good case.
Sometimes I check in on various raspberry pi smartphone projects. I love the idea and think it'd probably be able to last the longest (or be turned into something else after an upgrade) but I don't think any feel reliable enough to me yet.
The real answer is giving up on the concept of phones sadly. Laptop for life is much more realistic.
I’m with you there. I have defunded phones for sure and minimized the role of phones. I don’t even use smartphones as phones (no SIM chip). I think the only absolutely essential use case for me is to run OSMand (navigation) because it’s far too impractical to get a paper map for every city I set foot in.
OSMand is a resource hog. Crashes chronically when overworked. So maintaining OSMand seems to require keeping pace to some extent. Certainly the FOSS platforms will at least enable a phone to stay in play as long as possible -- or so I hope.
You could try Organic Maps as an alternative to OsmAnd though it's not so great either.
The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing, because of the mutually recursive escalation of web sites' and browsers' appetites for machine resources. A 2005 laptop that tops out at 512mb of ram simply can't run browsers needed to use the modern web. I'm still using a Thinkpad X220 from 2011 with 4gb of ram, but I have older ones that are no longer viable because of memory and CPU limitations.
Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu's can't keep up, and the reasons for that are somewhat more valid than web bloat. The new codecs really do have better video quality at a given bit rate, in exchange for the increased cpu cycles.
All phones have orphaned kernels. They are orphans because the source code to run the physical hardware is not available. The manufacturer adds these binaries in the last step of the ROM. They cannot be reverse engineered effectively and every model is different. Reverse engineering one does nothing for the next.
The hacked ROMs are maintained by people that know the kernel source at a crazy deep level. They know both the original kernel that the orphan is based on along with the state of every change and CVE that gets fixed in the current kernel. They are back porting all changes to the old kernel in order to keep it going. Eventually this becomes untenable or they lose interest.
It's too early to be certain, but I've got high hopes for the future of the SHIFT 6mq.
I believe it has mainline linux support, or it is being worked on, which will be important for ongoing OS upgrades. Otherwise they have a similar philosophy to Fairphone with an important difference; SHIFT wants you to be able to upgrade their phones, not just repair them. I don't think this has been realistically tested yet, but the successor SHIFTPHONE 8 is coming out imminently, and I think we should start to see pretty soon if any of the new modules can be installed on the older model.
I've actually got the SHIFTPHONE 8 coming myself, because I got spooked by places turning off 3G already and wanted to "future proof" with 5G, but otherwise would have preferred the 6mq.
The one caveat is that SHIFT is a very small company, which could mean risk for long term support.
I think flash memory degrades over time. This can render any phone useless given enough years of service, but this might vary a lot between brands and usage habits. A dash cam app can kill some phones surprisingly fast.
Early flash memory had a severe bitwear/bitrot issue, but at some point (2015?) they made some strides on that. The best resilience is in the SSDs for some reason. I’m not sure how much SD cards improved, but I suppose a phone’s internal storage would be an embedded SD card.
It’s a good point, so it would be useful to know if there is a year where bitwear is less notable on phones.
It’s a shame Fairphone even has internal storage, which seems to go against their vision. But apparently Fairphone users can at least use the external storage as internal (if you neglect the apparent bug mentioned in that thread). I wonder if the internal storage is still needed for the boot loader in that case.
Current FOSS supported smartphones are mostly not really compatible with BIFL
Firstly, Rooting/ flashing non-manufacturer firmware voids your warranty. A phone without manufacturer support is going to struggle to be BIFL. If you’re able to flash the original ROM back on that protects you some, but if a failure leaves you unable to flash firmware then you’re SOL.
Also, the FOSS OS might be solid but many ports to specific phones are enabled by only a couple of developers doing it on a voluntary basis. You might well find multiple FOSS OS are being maintained by a single person who is really into keeping their phone compatible with multiple FOSS projects. Unless you’re going to be that person, you would want to check that’s not the case, because if that person upgrades you may find yourself without support which again is not BIFL.
The closest you’re going to get is probably something like the Fairphone. They’re designed to be long-term repairable, ethically produced and running FOSS. But they are also far from the cutting edge. Pick your poison.
Firstly, Rooting/ flashing non-manufacturer firmware voids your warranty. A phone without manufacturer support is going to struggle to be BIFL.
I just bought an all-metal sewing machine from like the 1960s. Of course the warranty is toast (though it was generous.. like 25yrs or something). I would not say it’s not BifL on the basis of warranty expiry. It will likely last the rest of my life which could amount to another 50 yrs.
Most of what I buy outlasts the warranty. Then I push it far beyond what’s expected. But indeed smartphones are such an obsolescence shit-show out of the gate they will be the hardest product to push the lifetime on.
Got nothing for you. Good luck.
Swappa.com has been my go to for years. I am perfectly fine on S20.