Hey all,
I want to get away from Android, at the moment my solution is a flip phone. it runs an old version of Android GO, but the lack of practicality drives me away from using it frequently.
are there any good phone/distro combos with working VoLTE? anything to avoid? any advice or recs would be great.
Thanks!
Graphene is not a GNU/Linux distro, it’s an Android fork.
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FuriOS’s FLX1s works pretty well; it’s been my primary device for 3 months, now.
Never even heard of that device before. Can you get Signal messenger on it?
So there’s Flare which works (GTK implementation) but it’s far from feature parity; but it definitely works pretty nicely, for what it is.
The device also has really good Android emulation; certain Google Play services still don’t quite work, even though it comes with MicroG preinstalled (e.g. the Integrity API so, unfortunately, all my banking app.s crash themselves), but I can’t imagine Signal uses any that’d cause it not to run.
I have it (the Android version) installed and it opens just fine but I haven’t had the chance to try transferring the account (and all messages) over, yet. So I’d expect it’d fully work but that’s all I can tell you, yet.
I can come back and let you know how it goes and how well it works – once I get there –, if you’d like.
I’d appreciate that! Signal messenger support is honestly the biggest thing I can’t live without if I’m going to convert away. I’ve been considering a move to GrapheneOS soon without any Google Play Services and just using Aurora/F-Droid, but I’d REALLY love to move to a full Linux phone that isn’t Android-based, as I view GrapheneOS as just a stepping stone still beholden to Google’s whims.
So I ended up finally getting to do it much later than I’d ever want but I have finally tried it out and have an answer for you.
Answer is, even better than I could’ve anticipated. Transferring messages over worked just fine and as expected.
The app. operates fine with not even any crashing that I’ve seen, so far. But the big one is that it runs in the background and still pops up notifications. Most Android app.s which would typically run in the background do so just fine so I was less worried about that but I’ve definitely encountered not getting any notification until I opened the app.
In Signal’s case, it had a popup that mentioned not being able to deliver notifications due to the lack of GApps so you should set the settings to allow it to run without battery saver so it could run in the background and reliably provide notifications (or something like that).
You can just click the link in the popup and it’ll take you right to the Settings and you can authorize it; after that, it reliably will notify me if someone sends a message. I haven’t tried anything like calls or the like but I rarely use them and messages were my primary worry.
I set the phone as the primary device and removed the old Android phone. So, yeah; I can say the Android Signal works great.
Jolla has sailfish OS as the official ROM and it has for quite a few years now (for all their past phones). It’s not marketed as a dev experimental.
A lot of people who are eager to install Linux on their phones this early are out off by the proprietary parts of SailfishOS. I personally want a Linux phone in large part due to distrust of proprietary software for a device with such capacity to invade my privacy.
Proprietary blobs are also present throughout regular linux distributions. And I hear and participate with the moans they generate but users understand that sometimes modems, wireless chips or GPUs (main culprits) have us stuck at the onset of using Linux at all. Debian had to reverse it’s procedure from a default free only to default mix and user has to specify if he doesn’t want proprietary firmware installed. Even graphene OS has to make do with proprietary firmware.
It’s a whole lot more than just firmware, though. The UI is proprietary. A bunch of the basic system apps are proprietary. The Android compatibility layer is proprietary. You’re not really buying into an open OS that happens to have proprietary components; you’re getting a proprietary OS built in open components.