SailfishX is a usable daily driver with decent Android app support.
BUT: you’ll have to be okay with dealing with random annoyances like:
-> Your default weather app lost the ability to get weather data.
-> Some Xperia 10 III devices lose audio after some time when using GPS. Unless you are in Finland, then you are fine. Nobody knows why.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned Droidian yet. It’s the best of both worlds: You get a Linux phone with Phosh and an actual camera + sensors working due to the Android kernel. Check it out here: https://droidian.org/
It supports Waydroid out of the box, allowing you to run Android apps such as Whatsapp, Bitwarden and even Google Playstore, etc.
The new Firefox is miles away from what PostmarketOS offers. The only downside is you need a supported device, as per https://devices.droidian.org/.
So yes, I do drive Droidian daily, but I have an Android phone nearby just in case I need something specific.
It depends. It’s viable if you just need a phone with several open source applications (non-Android) and are fine with that. But if you need Android app compatibility it’s probably going to be harder or more inconvenient to do, though I haven’t checked the status in recent time. And then there’s this evil thing called Google Play Integrity (essentially DRM restricting which apps can run on which OS) which is a problem even for non-proprietary Androids, so you probably won’t have any chance if you’re dependent on such an app (thankfully it’s rare but as we all know stupid ideas tend to become annoyingly popular).
Main problem, as usual, is that Android and iOS have become such big and popular “platforms” for mobile apps that establishing a “third” platform for app developers is basically impossible (also remember what happened to Windows Phone OS, they were late to the market and failed spectacularly to catch up. Of course in this case it’s open source so it can grow regardless of user numbers, but still, it’s hard to catch up when lots of great Android apps were already developed specifically for Android). So you can only hope that Android app compatibility grows mature enough to be close to 100% compatible, so that you can also run almost all Android apps on your mainline Linux mobile OS. Then you’re not “limited” anymore. (At least if you consider it “limited” when you can’t run Android apps. Which most probably consider to be “limited”).
So I think it’s less about the hardware and OS/UI (I think they work fine these days) and more about the available apps.
[My main daily driver phone is a GrapheneOS (Android) and I have a Pinephone with Linux for playing around in WiFi at home only]
The biggest hurdle is getting a phone that you even can install a custom ROM or different OS. 'mericans and yuropeans can get their pixels, pinephones and similars easily, other places cannot.
Every phone in europe has to have an unlockable bootloader, Although, thats useless without a custom recovery support.
How are all the AOSP-based OSes, like for instance GrapheneOS, not Linux distros?
When people want “Linux” on their phones they’re talking more about the ecosystem than the OS
There are apps made for linux that don’t work with android, and there are apps made for android that don’t work with linux. That’s enough for me to consider them different
Also android just doesn’t use the basic mainline kernel which is what most people want when they say “linux phone”
I run Ubuntu Touch on a Google Pixel 3a xL with Waydroid/Aurora store for Android stuff. So far it works fine for what i need.
Gonna pull your leg here and say Android or, as I’ve recently taken to calling it, busybox + Linux + Google
Actually android uses toybox not busybox 🤓
Actually thanks for the akshually, because I had no idea about its existence
No. Maybe. Why not?
