
Ask HN: Why are there no “modern” phones running open source operating systems? - mmathias
Now that Ubuntu Touch development has been halted, I was searching for alternatives. Plasma Mobile only supports the Nexus 5X. Any ideas?
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mossmoth
You have Sailfish OS [0], which is ported to rather modern (albeit somewhat
low spec) phones (e.g. Fairphone 2, Jolla C [1]). Sailfish also has an Android
compatability layer (think Wine for Linux) so it can run most Android apps.

[0] - [https://sailfishos.org/](https://sailfishos.org/) [1] -
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS#Hardware_overvie...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailfish_OS#Hardware_overview)

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mknits
A few months ago, I was in the same boat as OP - bored of Android and iOS
stuff. Thanks to the ex-Nokia and ex-Meego employees, we have Sailfish OS.

Bought immediately. Since then, I'm using less of Google's ecosystem. Phone is
great and almost have every feature that you desire, sometimes better.

[https://sailfishos.org/about/](https://sailfishos.org/about/)

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beckler
I will always be disappointed that WebOS never had a proper leg to stand on.
The Palm Pre was my absolute favorite phone, but the hardware was just too far
behind. Whenever I heard WebOS was made open-source I was hoping someone would
take it and make a great phone OS, but I haven't seen anyone try. Instead it's
used to power new TVs and printers.

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paulcole
Follow the money: vast majority of people don't care and don't want one.

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soulbadguy
Part of the problem is that the "open source" community have never been able
to produce well design and user-freindly user interfaces.

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addcn
Android is open source.

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mmathias
Yes, but all Android Phones come with a pre-compiled binary distribution. And
as long as it's pre-compiled, it's kind of hard to know what is going on under
the hood. Compiling and installing your own Android almost always is a pain..

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edimaudo
Counting out Android building a mobile OS is a huge investment with very
little returns.

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aey
Because of Qualcomm

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bbcbasic
?

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aey
None of their modem code is open source. It's baked into a proprietary modem
image that runs on a different subsystem then the application processor.

You could run a your own OS on the application processor, but millions of
lines of code that are actually doing the "phone" part of the device is going
to remain closed.

I doubt you could run your own trust zone image either, so you are effectively
running an open source guest OS where all the interesting stuff is controlled
by propriatery code.

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mmathias
Thank you, that's a good explanation. Of course, open source hardware would be
nice too :)

