I‘m currently using an old iphone since I bought it before I knew much about apple and it was advertised for its long lifespan.
The problems I have with apples policy and the way I cant use this phone like i want to are driving me to want a different phone.
But the discussion I had about alternative OSs feels very biased. A lot of folks seem to be mostly focused on privacytm, not owning your device.
What do I mean by that?
If you buy a computer, most people got windows with it. Some upgraded as soon as a new OS came out, some waited until the old one ran out. But it used to be that you can keep your device many years until it cant really run anything anymore. With linux its a different ballgame but out of the scope of this post.
Phones are a fashion item
Not so with phones. Some drop support for their phones like a hot potato but no phone keeps being supported after 5 yrs (apple) or three yrs (android phones mostly), some even earlier.
Manufacturers keep telling us its for safety or performance but the advancements in mobile computing arent that huge imo.
Privacy is a trend
And people seem to not care, not even most alternative os users. Graphene OS, running on pixel phones, seems to also drop support when the manufacturer support runs out.
This is, at its core, a terrible situation. But nobody seems to talk about it. These phones are not broken, they are getting intentionally „soft bricked“. The manufacturers could release the codes to sign software for these devices from what I read. They could make it easy for the community to support them.
We are being manipulated
But they condemn our hardware to the landfill and us to do their bidding and buy new as well as ruining our climate even further.
Thats why decided to go with postmarket os and buy an old phone. I‘ll try to get it working as best I can and also try to help with development since I have some skills.
please help
That said, if you have tech skills, consider helping with making old phones work longer either by testing postmarket os or others. Alternatively you can help developing this community project.
But even without tech knowledge, you can sign this petition to make manufacturers open their devices to us after support ends.
By “general purpose OS” I meant “an OS or OSes which are capable to provide features so that the phone can reasonably used as a daily driver”. Similar to bare-bone AOSP. I didn’t stress on a single OS. Sorry, that was not clarified in my response.
Regarding the other parts, the issue is not about the jailbreak or unlock of bootloader - it is already being done. And it is getting increasingly easy for those phones which stop getting updates. I was stressing the fact that even after such unlock, the harder part is to avail/install a workable OS on such a phone, and even harder is to develop such. A lot of reverse engineering needed in such efforts.
Yeah, if we can get the device unlocked, get the full hardware specifications with datasheets and firmware code, and source code of the drivers then we might have a shot.
Sorry, I was not on the same ideological page as you on Anti-Corporate Movement. I’m new here, and wasn’t fully aware of the goal of community. So, my reply was along the lines of technical issues of the approach.
Thank you for clarifying and please dont worry. It was a clear misunderstanding on both ends. I respect that you are being open about it.
Have a nice day! :)