RE: https://androiddev.social/@MishaalRahman/115849772521760098

It’s worth repeating. Android is not a viable base for an independent or even just collaborative operating system. Android is Google and only Google’s project.

If you want to see an actually transparent, international, and collaborative system on phones, support @postmarketOS

#android #opensource

@thibaultamartin @postmarketOS It's the reason I bought a @WeAreFairphone for me and my wife. If Android becomes fully enshittified, there is a high chance postmarketOS will be compatible enough at that time to be a real alternative. I support pmOS with 5€ a month as well. It's nice. It feels like I directly funded the recent call audio work.

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin

forking AOSP would be a ridiculously huge effort, since Google has evolved to scale through increasing abstractions you need to have teams of people working maintenance like security fixes across bespoke compilers, apis and code, responsible for having compatible expensive test farms, and establishing governance for changing UI features, updating security APIs, and interacting with vendors.

To support that you would need funding that really can only be obtained by having lots of vendors using your OS, but vendors aren't gonna do that without the governence in place.

basically this is limitied to corporations and states.

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin more or less yeah that's my take.

I believe this is one of the reasons postmarketOS is better. We intentionally work towards decentralisation in a many2many style, so that the number of centralised components that could bottleneck the project are kinimal.

we aim to make it easier to set up your own paclage repositories, CI, and automated testing, and do t force people to pick a side by ensuring that our automated hardware testing allows one device to be tested from multiple gitlab instances.

the binary repo and tooling like pmbootstrap let you easily replace on the fly any part of the OS (same way you would replace a package on your desktop linux pc) since it's literally Linux. The immutable version will also make this possible

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS the scale of a project like this means, it can't meaningfully be forked. You'd need a team of experienced developers just to keep up, let alone make some headway.

So
"fork": yes
Fork and be viable long-term: extremely hard
😩

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS I can't speak about PostmarketOS because I have no idea how this project is structured or how it keeps running. From what I could gather quickly, it seems to be based on pretty standard HUGE projects (linux kernel, GNOME, Waydroid, Alpine packaging). So the "damage" here would be the device-specific customisations they seem to be in charge of. 1/

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS 2/ Even with this *much* smaller problem to solve, this project is not ready:

> The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for non-technical people too, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first.

from: https://postmarketos.org/state/

So, I would say: no, postmarketOS *currently* is not an alternative. And I personally doubt it will be any time soon.

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS 3/ I would love to see a viable linux phone. I have looked at this space on and off all the way back to the neo Freerunner (2008). I met someone who had one. And while it's of course a great effort and achievement to get a 90% working phone, a 90% working phone is still *not working*.

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS 4/4 Without backing of a steering entity and MASSIVE effort (human labour, infrastructure, money) I don't see this happening. To reach something that can even begin to compete with current Android or iOS, you'd have to be a pretty large company. Not even Samsung does its own operating system.

It would basically take a nation state or the EU to start from scratch and be competitive in 5 years.

@claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS you're largely spot on that the "damage" is largely device specific support at least from a hardware enablement standpoint.

We have a very upstream-first community (it's something we take extremely seriously for the obvious reasons in this thread but also because it is just the right thing to do) and as a result upstream projects also increasingly consider mobile usecases, for example GNOME's libadwaita graphics toolkit treats mobile as a first-class citizen, and all GNOME core apps works great on a phone through convergence.

Despite this, we're still operating at a very small scale when it comes to working on things for our own sake and we are still a while away from being able to fully fund even core maintenance of the project.

That being said, 2025 has imo been a year of preparation for us, we have improved our governance with the aim of making it easier to grow the team and scale more horizontally, we also made a lot of progress towards automated testing which is gonna be huge!

With immutable pmOS also on the horizon I'm really excited for 2026 when it comes to reliability!

@claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS

In the long term I think we'll grow to fill a niche and ideally be self-sustaining along with our community of contributors. We are always trying to bring users in and turn them into developers, return to when you could just tinker with your devices! Our next biggest hurdle is probably going to be figuring out how to collaborate with vendors and shipping pmOS out of the box.

There is also the growing inevitability of climate and economic collapse and an increasing necessity for longer lasting hardware, if there comes a time when Google/Android is no longer a viable option for the EU, I want postmarketOS to be there when that time comes

@cas @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS thank you for the added details. I hope you were not offended by my post. I really like what you are doing. But it is a HUMONGOUS task that you picked. I would love nothing more than this to get funding to a degree where everyone could work on this as much as they wanted.

Basically, I wish the EU had given you the millions of euros it chose to burn up in AI subsidies.

@cas @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS that said, longer lasting hardware will absolutely make your task a little easier. One of the huge problems in this space was "dang they are supporting a two year old phone" used to be a deal breaker. This is no longer the case, a phone today can easily productively work for many years. This really honestly was not the case ten years ago, when even flagship phones were struggling to keep up at three or four years old.

@claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS thanks for the response! I'm definitely with you when it comes to funding heh, and no your description was pretty realistic imo, no offence taken.

the upside is that even if we don't succeed in taking over the world, the journey is absolutely one for a lifetime, it's amazing to be part of this project and work on something that brings joy to peoples lives today and now

@claudius

In fully agreement with @cas, I think your assessment is fair, even if it can sometimes hurt seeing it written like that. Personally, one of the things that motivates me the most is that we all know that the task is humongous... But honestly, so was the effort needed to get from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14427232 to where we are now.

We (postmarketOS but also the whole mainlineLinux Mobile community: Mobian, Phosh, Plasma Mobile, etc.) have already succeeded in something that is a humongous task, that most considered completely impossible, and that very few even dared to dream. Yet, here we are, and we're not stopping any day soon. Personally, this looking back and seeing what once was thought as impossible as accomplished, is one of the things that motivates me the most to keep going.

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS

@thibaultamartin @postmarketOS It is worth repeating. Android was never good and it is getting worse. Move away...

@pabloyoyoista @claudius @cas @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @postmarketOS Hopefully you don't mind me chipping in here.

I used to maintain my own fork back in high-school (when LineageOS was still called CyanogenMod... ouch, my back). Back in those days smartphones were a wild west. People carrying computers full of personal data in their pockets without any encryption, banking apps and other essential applications didn't care whether you modified your device or not. It was trivial to root your device and relatively easy to maintain your fork.

That started to change around 2016 - 2018. Around Android 8 codebase started increasing, maintaining your forks/rebasing became a pain in the butt. That's why many "Custom ROMs" started disappearing, it simply consumed too much time and required a lot of resources to build the bloody thing.

Around that time prices of smartphones started to drop, and people in developing countries could afford a smartphone (where they couldn't afford a computer). This was the time when we observed a general population shifting their daily computing needs from desktop onto mobile.

With people shifting their habits, companies decided to track users and sell their data in exchange for "free" utilities and forcing everyone to use their stupid apps (where most people couldn't block ads).
Mobile market became a much more lucrative target for spyware and malware, because now everyone had a computer connected to the internet in their pocket at all times. That's why banks started to detect/block people using modified Android builds for "accountability". Soon after, it essentially became a war.

For that reason, I bought an iPhone with my first real paycheck in 2016. Not having to deal with Android's atrocious security, potential malware in custom builds (it happened many times).
It just worked... until 2022, when Apple started adding ads to App Store and so on. It made me angry that I spent a small fortune on a device and manufacturer dared to serve me ads, so I bought a Google Pixel 6 and installed GrapheneOS on it.

To put it bluntly: I despise that phone. I still have it kicking around, but I'm working on gs101-mainline. Heavy, bulky, no expandable storage, no headphone jack, no physical keyboard.
Using GrapheneOS meant I couldn't use contactless payments, notifications didn't work, and in ~2025 my bank added Play Integrity API, which prevented me from using my banking applications whatsoever.

Some people will say it's about keeping users safe, I call it "control". Device manufacturers are trying to take away device ownership from you by removing the ability to "unlock bootloader" (in reality just flipping a flag whether ABL should check signatures) because they want you to stay within their ecosystems.
Google Services that track your every move, $VENDOR shipping uninstallable applications and harvesting your data/serving you ads. I've looked at my brother's Samsung S25 (or whatever it's called) running stock firmware and I was absolutely horrified.
If my brother and I would be talking about sensitive topics, I would ask him and his girlfriend to put their phones into a Faraday cage. That's how bad modern smartphones are.

AOSP is done for, Google doesn't care about opensource anymore (unless it benefits them).
Releases twice a year, delayed security updates. Not publishing trees for Pixels anymore (their own freakin' devices!).
They laid off the entire ChromeOS team, cancelled AMD Chromebooks, and now there are rumors of ditching coreboot in the future (where they could easily lock-down the boot chain and fuse devices with their own signing keys).

One vendor I've worked with (and whom I'll likely work again this year) almost went bankrupt because of Google and amount of control they have on device manufacturers.
Out-of-the-blue Google cancelled Android XR partnership (even though said vendor helped Google get that project off the ground) and left them with AOSP scraps provided by silicon vendor (Qualcomm).
Said company has ~15 employees whom can't possibly write replacements for what Android XR offers nor maintain it down the road. Hell, you need a system with ~64GB of RAM and ~480GB of disk space to build those sources. It's absolutely ridiculous.

While I haven't done much in postmarketOS, I've been tracking the project since 2018 and messing with/maintaining few devices, as well as suggesting ideas myself.
It's the only way we can have computers in our pockets that don't track our every move and that can easily be pwned by 3-letter agencies if your suspected of any (even insignificant) crime.

It's been a wild ride and I'm extremely proud of everyone who's involved in this project. Tremendous amount of work done and plenty still to do. Slowly but surely it will become a viable replacement for Android.

@opensourceit @thibaultamartin @claudius @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS @elly dude read what she wrote and stop reading into what she didn't

do you think any of the android derivatives you mentioned have the ability to take on a full fork of AOSP?

@thibaultamartin @postmarketOS What does the release schedule for major releases being 2 times per year instead of the previous 1 time per year or then 4 times per year matter?

PostmarketOS has poor privacy, atrocious security, weak functionality and isn't compatible with most open source mobile apps or mainstream apps. The core development team behind PostmarketOS has extensively participated in harassment of the GrapheneOS team. How is participating in Kiwi Farms harassment collaborative?

@thibaultamartin @postmarketOS Every developer hour spent on Android forks is a wasted hour that could've been spent contributing to open platforms.

@ocdtrekkie What does the release schedule for major releases being 2 times per year instead of the previous 1 time per year or then 4 times per year matter?

PostmarketOS has poor privacy, atrocious security, weak functionality and isn't compatible with most open source mobile apps or mainstream apps. The core development team behind PostmarketOS has extensively participated in harassment of the GrapheneOS team. How is participating in Kiwi Farms harassment collaborative?

@thibaultamartin @fabrice @postmarketOS not a great look when the supported devices are all 5+ years old.

@jeffmcneill @thibaultamartin @fabrice @postmarketOS probably caused by it being developed by people volunteering their time and giving the result of their work for free. It is not unusable for many people, altough definetly not "daily driver" ready. It's progressing though, and would do so faster with economic support and more hands working on it. So if you can help with any of that, maybe in 5 years from now it can be supporting your prefered device ;)

@pablo_martan @jeffmcneill What does Android's release schedule for major releases being 2 times per year instead of the previous 1 time per year or then 4 times per year matter?

PostmarketOS has poor privacy, atrocious security, weak functionality and isn't compatible with most open source mobile apps or mainstream apps. The core development team behind PostmarketOS has extensively participated in harassment of the GrapheneOS team. How is participating in Kiwi Farms harassment collaborative?

@elly @claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @cas@treehouse.systems @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS

> contactless payments

There are multiple working options for contactless payments on GrapheneOS. They won't work on PostmarketOS.

> notifications didn't work

Push notifications work perfectly well on GrapheneOS.

> which prevented me from using my banking applications

That's not solved using something where hardly any open source mobile apps or especially mainstream apps will be available compared to it.

@elly @claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS

> consumed too much time and required a lot of resources to build the bloody thing

Building the OS as a whole from source it not the same as using other people's builds of binary packages.

> AOSP is done

Moving from 1 major release per year to 4 and then to 2 doesn't mean that. People should really stop spinning everything to suit their biases.

> delayed security updates

AOSP isn't the only project with embargoes.

@elly @claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS

> laid off the entire ChromeOS team

> cancelled AMD Chromebooks

> ditching coreboot in the future

> where they could easily lock-down the boot chain

These claims aren't true but it's not really relevant.

> you need a system with ~64GB of RAM and ~480GB of disk space to build those sources

You don't need anywhere close to that much RAM. Building a whole OS does use a lot of space.

@elly @claudius @opensourceit @thibaultamartin @pabloyoyoista @postmarketOS

> It's been a wild ride and I'm extremely proud of everyone who's involved in this project.

Does that include the multiple core PostmarketOS developers who have participated in attacks on the GrapheneOS team with libel, bullying and harassment including linking to Kiwi Farms content repeatedly?

> Slowly but surely it will become a viable replacement for Android.

Doesn't seem to be getting there.

@postmarketOS explicitly say they are not consumer-ready.

https://postmarketos.org/state/

I am not advocating for people to install postmarketOS now as a daily driver, I'm advocating for people to support a project that doesn't depend on Android because it is not a viable route for Europeans.

I am happy that @GrapheneOS exists and that it can serve an overlapping audience today.

I'm asking you to please be respectful of other projects, and I will not engage further.

@thibaultamartin @postmarketOS

> I'm asking you to please be respectful of other projects, and I will not engage further.

You're making highly inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS and disparaging our work. You're claiming it's not viable and dead end. At the same time, you're supporting a project which has numerous core developers and contributors engaging in attacks on GrapheneOS and our team with fabricated stories, bullying and harassment. That includes spreading Kiwi Farms content.

@thibaultamartin @postmarketOS It makes sense since you're a member of another project (GNOME) which has been heavily involved in that and chose to ignore the harassment by not enforcing their own Code of Conduct. Matrix has similarly chosen not to do anything about their platform being heavily used for harassment and even openly collaborated with people doing it. Do you think it's not relevant when you try to present these as ethical, collaborative and good vs. projects like ours you deride?

@cas @claudius @opensourceit thanks all for the excellent points.

One thing I failed to mention in my post is that I support @postmarketOS to help it grow to the point it can seek the public funding it deserves to become a general public solution.

I support financially so the team can

- Go from a prototype to a MVP
- Identify what it’s missing to become mainstream
- Make a case for it to the relevant funders

Individuals alone won’t fund the project, but we can kickstart its next phase.

@GrapheneOS They are true. Should I remind you that I'm working on firmware alongside engineers from AMD, and with people that were directly affected by layoffs?

@elly You claim the entire ChromeOS team is laid off and yet we know people working there and it's still having active development/releases. How is that supposed to be true?

How are AMD Chromebooks cancelled when they're still getting new models and receiving the expected updates? It sounds more like a specific project or generation was cancelled or skipped over.

Where's your source for them ditching coreboot and doing what you claim they will by locking out other operating systems?

@GrapheneOS

You claim the entire ChromeOS team is laid off and yet we know people working there and it’s still having active development/releases. How is that supposed to be true?

Mostly maintenance by underpaid workers in India. They were given cheapest, crappiest machines and can barely do their job as they’re expected to build remotely in US and tools are timing out due to latency. All proper engineering resources go into merging ChromeOS codebase with Android (which will be a disaster for resulting codebase and overall complexity).

Just check coreboot’s gerrit and look for accounts with chromium.org emails that are no longer active.

How are AMD Chromebooks cancelled when they’re still getting new models and receiving the expected updates? It sounds more like a specific project or generation was cancelled or skipped over.

What’s your source on this? Last AMD models were released in ~2023 with release of Zen2-based Ryzen 7000 models (“Mendocino”, baseboard “Skyrim”). Phoenix and subsequent generations were cancelled, people at AMD were either laid off or re-located to server segment. Google’s engineers personally confirmed there are no plans to release new models with AMD SoCs.

Compared to that, they currently have EVTs with Intel PantherLake (“fatcat”) that was just released to the public.

Where’s your source for them ditching coreboot and doing what you claim they will by locking out other operating systems?

That’s just a speculation and rumors, you’re right about this one.

@elly You said they laid off the entire ChromeOS team rather than one specific team of underpaid contract workers likely working for a company there rather than directly from them. What you said is that they laid off the entire ChromeOS team which they clearly haven't. They're doing lots of cost cutting in general which is why Android moved from 1 to 4 releases due to prior plans but then cut back to 2 major releases instead of 4. It's not becoming less open but rather fewer major releases...

@elly It's only Android 14 QPR2 which started with trunk-based quarterly releases. Android 16 QPR2 is the first one other OEMs are expected to ship which means it's getting security patch backports. All prior monthly and quarterly releases were for Pixels with the code released to AOSP but not expected to be shipped by others. They decided to move from 4 to 2 because neither Google or OEMs wants to deal with 4 release branches per year which each need to receive security backports for ages.

@elly What about the rest of what we said in our original reply?

@GrapheneOS If you're referring to alleged attacks, then all I would have to say would be that I will not believe for a second that someone from postmarketOS's team attacked other project or person working on it.

I intentionally skipped this part because I'm sure you will try to convince me otherwise, but that's something we won't reach an agreement on.

They are genuinely some of nicest people I've ever met, we've been meeting semi-regularly at events in Europe for the past 3(?) years, during which I've never heard GrapheneOS mentioned in a bad manner.
If anything, I'm the one who tends to get too fired up about things I care about and people need to calm me down from time to time (which is something I'm actively working on).

One single contributor that ever made me uncomfortable (mansplaining UFS bringup while I was holding a phone in my hand running mainline Linux kernel and booted into userspace from internal UFS storage) was (as far as I'm aware) banned for transphobia towards other contributors and few other things. That's literally it.

@elly The problem for you is that we can prove multiple members of postmarketOS have repeatedly participated in Kiwi Farms libel and harassment towards our team, especially craftyguy. We have archives of it and can prove it. You can lie through your teeth as much as you want. They're a group of people which has been over again. There are dozens of cases on Mastodon alone of people involved posting libelous claims including baseless claims our founder is crazy and linking harassment content.

@elly If people are going to lie about what has been done to us then we have no problem making a top level thread about postmarketOS linking to a dozen examples of harassment and beginning to take more actions in response beyond that. Every time you make inaccurate claims about GrapheneOS, you get closer to us beginning a massive response including organizing our community against the project as has been done by the postmarketOS community towards GrapheneOS with endless attacks on our team.

@elly Spreading links to harassment content clearly based around making fabricated claims about someone to bully them and participating in that directly is something which has been ongoing from multiple members of the project. There's no point in pretended it hasn't happened. Repeatedly calling our founder insane, delusional, schizophrenic, etc. with no basis and pushing fabricated stories about them clearly aimed at creating harassment has been ongoing from multiple people involved.

@elly Casey Connolly and craftyguy have both very directed engaged in libel, bullying and harassment towards our founder on numerous occasions. We have it archived. We have no problem filing at least one libel lawsuit and actively organizing our community against it. postmarketOS has serial harassers and fabricators as core members of the team who are targeting us with harassment. They've spread Kiwi Farms harassment content and participated in it alongside those people with the same attacks.