[letstrynvm]

Android is a bit of a siren... since there are many devices on current hardware working great, it looks like it should be possible to be the starting point for a lovely FOSS solution.

But it isn't, due to the Android approach of piling together unmaintainable vendor junk like gpu driver and sensors on old kernel that doesn't work with FOSS gpu apis, radioactive horror story wifi / bt stack using non-upstream apis. The different kernels as a whole are individual flies in amber that are impossible to keep working on newer upstream basis.

Therefore your 'secure FOSS phone' becomes the usual Android security apocalypse as soon as the vendor stops patching the security holes found monthly; that's if your vendor even bothered patching and updating those pieces quarterly or even once.

Purism got it right that there's no way to get the needed result - that it's like putting linux on your x86_64 laptop - out of Android / existing devices. The story seems to be about whether their laptop business and the kickstarter gave them enough runway and ability to pay suppliers up front for initial production.

[zozbot234]

> But it isn't, due to the Android approach of piling together unmaintainable vendor junk like gpu driver and sensors on old kernel that doesn't work with FOSS gpu apis

That's not the Android approach, it's just the embedded-on-ARM approach that Android inherited wholesale. Pre-Android Linux mobile/embedded OS's were just as bad. In fact, we're starting to see some improvements. The SoC's used in the latest Google Pixel (3 and 4) phones are getting mainline support in the Linux kernel.