Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mftrhu 104 days ago
> The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on.

Why would declining sales of new smartphones have anything to do with PostMarketOS, which only supports phones more than half a decade old?
2 comments
fartfeatures 104 days ago
PostmarketOS doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s the final stage of a device's life cycle. If the initial sales of new devices decline, the pool of available hardware for enthusiasts to tinker with in five years will be significantly smaller.
link
mftrhu 104 days ago
Yes. In five years, once the PMOS devs manage to get a 2025 device in working state, they might have less devices to play around with, so there could be an indirect effect on the project.

What I struggle to believe - what I don't believe - is that there any sort of connection between the report about likely declining sales and PMOS' announcement.

link
zozbot234 104 days ago
pmOS does support recent phones, provided that they can be bootloader-unlocked - and that's only a few brands these days.
link
mftrhu 104 days ago
Right now, their wiki page on device support [0] lists zero actual devices as "fully supported":

> These are the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI.

> Besides QEMU devices, this is currently empty. The ports we had here earlier weren't as reliable as we would have liked. We plan to add new devices here with a higher standard.

The most recent smartphone in the Community section of that page is the Fairphone 4, released half a decade ago, in 2021. Pixel devices can trivially be bootloader unlocked, but that doesn't make the work that goes into supporting them much easier: the latest device in Testing is the 6a/6 Pro, from 2022, and its device page lists all the features but the most basic (touchscreen, flash, internal storage) as "Untested".

[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

link