Hello all!
Due to the recent statements by Google (as well as their track record the last few years) I’ve decided I do not want to use Android as a phone operating system anymore. But Apple is just as bad, if not worse. So I’ve decided to build my own custom device.
I am working on building a phone using a single board computer, right now I’m using the raspberry pi 5. This is still a proof of concept, but I want to share my ideas with others, so like minded individuals can start messing around with this idea in their own homes to further this goal.
You can view more images of the device here, as well as the step by step instructions here (these are still very rough and incomplete) https://github.com/muhammadmanwar/cheaphone OR https://codeberg.org/muhammadmanwar/cheaphone
Right now it just runs raspberry pi OS, with a different desktop look and feel. Everything that normally works in a pi 5 works on this device, additionally I am experimenting with a Mobile Broadband modem, to allow the device to text and call, as well as access internet, like a normal phone off wifi
The total cost is around 200 dollars, not including the 3d printer to make the custom case.
This project is barely off the ground, and I’ve got a lot to learn before I can stop relying strictly on the raspberry pi 5, my end goal is to custom design SBCs, and release those designs for free alongside the plans for the device, so that interested parties can select their own System on a Chip to use for the device. I need to get into designing boards, I’m interested in trying Stephen Hawes’ Lumen PnP (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlkTcxh-9gA) for that phase.
But that’s for the future, for now, I’m hoping to get more people interested in the prototype so that I’m not the only one noodling around on this idea. I’d love some feedback, and if anyone was willing to put one together for testing, I would appreciate it greatly!
And the software side of it is the really annoying part. We’re missing so many components: Connected standby, an app lifecycle management, maybe sandboxing and a detailed, user-facing permission system. And then we need to go ahead and rewrite all the important Linux software to use these (not yet existing) interfaces.
I own a Pinephone, and I feel the Linux phone is within reach since the Nokia 900 (and its predecessors) and that was in 2009, so 16 years now. I believe any effort is very welcome, though. We badly need a good and free operating systems for this important device we all carry around and use hundreds of times each day.
The one main remaining barrier (apart from thousands of paper cuts everywhere and lack of apps), is indeed process lifecycle management. It’s the most complicated one to do, because in order to work well it requires apps to cooperate in some way, either by completely and honestly shutting down when not doing any work, or by providing ways to check if there’s any work to be done without running the rest of the app, or both ideally. None of the apps currently do that, so the only options are (1) just let apps do whatever they want, draining the battery, or (2) send SIGSTP to apps that are not in the foreground, losing background notifications and such.
Yes, good job at explaining the app lifecycle. I brushed over it because I had no idea how to phrase it in a concise way. And it’s really the million papercuts that stopped me from using the Pinephone. I tried.
Yes, it’s a very crude way, though. In practice I never got the messages from my wife to bring milk on my way home. I’d read them a few hours later in the evening after unlocking and tinkering with the device. What worked well is tell people to send SMS or call, because that reliably wakes up the device. But then people forgot they were supposed to communicate with me like in the 1990s.
We do. That’s how some modern distros like Fedora Silverblue work. But then it’s somewhat problematic with phones. These packages are supposed to come directly from the various upstream projects. And then the phone distros can’t patch them any more to deal with the peculiarities with the inconsistent ecosystem. So we’d either need to have a good platform first and all agree on it, or repackage everything in a way unalike how Flatpak is done today. And then it fills up storage fast with all the runtimes and dependencies and a phone has limited storage available.
I think hardware wise, that leads us to re-invent the laptop. Not a phone by any means. We need a large SSD for all the Flatpaks, lots of RAM to keep the software running in the background and a large battery stapled to it because none of it is energy-efficient enough.
It ain’t easy… I think we’re making (slow) progress, though.
Let’s not forget all the software that was done and kinda ready for the openmoko device. There were a few distros for that alone. Some were pretty stable but the biggest issue came down always to phone call quality and connectivity. I’m completely out of the loop but back then all the chips were so closed in themselves that they were basically black boxes. A huge effort was made to try and get them to work as well as possible, with varying degrees of success. I wonder if it continues being the same nowadays.
The N900 was such an amazing device, I still have it around and the UX was the best I’ve had in a phone, Maemo was truly great and way advanced to its time. That UX with the screen sizes we have today… I keep dreaming.
Phone quality on my Pinephone is nice except when it isn’t. We have a largely Free Software baseband running on the modem. You can tell it to run a high samplerate and it does VoIP and 4G. On the flipside it doesn’t always work and there were issues with additional stuff like echo cancellation, which then takes away from the experience. Openmoko was great as well. I think it was so very open, people could do silly things with the phone network. But then it’s old tech by now and the 2G (GSM) phone network is obsolete and they turned off the cell towers in most areas by now. And I think the software on it didn’t really translate to the phone generations after that. Afaik the entire software stack didn’t carry over and we’re using different dialers, messengers, calendars etc now.
PureOS disagrees.
Did it solve these issues with delivering Matrix instant messenger notifications and emails right away? And what’s the internet browsing and occasional social media doomscrolling experience? I don’t think the Librem5 hardware is substantially faster than my Pinephone? So I suppose it’s similar to mine with a Firefox which is rudimentarily optimized for touch but then the 3GB of RAM and slow processor make it somewhat not nice to use? Can you listen to a podcast via standard bluetooth headphones and there’s still some juice in the battery after 90mins? I’d love to try it. Especially if they solved those annoying issues. But seems the PureOS Pinephone ports have all been abandoned a few years ago…