Linux phones are still behind android and iPhone, but the gap shrank a surprising amount while I wasn’t looking. These are damn near usable day to day phones now! But there are still a few things that need done and I was wondering what everyone’s thoughts on these were:
1 - tap to pay. I don’t see how this can practically be done. Like, at all.
2 - android auto/apple CarPlay emulation. A Linux phones could theoretically emulate one of these protocols and display a separate session on the head unit of a car. But I dont see any kind of project out there that already does this in an open-source kind of way. The closest I can find are some shady dongles on amazon that give wireless CarPlay to head units that normally require USB cables. It can be done, but I don't see it being done in our community.
3 - voice assistants. wether done on device or phoning into our home servers and having requests processed there, this should be doable and integrated with convenient shortcuts. Home assistant has some things like this, and there’s good-old Mycroft blowing around out there still. Siri is used every day by plenty of people and she sucks. If that’s the benchmark I think our community can easily meet that.
I started looking at Linux phones again because I loathe what apple is doing to this UI now and android has some interesting foldables but now that google is forcing Gemini into everything and you can’t turn it off, killing third party ROMS, and getting somehow even MORE invasive, that whole ecosystem seems like it’s about to march right off a cliff so its not an option anymore for me.
I think some of this data is stuff im fine to share with some caveats. I think we can have a world of convenience and a world where people have a decent level of privacy. Of course there will always be tradeoffs but we can find a sane middle ground because at the moment its 0 privacy.
GPS data can be shared while im using a map to navigate and They must not "know who I am". I am ok to be a datapoint but I dont like when they build a personal profile with this information.
Payments are fine if its my bank and they never sell that info.
Communication must be encrypted and I do not want them knowing who I am talking to.
Photo and video thats private should be encrypted but anything posted public is public. I would use cloud storage but it needs to be encrypted.
Web browsing I dont mind if the site tracks what I do on the site but it must only be stuff I do on site and not build a profile using my off site data.