this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
316 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
81534 readers
4451 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Good. Start by introducing a viable smartphone OS, because right now it’s down to Apple and Google, both from the US.
Linux is a great place to start. Android is based on Linux. Even a fork of Android that doesn’t give Google any data would be a good place to start, but relying on AOSP — Google’s open source repository — isn’t ideal.
Graphene and e/OS exist.
Problem with Graphene is the limitation of hardware to Pixel due to manufacturers.
e/OS is good, but the missing killer app for me is contactless payment. Which brings Europe back to the Visa/MC problem. Digital Euro could fix this.
Damn funny me thinking about Symbian and the fallen empires of Nokia and Ericsson, now that the ball is in EU's court as enshittification consumes America and the Chinese government likes to have its presence in nearly every device ever made from the Middle Kingdom.
You would have the same trouble Microsoft did though. No one wanted to use the Windows mobile because there were no apps for it, and there were no apps for it because no developers wanted to develop for a platform with no users. Chicken and the egg.
It would be nice to have a smartphone that was just web-based and didn't really have apps, but I think that ship has sailed, people are just used to the concept and I think they would think of it as a step backwards if they had a phone that didn't use apps.
I'd say the priority should be to have hardware that allows changing the os, just like pcs. We already have a lot of functional mobile OSes, but with locked hardware, we're still stuck with google and apple
To give a bit of technical details, the hardware must have a feature to destroy encryption keys for user data whenever a new OS is installed on it; and you have to be able to install a new OS on it at all.
Like, today, many smartphones have the problem that you can't install a new OS on them at all, because the bootloader doesn't allow it. Meanwhile PCs have a different problem, where they do allow installing new OS, but the user data is typically not encrypted and so you can just boot linux from a USB device and read all contents on the internal disk.
The best solution might be to encrypt all userdata, store the keys in the bootloader on the device, but when a new OS is loaded/installed, the bootloader doesn't give out the keys so the userdata can't be decrypted.