Who is âweâ, who are you? If you look back at the personas (the target group of Fairphone) a pure AOSP would only satisfy one (or maybe two) personas out of the five. And especially these people could compile it themselves anywayâŚ
Note: Out of my own experience I know that compiling might not be that easy.^^ And I totally agree with you that it would be nice to have an official Fairphone OSOS soon.
we = the Fairphone community / âregularâ users
Well, whom of the five personas do you consider the âregularâ user? I want to point out that the needs are rather diverse. And just because I identify with one of the personas more than with another, it doesnât mean that I think their needs are more or less important.
@sjjh @kuleszdl: You two want the same things. But what you call âpersonasâ @kuleszdl calls âextension packsâ but itâs pretty much the same. But those cannot be developed if there is no FP image to begin with ⌠that can be shared/extended.
No noâŚI am familiar with the concept of personas, donât worry. I am just talking more or less about the user meeting I attended and which impressions I got also from various people here posting in the forums. I didnât see these personas fulfilled there - I rather got the impression, that there are many ânot so tech savvyâ people who care about open source and they donât mind following long instructions, but building FP-OSOS themselves is way too much for them. I was also surprised how many people of the ânon techieâ part of community use the f-droid store!
So if Fairphone would just provide the bare minimum of a basic FP-OSOS build, I am sure the community will produce good tutorials etc. which will also taggle aspects of installing microG or whatever as well as getting f-droid or decent apps. This would be just much faster and more efficient than spending the limited time of the FP devs for it - this time could be used much better for fixing the various bugs or moving on towards Android 6.0.
Nice discussion going on here!
In general, I think itâs a good idea to suggest apps for different standard needs to the users and give some advice to them. Otherwise, they had to e.g. read to a lot of topics in the forum here, which is very time-consuming and obviously not the way to go for everyone. However, I see multiple possibilities to implement this (and there may be even more):
- Community based tutorials, though weâd be in desperate need of better wiki âsoftwareâ in this case, IMHO.
- Tutorials by Fairphone on the download site of FPOSOS (or linked from there).
- A software implementation integrated in the OS itself.
From my point of view, 3. might be a bit unnecessary overkill binding resources that could be better used for more important work. In particular, Iâd agree with @kuleszdl and @lklaus here:
However, if FP wants to have an own solution to this and serve their customers directly by own software or tutorials rather than community based tutorials, I could in fact understand such an argument and would find it reasonable, as well, also from a customerâs perspective. (Also see the quote of @keesj a few lines downwards).
One way or the other, Iâd agree with @TobiasF that itâd be nice to suggest several apps, explain basically their features and differences etc.:
In any of these cases, youâd still have to decide which and how many apps to preinstall. Of course, one could preinstall one app for every âstandard needâ (whatever these are) and provide alternatives for those who need them as suggested earlier:
And I agree to @keesj and @kuleszdl that this might be needed for quite an amount of users interested in FPOSOS:
However, if the tutorial or software implementation is clear and all info is accessible in one place in a user-friendly way (hence avoiding working through the forum), that could also serve the not-so-tech-savvy people. Though there will still be users (no idea how many) who may just want default preinstalled apps instead of working through a tutorial (even a user-friendly one) and who would be âlostâ if provided with nearly no preinstalled apps (as e.g. in AOSP). Regarding this, I could understand a decision to include preinstalled apps for standard needs, although itâs definitely not my personal preference and I see a good point in:
And, as @keesj himself already pointed out, Itâs a tough decision anyway:
I highly appreciate these thoughts. Some people (again, donât know how many) may feel like pushed to use a particular app or classify the preinstalled apps as bloatware.
The bottom line is, I guess, that itâs just not possible to serve the needs of the wide spectrum of users (well, not a new insight ).This being said, I like the idea of providing different âversionsâ:
Though this may produce to much work and one really needs to make sure that this splitting doesnât screw up maintainability. Hence, I fear that this is not really an option.
Yeah, thatâd be nice. @keesj?
I would like if possible use opensource on my phone, but I still needs some apps like âNS reisplannerâ provided by the Google Play store.
You may know about the other possibilities of downloading apps only available from the Play Store while not using the Play Store itself (as documented in the Alternative Apps(tores) topic mentioned by @paulakreuzer). But apart from the less trustworthy options mentioned there (Evozi, 1Mobile Market etc.) I want to emphasize the open-source program Raccoon, which Iâd put more trust in. It can be installed as a client program on a desktop PC and just extracts .apk
files from the Google Play Store (you still need a Google Play account, but it could be a dummy account and it doesnât need to be linked to your phone). In particular, itâs also available for Linux (for German speaking people see this German blog post and the Droidwiki entry for more info).
Talking about features, one thing I would like to have changed by default is the DNS, so all requests sent from the FP2 would not go through Googleâs DNS servers. Another feature I would like (also for the regular release) is a prompt for split passphrases for protecting the encryption key and the lockscreen without the need for additional apps here.
Nice feature requests. Is it possible to easily configure the DNS stuff such that the Google DNS servers can be replaced by other servers?
And especially these people could compile it themselves anywayâŚ
I donât know yet how the update process will be organised, especially concerning self-compiled versions. And recompiling the image every time a new update is published, wouldnât be really practical to me.
I donât know yet how the update process will be organised, especially concerning self-compiled versions. And recompiling the image every time a new update is published, wouldnât be really practical to me.
I guess notifications about critical updates (security and showstopper issues) would be sufficient - every time something like this gets fixed, it would be fine to recompile. You certainly donât need to recompile to get some minor updates or the latest improvements in the source code documentation.
Anyways, I still think the most important target group for FP-OSOS are people who DO care about privacy and stuff, are willing to take some additional efforts and read through wikis etc. but for whom compiling themselves or installing linux (virtual machines) is way too much. Official and âtrustworthyâ, pre-rooted FP-OSOS images are the best solution => and basically what many FP1 owners like(d) most about this device.
Can you explain, what exactly is sustainable about selling a device that will not be updated anymore in the future? So I have to buy a new fairphone every few years? Donât think thatâs fair. I would like to keep my fairphone 1, but I canât install some apps already. Somehow this does not seem to me as a good way to deal with resources. Maybe you could think of an upgrade on a new android-version as a paid service or something like that. If you wave mit some money, there might be support of the manufactures for an update. Would be a better solution than throwing away the old full functional phone, because the software is outdated.
Having security fixes as soon as available on AOSP
Itâs a shame which big software fails (including security) are in the current Android Version and how slowly at fixing the Fairphone-Team is.
Hi jom:
We will improve upon this and as suggested plan on Monthly updates
@JacobVR, you are right and many people agree with you.
Even Fairphone agrees with you. That is why they have invested resources in updating Fairphone 1. We donât know yet whether anything will come out of it.
Meanwhile, you can try the unofficial update which is compiled by a community member. There is even a nice and easy tutorial how to install the unofficial update.
However this thread is about the future of âFairphone Open Source OSâ which is only for Fairphone 2.
Itâs a shame which big software fails (including security) are in the current Android Version and how slowly at fixing the Fairphone-Team is.
Are you referring to FP2? Are the fixes not included in the official image or does FP-OSOS (self-compiled) lack them?
I guess notifications about critical updates (security and showstopper issues) would be sufficient - every time something like this gets fixed, it would be fine to recompile. You certainly donât need to recompile to get some minor updates or the latest improvements in the source code documentation.
Well, Android security patches are being released on a monthly basis. And Fairphone seems to have the goal to keep up with that, as @keesj pointed out - and I highly appreciate that! In view of this, I wouldnât like to recompile every month, in particular facing my weak hardware (need to free 70GB space every time; and syncing sources and compilation takes more than 12h).
If itâs just the patches, recompilation and resync should be pretty quick if you use the compiler cache. But yes, you will need to reserve quite a bunch of disk space to do that.
My point was targeted mainly at people who want to compile their system themselves anyways. Of course, for the majority getting compiled binaries is more preferable.
My point was targeted mainly at people who want to compile their system themselves anyways.
Fair enough.
Nobody wants to compile anything
Itâs boring and steals time. The pain is that all new features have to be adapted a little for each device and itâs OEM/SoC/bin blob bound source code. And not everything that is useful also ends up automatically in the Android-Code and it takes a while to end up in the OEM code. Also, most paid developers want a more âApple-likeâ ecosystem, not so much a âLinux-on-a-phoneâ Android for security, user-friendliness, and marketing reasons.
Is there any information on the release date of the OSOS binary? I donât want to compile it on my own, but would like to start customizing it, without the thought of doing it all over again a week later.
Could someone who compiled an OSOS without GMS upload there files somewhere?
Could someone who compiled an OSOS without GMS upload there files somewhere?
Not allowed. But maybe someone will ignore the strange licence and send you a private message with a link. The problem is the licence is pretty hard to understand. Iâm not even sure if it is forbidden. But there is a discussion about that elsewhere if you search for it.
Update, Links:
The official answer has to be No, this is not allowed because your ROM contains the non open source blobs and that those restrict you from doing so. That said we are investigating how to help the community. One option would be to let the end user download and install the blobs. We can investigate more solutions provided those are ⌠provided.
Hi all, Internally, we were gathering information and I think I can answer most of your questions. Note: I am not a tech or legal expert, so if you have more specific questions, please write our support team. Users can only use the blobs for software that goes on their Fairphone 2. The personal use (no commercial use) means that users cannot be remunerated for economic activities with this software or derivatives - e.g. selling the software. The terms do not require users to compile thâŚ
I guess these lines are important: âFairphone grants you (âŚ) non-transferable, limited copyright license to download, install and use the Software for non commercial purposes only on a Fairphone 2 device in machine-readable (i.e., object code) environmentâ, âYou must not take any actions that may result in the fragmentation of Android.â and âYou are also not allowed to remove portions of the Software, alter or otherwise modify it, or translate, reproduce, copy, reverse engineer, reverse compile, disassemble or transfer the Software.â But I donât see a lot about sharing here and the non-transferable is pretty vague. If everyone can download it you are practically sharing it anyway, it just makes things difficult.
But Iâm not a lawyer and I guess the same is true for @keesj. There is no lawyer-like official statement yet, I think.
Q1 2016 is almost over. My FP2 is lying stupidly in its delivery box most of the time. What are the release plans/circumstances for the fposos?