Hey all,
I want to get away from Android, at the moment my solution is a flip phone. it runs an old version of Android GO, but the lack of practicality drives me away from using it frequently.
are there any good phone/distro combos with working VoLTE? anything to avoid? any advice or recs would be great.
Thanks!
Perhaps not, but there is no GNU/Linux distro that is “ready for primetime” as a mobile OS right now. I WISH there was, but UBPorts, PostmarketOS, etc all either have significant features disparity or are straight up still marketed as “developer experimental”.
GrapheneOS is a solid choice for now to provide an alternative, whether a permanent replacement or a stepping stone.
Jolla has sailfish OS as the official ROM and it has for quite a few years now (for all their past phones). It’s not marketed as a dev experimental.
FuriOS’s FLX1s works pretty well; it’s been my primary device for 3 months, now.
Never even heard of that device before. Can you get Signal messenger on it?
So there’s Flare which works (GTK implementation) but it’s far from feature parity; but it definitely works pretty nicely, for what it is.
The device also has really good Android emulation; certain Google Play services still don’t quite work, even though it comes with MicroG preinstalled (e.g. the Integrity API so, unfortunately, all my banking app.s crash themselves), but I can’t imagine Signal uses any that’d cause it not to run.
I have it (the Android version) installed and it opens just fine but I haven’t had the chance to try transferring the account (and all messages) over, yet. So I’d expect it’d fully work but that’s all I can tell you, yet.
I can come back and let you know how it goes and how well it works – once I get there –, if you’d like.
I’d appreciate that! Signal messenger support is honestly the biggest thing I can’t live without if I’m going to convert away. I’ve been considering a move to GrapheneOS soon without any Google Play Services and just using Aurora/F-Droid, but I’d REALLY love to move to a full Linux phone that isn’t Android-based, as I view GrapheneOS as just a stepping stone still beholden to Google’s whims.