Linux 手機能否成為 Android／iOS 雙寡頭市場的可行替代方案？

by Amos Batto (2026-10-05), License: CC BY 4.0, Download: PDF, ODT

1. The SoC dilemma: weak but long lived vs powerful but short lived
2. The RK3588S changes the game for Linux phones
3. The new option of Linux phones using a Qualcomm IoT SoC
4. The problem of using an Android kernel in a Linux phone
5. Linux phones based on Android will become more viable due to longer support
6. Why software was a major challenge for the Librem 5
7. The success of Phosh despite its limited funding
8. Adoption of mobile interfaces by Linux distros
9. PINE64's attempt to get around the cost of developing software
10. The waning enthusiasm for Linux phones
11. Jolla shows that there is still demand for Linux phones
12. The mobile industry is shutting down the AOSP alternative
13. Three types of Linux phones are now possible
14. The real barrier holding back Linux phones is the companies

Five years ago, Linux phones looked like they were poised to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly that has an iron grip on the mobile phone industry. Sadly, after a brief flash of activity and community engagement with the release of the Purism Librem 5 and the PINE64 PinePhone in 2020, the Linux phone market has generally stagnated. This stagnation occurred partly because of the problems at Purism and PINE64, but also because the available Linux SoC’s weren’t up to the task of running a modern smartphone, and the hardware industry wasn’t providing any good alternatives with good free/open source drivers. In addition, Plasma Mobile and Phosh were still inchoate mobile interfaces at the time, and there wasn’t a good distro option to run these interfaces on Android kernels with a normal integrated mobile SoC. The poor performance of the PinePhone and Librem 5 and the problems with the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 refunds sapped people’s enthusiasm and willingness to take a chance on the next Linux phone.

Fortunately, all of these conditions are changing, and I believe that there is now the possibility that Linux could finally become a viable alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the mobile space, just like desktop Linux has become a viable alternative to Windows and Mac OSX on the PC over the last three decades. This isn’t to say that mobile Linux will fundamentally challenge the business of Google or Apple, but the conditions are ripe for a small market to arise for Linux phones, similar to the way that people can currently buy Linux PCs from a number of small companies, such as TUXEDO, System76, Purism, Slimbook, ThinkPenguin, Ubuntushop.biz, Entroware, Star Labs, Juno, Laptop with Linux, Linux Certified, ArkPC, etc.

It isn’t impossible that one of the big phone brands might sell a few models of phones with mobile Linux in the future, just like Lenovo and Dell currently sell a few PC models with Linux preinstalled in some limited markets. Motorola just announced that it will start selling some high-end phone models with GrapheneOS in 2027, which indicates that Google will allow the big phone makers to sell alternatives, probably because it fears anti-trust regulation. As the mobile industry increasingly shuts down the ability to unlock the bootloaders of Android phones, more people will be looking for an alternative to AOSP derivatives, and mobile Linux could provide that alternative.

Five years ago, it looked like mobile Linux had finally arrived. The Purism Librem 5 and PINE64 PinePhone had just been released, and even a big tech reviewer like Linus Tech Tips was trying them out. Mrwhosetheboss’s video, “Are Linux Smartphones about to KILL Android?,” where he held up the Librem 5, got 7.8 million views on YouTube. The Librem 5 had been ported to Mobian and postmarketOS, and the PinePhone had been ported to 20 different Linux distributions. There was a growing number of phone models that could run Jolla’s Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch on top of Android kernels, and many people were testing postmarketOS on their old phones. Plasma Mobile and Phosh were advancing fast as mobile interfaces. KDE had adopted Kirigami and GNOME was adopting Adwaita, so both KDE and GNOME apps could become adaptive between desktop and mobile interfaces. The Waydroid project was making it possible to run Android apps inside a Linux container. The future seemed bright for mobile Linux, but that future never seemed to arrive. It is worth examining what held back mobile Linux to understand how those conditions can be overcome in the future.

There has been great deal of experimentation with different mobile operating systems based on a Linux kernel over the last 25 years since the first mobile Linux devices were released—the Sharp Zaurus, the G.Mate Yopy and the Motorola A760. I count 29 different varieties of commercial mobile Linux that have existed over the years, and there are probably many more that I missed. There have been many different waves of mobile Linux, which at the time looked like they might become the next big thing, including EZX, MotoMagx, Maemo, LiMo, Moblin, Meego, Tizen, Firefox OS, webOS, Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS. For years Motorola experimented with different Linux varieties that were based on the idea of using Java apps available in a community store, so Google’s Android was hardly unique, but it was the flavor of mobile Linux which succeeded. Today, all of them are often lumped together under the label of “Linux” as a separate category from Android, but Tizen and Firefox OS are just as distinct architecturally as Android from a standard desktop Linux distro.

The mobile Linux operating systems live on, although they are less visible today. Much of the MeeGo code that Nokia created for the N9, continues to be developed by the tiny Finnish company, the Jolla Group, which is once again selling phones with its Sailfish OS. Firefox OS, which was abandoned by Mozilla Foundation in 2016, was reborn in 2017 as proprietary KaiOS for low-end phones without touch screens, but that market is slowly disappearing as Android now reaches even the cheapest segments of the mobile phone market. Ubuntu Touch, which was abandoned by Canonical in 2017, lives on as a community-based project under the volunteers at UBports. Even, webOS and Tizen still exist, although they are no longer used as mobile operating systems. webOS runs LG TVs and Tizen is used in Samsung TVs.

Although it doesn’t generate many headlines in the tech press, a tiny Linux phone market still exists. Purism, PINE64, FuriLabs, Jolla, Jolla-Devices, Volla and PrivacyPortal (plus Brax in the future) all sell phones with some flavor of Linux preinstalled. The number of people buying Linux phones today is fewer than in 2020-22 when PINE64 was launching the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, but there are actually more companies selling Linux phones than there was 5 years ago. There are good reasons to believe that many of the problems that plagued Linux phones in the past are going to be overcome in the future.

The SoC dilemma: weak but long lived vs powerful but short lived

In the past, the available hardware choices limited the viability of Linux phones. Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC’s) which support Linux are generally used in single-board-computers (SBC’s), TV setup boxes, internet of things (IoT) devices and embedded microprocessors in industrial and automotive applications, where the price points are lower, so their performance is generally weaker and they are less energy efficient than the typical mobile SoC designed for smartphones, because they are fabbed on older process nodes. However, they offer long-term support, because they are used in applications that have long product life cycles. For example, automobiles contain dozens of SoC’s and they typically takes 3 to 5 years just to design and need to be able to run for the next 20 years. In contrast, the mobile SoC’s with Android support are very powerful, but they are only produced for 1 to 3 years.

If the designers of Linux phones want to be able to run a Linux kernel (as opposed to an Android kernel), most of their options offer little processing power, poor energy efficiency and poor thermals. If they want to avoid proprietary blobs as much as possible, they either have to choose an older SoC which the community has been worked on for years to iron out the bugs in the free/open source drivers (e.g., the Allwinner A64 in the PinePhone), or they have to spend years patching the Linux kernel to properly support a newer SoC (as Purism did with the NXP i.MX 8M Quad in the Librem 5). If they decide that it is too much trouble to send their patches to mainline Linux, then it will be harder to support their hardware in the future, because they will have to keep applying those same patches to each new Linux kernel release. Purism chose to upstream their changes to mainline Linux, whereas the volunteers working on the PinePhone’s kernel generally didn’t.

The chipmakers like NXP, Rockchip, Allwinner, Amlogic and Broadcom who make SoC’s with Linux support simply don’t generate enough revenue to justify using a leading-edge process node in their chips. Even thought they can sell a Linux SoC for 10 to 15 years, they still won’t sell enough to recoup the extra $400 – $600 million that it would cost to use a 3nm process, and the costs keep going up with each new generation of process node. It is enormously expensive to design a chip at the cutting edge of the silicon industry. Silicon Analysts estimates that fabbing a wafer at TSMC costs an average of $19,500 at a 3nm node, but only $3000 at a 28nm node. Most Linux SoC’s are low-priced chips with very thin margins, so they have to sell millions of them to make much profit. Some Linux SoC makers like NXP focus on specialty markets, so they they have higher margins, but they tend not to sell many of them, so the profits are still limited.

Another way that chipmakers reduce their costs is by using older generations of Cortex cores, which have lower licensing fees from ARM, and by using lots of low-power Cortex-A5 series cores, rather than the higher-power Cortex-A7 and Cortex-X series cores, which have higher licensing fees. NXP was clearly employing these cost cutting strategies with its i.MX 9 series processors. The most powerful chip in the series is the i.MX 95, which contains six Cortex-A55 cores, when it would have made more sense to use two Cortex-A78 cores for better performance and four Cortex-A55 cores for low power. The i.MX 95 was fabbed on a 16nm FinFET node, which is a slight regression compared to Samsung’s 14nm node used in the previous i.MX 8M Plus processor. Another example of this cost cutting was the decision by Broadcom to use older Cortex cores and larger process nodes in its BCM2836 (40nm, 4x Cortex-A7), BCM2837 (40nm, 4x Cortex-A53), BCM2711 (28nm, 4x Cortex-A72) and BCM2712 (16nm, 4x Cortex-A76), despite knowing that millions of these chips would be sold (e.g. in the Raspberry Pi 2, 3, 4 and 5, respectively). Even Nvidia, which is the world’s richest chipmaker due to the AI boom, appears to be avoiding the costs of using a leading-edge process node in its Tegra SoC. It canceled its planned Tegra Atlan series which was announced in April 2021, and still hasn’t released its Tegra Thor series, which was announced in September 2022. Its Tegra Orin series which was announced in March 2018 is now getting long in the tooth using an 8nm node.

In contrast, the smartphone market, which sold 1.25 billion units in 2025, has enormous volumes, and phone makers are willing to pay much higher prices for processors, especially for higher-end models, which allows Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi and Huawei to make the enormous investment in designing mobile SoC’s for an expensive 3nm process node. Integrated mobile SoC’s such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon and MediaTek Dimensity have so much volume, that they can make a profit despite the fact that they generally are only produced for 2 to 3 years. The flagship models (e.g. the Snapdragon 8 series and Dimensity 9000 series) lose most of their market after the first year, so SoC makers have to charge much higher prices to cover the enormous costs of using a leading-edge process node.

In addition, the integrated mobile SoC’s that run Android incorporate many additional functions, such as WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular modem, GPS/GNSS, audio DAC, charge controller and USB-C controller, which require separate chips on Linux phones like the PinePhone and Librem 5. This makes the circuit boards for these phones much more expensive to design, because they can’t just take a standard reference design from Qualcomm or MediaTek and tweak it. They have to custom design their circuit boards, which requires two to three times more components than the circuit board for a typical smartphone. The Librem 5 contains 74 integrated circuits (IC’s) and its 4 circuit boards have a total of 1267 components, making it the most complex phone ever created. The six chips (i.MX 8M Quad, RS9116, BM818, Teseo-LIV3F, WM8962 and bq25895) that the Librem 5 uses in place of an integrated mobile SoC occupy a total of 1483.2 mm2, which is 10 times the area of a Snapdragon 8. Purism had to use components as small as 0201 and use 10 layers to cram everything into the Librem 5’s main circuit board, which had to go through roughly a dozen iterations to get right. Even a minimal Linux phone like the PinePhone, which was designed to be as economical as possible, has 24 ICs and a total of 627 components on its circuit board, making it more complex than most Android smartphones, which typically have 300 to 400 components.

Adding all these extra components makes Linux phones more expensive to design and produce, but it also makes them suck more power, since it takes more energy to run half a dozen chips at larger node sizes than one integrated mobile SoC fabbed on a ≤4nm node, which has been optimized for energy efficiency. It is hard to coordinate all the extra chips in Linux phones to get them to enter lower power modes and sleep modes to conserve their batteries. Add in an SoC with an older node size between 28 and 8 nm that hasn’t been optimized for battery usage, and there is no way that Linux phones can match the battery life of Android phones.

The RK3588S changes the game for Linux phones

Many of the Linux SoC makers have decided that they shouldn’t even bother building chips with the CPU and GPU performance needed for a modern computing device. NXP, Amlogic and Broadcom simply aren’t interested in building competitive SoC’s. However, Rockchip fundamentally changed the prospects for making a decent Linux phone when it released the RK3588 and its lower-power RK3588S variant in 2022. With four 2.4Ghz Cortex-A76 cores and four 1.8GHz Cortex-A55 cores and a Mali-G610 MC4 graphics, there finally was a Linux SoC on the market with enough processing power in an SoC to make an acceptable Linux smartphone.

The Liberux NEXX and the Dawndrums Divine D. are two Linux phones currently being designed with the RK3588S. Purism just announced on its forum that its next gen phone “is actively being designed,” which won’t be based on the i.MX platform like the Librem 5 and Liberty, so it is likely to be based on the RK3588S as well.

Of course, the RK3588S’s performance isn’t going to impress anyone used to an Android phone. The RK3588 and RK3588S are fabbed on a 8nm process node, which is four generations behind today’s state of the art at 2nm. Today’s low-end Snapdragon 4 Gen 4 fabbed at 4nm has 25% better single core CPU performance than the RK3588. (See the table of SoC’s below.) The RK3588S has similar performance to the RK3588 over short bursts, but its performance is 10%-15% less over periods longer than 30 seconds. By the time the Linux phones based on the RK3588S hit the market in a couple years time, they will have significantly worse performance than every Android smartphone on the market, but this difference probably won’t be a limiting factor for most people who aren’t 3D gaming or shooting high-resolution video. At a certain point, more processing power has diminishing utility, and the RK3588S crosses that threshold for most people.

Where the older process tech will be significant is in terms of their energy consumption. A phone sporting the RK3588S will run hotter and have worse battery life than phones using integrated mobile SoC’s from Qualcomm, MediaTek, UNISOC, etc. The challenge is to dissipate the extra heat. The PinePhone’s SoC and cellular modem get very hot because they do not have a good heat spreader. The Librem 5’s SoC is joined with thermal paste to the back plate of the LCD, which avoids overheating the SoC, but causes the touchscreen and aluminum frame to become hot to the touch. A Linux phone with the RK3358S will need some kind of heat dissipation, but it is unlikely that a Linux phone maker can afford to include a vapor chamber, since those have to be specially designed and would be very expensive for a phone of limited production. The RK3588S will need throttling to fit within the power and thermal envelope of a phone.

At first, the mainline Linux support for the RK3588 was very limited. Rockchip never published the documentation for the chip on its opensource.rock-chips.com site, and Rockchip took down that site at the end of 2025. On December 21, 2024, Jeff Geerling, the most influential reviewer in the Raspberry Pi alternative space, reported on X:

I was told Rockchip no longer considers RK3588 to be an ‘open source’ chip. In practice, that means Rockchip no longer contributes RK3588 code to open-source projects and they also decided not to sell RK3588 directly to SBC vendors.

On the other hand, Rockchip is still updating its public kernel code for the RK3588 at Github. Collabora has been toiling away for years to add mainline Linux support for the RK3588, and Collabora lists Rockchip as one of its partners, so Rockchip hasn’t totally abandoned the Linux community. Collabora recently added mainline Linux support for the video capture unit and MIPI CSI2 interface in the RK3588. Now Collabora is working with Ideas on Board and Rockchip to create an new image signal processor (ISP) driver for all the RK35xx chips. Collabora has gotten the hardware video decoder working for VP8, VP9, H.264 and H.265, and is now working on the hardware video encoder for H.264.

Four years after the RK3588S was released, there is now enough support for the chip in mainline Linux, that an RK3588S phone can be created running free/open source drivers. The RK3588S needs to execute a proprietary Synopsys DDR timing training blob at boot. The RK3588S can now use the free Panthor driver for the GPU, but it requires the proprietary mali_csffw.bin firmware, which is loaded from the /lib/firmware/ directory at boot. All the other blobs for the RK3588S have either been replaced or they aren’t necessary. There is now a FOSS driver for the NPU. The proprietary MPP library for hardware video encoding can be replaced with software video encoding, and Collabora is working on free drivers for the ISP and hardware video encode, so software video processing and encoding probably won’t be necessary in the future. Collabora has developed a FOSS version for the Trusted Firmware-A (TF-A), that can replace the proprietary bl31.elf firmware. The HDMI blob in the bl31.elf isn’t necessary if using DisplayPort Alt Mode for video out. The proprietary bl32.bin firmware is not necessary if not using the hardware-enforced security features or encryption keys.

If Purism uses the RK3588S in its next phone, it is unlikely that Purism will attempt to obtain the FSF’s RYF certification by storing blobs on a separate NOR Flash chip and executing them with a secondary processor, like it did with the Librem 5, because the RK3588S doesn’t have a secondary low-power processor like the Cortex-M4 in the i.MX 8M Quad.

There are good prospects that Collabora will eventually get all the RK3588S’s hardware supported with mainline Linux drivers, and until then, the RK3588S has enough processing power in the GPU and CPU to process and encode images and video in software, so a phone built on the RK3588S can take photos and shoot video like a normal smartphone, although it will be slower and use more energy. In contrast, previous phones using a Linux kernel simply didn’t have enough processing power to offer decent cameras. Taking photos on the PinePhone is painfully slow, and the Millipixels app on the Librem 5 pauses for 3 to 4 seconds after taking each photo. Because the Librem 5’s i.MX 8M Quad processor lacks an ISP, audio DSP and hardware video encoder, it takes roughly 10 times as long to process and encode a 720p video on the Librem 5 as the length of the video, and it’s about 50 times longer on the PinePhone, due to its antiquated Allwinner A64 processor and significantly slower RAM and eMMC.

Aside from the RK3588S, there aren’t many other options on the market to make a good Linux phone. The closest option is Nvidia’s Tegra Orin NX or Orin Nano Super, which only contain Cortex-A78 cores. They lack low-power Cortex-A55 cores and they aren’t very energy efficient. They sport newer tech than the Cortex-A76 cores in the RK3588S, but the Tegra Orin was fabbed on a 8nm node just like the RK3588S and the Tegra Orin’s lower clock rate limits its single-core performance. The Tegra Orin is also much worse in terms of software freedom, requiring proprietary blobs in the initial bootloader, the secondary bootloader, Boot Configuration Table, USB firmware, HDMI/DisplayPort configuration, ARM Trusted Firmware and the GPU userspace driver. Many Linux users can ignore the blobs in the Linux device tree, but it harder to ignore Nvidia’s GPU blob in the userspace.

Another option is the Allwinner A733 at 12nm, which offers less performance with dual 2.0Ghz Cortex-A76 cores and six 1.79GHz Cortex-A55 low-power cores. Allwinner stopped collaborating with the Linux community years ago, and has frequently violated the GPL 2.0 license by not publishing its Linux source code, so the A733 probably won’t be a viable option, although Allwinner has made some comments about intending to collaborate with the community in the future. Another option is the NXP i.MX 95, which does have mainline Linux support, but its performance on a 16nm node with six low-power Cortex-A55 cores is poor and not a good value for the money.

The PinePhone 2 was expected to use the more economical Rockchip RK3566, which is fabbed on an older 22nm node. However, so many volunteer developers abandoned PINE64 in 2022, that it is unlikely that the Hong Kong-based company will be launching any new models in the foreseeable future. The production of PINE64’s Linux devices are currently on hold due to the high RAM and eMMC prices caused by the AI boom, but part of the reason is that PINE64 can’t raise prices on many of its devices, which are only half-functional, because many of the community groups, who worked on the PinePhone, are no longer developing the software to support PINE64’s newer devices.

Another reason the RK3588 is the preferred option is because Rockchip is promising to provide a successor chip, the RK3668 with four Cortex-A730 cores and six Cortex-A530 cores at a 5 or 6 nm node in 2027, so it should be possible to keep upgrading the phone in the future. Purism invested heavily in supporting the 28nm i.MX 8M Quad in the Librem 5, thinking that it would be possible to upgrade to a future 14nm version of the SoC, but NXP decided to eliminate half the cores in the GPU and remove DisplayPort support in the 14nm i.MX 8M Plus, so Purism couldn’t upgrade its phone in the same processor family. Given that the cost of fabbing on smaller process nodes keeps rising, it is unlikely that any of the other chipmakers will launch a new chip to challenge the RK3588’s performance in the near future.

The new option of Linux phones using a Qualcomm IoT SoC

In the past, the only way to create a phone running on a Linux kernel was to design a complex device containing many separate chips. Historically Qualcomm didn’t bother making powerful processors for its SoC’s that supported Linux. However, there has been increasing demand for more powerful Internet of Things processors that can handle AI and lots of image processing from multiple video feeds. Unlike short-lived smartphones and tablets, IoT devices have long product lives, so they are better suited to use Linux, rather than Android which is much harder to support over time. In March 2023, Qualcomm dramatically improved the prospects for Linux phones with the announcement that its upcoming 6nm QCM6490 processor with an integrated cellular modem would support four operating systems (Android, Linux, Ubuntu and Windows IoT Enterprise).

Then, the San Diego-based company announced its new Product Longevity Program, which would both sell and provide software support for the QCM6490 until July 2036. Both the FairPhone 5 and SHIFTphone 8 were designed around the QCM6490, due to the environmental benefits to its long support, and that long support is exactly what Linux phones also need, because it takes so long to bring a Linux phone to market and it needs to sell for many years to recoup the high investment in a product that has limited annual sales. The Fairphone 5 with the QCM6490 (1x 2.7Ghz Cortex-A78, 3x 2.4GHz Cortex-A78, 4x 1.9Ghz Cortex-A55) was criticized for its poor benchmarks and poor battery life compared to other Android phones. However, the QCM6490 offers significantly better CPU and GPU performance and better energy efficiency than the RK3588S.

The subsequent QCM4490 and QCM8850, which are fabbed on a newer 4nm node, offer lower and higher power options than the QCM6490. The QCM4490 (2x 2.4GHz Cortex-A78, 6x 2.0GHz Cortex-A55) has almost as good single-core performance as the QCM6490 and is more energy efficient, but its support ends in April 2030, which is too short for a Linux phone. The QCM8850 probably could be downclocked to fit within the power envelope of a Linux phone, but its support ends in April 2033, so the longer-lived QCM6490 is probably the better option for a Linux phone.

The benefit of using one of these IoT processors, which Qualcomm has rebranded as “Dragonwing“, is that they make it significantly easier to design a phone and bring it to market, since they incorporate so much functionality in one chip, which reduces the complexity of the phone’s circuit board. Qualcomm provides reference designs that can be customized, so designing a Linux phone with a Dragonwing processor should be much easier and require fewer circuit board iterations and less testing.

A company with limited resources could contract with SHIFT or Fairphone to produce their phones and then install Linux, similar to the way that both Murena and iodé sell Fairphones and SHIFTphones and install their AOSP variants focused on privacy on the phones. Not only would this avoid the time and cost of designing the hardware, but it would allow the Linux phone to be marketed for its environmental and ethical benefits. Fairphone or SHIFT could also be contracted to provide the warranty service for the phone.

Qualcomm provides free/open source drivers for its Snapdragon and Dragonwing processors, and over time many of these processors will be partially supported in mainline Linux. However, the Qualcomm drivers depend on many proprietary blobs. The Adreno A660 GPU uses a blob to accelerate the 3D graphics. The audio digital signal processor (aDSP) uses a blob to handle audio decoding and processing. A compute blob is used by the DSP and NPU for tasks like machine learning. The VPU needs a blob to do the hardware video decoding and encoding. The Inline Packet Accelerator (IPA) uses a blob to speed up its network routing. These blobs allow the SoC to run cooler and be more energy efficient, but tasks like audio processing, video encoding/decoding and compute can be handled in software by the CPU and/or GPU in order to avoid using these blobs.

While these blobs are optional, the blobs to operate the WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular modem would not be optional on a phone which needs those functions. None of those blobs are required in the userspace, but the only way to avoid them is to use separate WiFi/Bluetooth and cellular modem chips. Adding those chips to the phone’s circuit board would add significant extra cost and complexity and make the phone less energy efficient.

On the other hand, adding those extra chips would also make it possible to use a hardware kill switch to shut down the phone’s wireless communications, which would be a major selling point for the phone. However, the type of customer who wants to be able to cut the power to the WiFi/Bluetooth and cellular modem will also probably be worried about the three blobs needed to boot the Qualcomm QCM chips, especially the one which runs the hypervisor and the TrustZone that handles encryption. Although the RK3566, RK3588 and i.MX 95 also require a blob to boot, it is a tiny file from Synopsys DesignWare that simply trains the DDR RAM’s memory timing, whereas the Qualcomm blobs to boot the QCM4490, QCM6490 and QCM8850 are much more extensive.

The problem of using an Android kernel in a Linux phone

What made the wave of mobile Linux from 2020 – 2022 with the release of the Librem 5, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro so exciting was that these were phones that ran on a Linux kernel. In contrast, most other Linux phones run their Linux stack on top of libhybris, which loads Android libraries and drivers and translates calls to libc and musl, so they can work with Android’s Bionic. The advantage of using an Android kernel is that it allows Linux phones to use a modern integrated mobile SoC like a Qualcomm Snapdragon or MediaTek Dimensity with good performance and energy efficiency, so Linux phones can compete with Android phones.

The problem is that a Linux phone that runs on an Android kernel will significantly shorten the lifespan of the phone. Historically Google only supported each Android kernel for 4 years with security updates, and it was necessary to do at least one Android upgrade to get those 4 years of support, since Google usually only supports each Android release for 3.5 years.

It is a security risk to use an Android phone that is no longer getting security updates, because there is so much Android malware in the world, including in Google’s official Play Store. A lot of hackers are focused on attacking Android, because it is so widely used on devices that carry valuable personal information. AV-TEST counts 37.62 million distinct pieces of Android malware and 30.38 million potentially unwanted applications (PUA’s) that do things that users may not want such as collecting their personal data. In contrast, AV-TEST counts 5.29 million pieces of malware and 58,128 PUA’s in Linux, and most of it is rarely installed, because most Linux users only install software from the repository of their distro, where free/open source software (FOSS) predominates and package maintainers would suffer reputational damage for including malware.

Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek typically only sell their SoC’s for smartphones for 2 to 3 years, and most of the demand for the high-end Snapdragon and Dimensity models dries up after the first year, so historically they only provided Android updates for 1-3 years and security updates for 2 to 4 years. They usually didn’t bother upgrading the kernel and the drivers and the proprietary blobs that they provided were designed to function with a particular kernel and couldn’t be upgraded. Historically Google only supported three years of kernels in each Android version, so that limited most phones to being used with a maximum of three Android versions.

In contrast to the 2-4 years of software support for Android phones, Purism advertised that the Librem 5 would get “lifetime updates that actually extend your phone’s life.” Likewise, PINE64 promised that it would sell the PinePhone and its replacement parts for “at least 5 years.” These two Linux phones can be supported for far longer than any Android device on the market. They use free/open source drivers and Linux kernels that can keep being upgraded, because they doesn’t rely on proprietary blobs that are only compatible with a particular kernel version. While they do contain proprietary firmware, they are not dependent on the SoC manufacturer to provide new blobs that allow the use of recent versions of the kernel.

The problem with the short lifespan of Android kernels is that Linux phones typically take longer to develop and bring to market, and then they are sold for more years than most Android phones. Given all the challenges with using Linux SoC’s, it isn’t surprising that FuriLabs decided to use a conventional smartphone design sporting a MediaTek Dimensity 900 processor for its FLX1 phone, which started shipping in July 2024. The phone’s operating system, FuriOS, is based on the Droidian project, which runs a mobile Debian stack with Wayland + wlroots + GTK + GNOME libraries + Phosh on top of an Android kernel using libhybris. Unlike the Librem 5 and the PinePhone, the FLX1 has the processing power to handle all the tasks that people expect of a modern smartphone.

The problem is that the Dimensity 900 was released in May 2021 with Android 11 using the android11-5.4 kernel. Google stopped supporting this kernel on January 1, 2026, and Linux stopped providing updates for the 5.4 kernel on December 3, 2025. MediaTek doesn’t release major-version kernel upgrades for its processors (although that may change in the future), and the drivers that MediaTek provides for the Dimensity 900 contains proprietary blobs that can’t be upgraded to support newer kernels, so the FLX1, and its successors, the FLX1s and FLX1s+, are stuck with an outdated kernel for Android 11 that isn’t getting security patches and bug fixes. Since these phones use Andromeda, which is a custom fork of Waydroid, to run Android apps inside FuriOS, they are potentially exposed to a lot of Android malware. Waydroid has weakened the app sandbox and SELinux security in standard Android, and it is based on outdated AOSP 13, which stopped getting security updates in March 2026. Given the security implications, it is questionable whether FuriLabs should still be selling the FLX1s+ using an unsupported kernel.

The Jolla C2 Community Phone, which currently sells for €369, shares similar security concerns. The C2, which started shipping in September 2024, is based on the UNISOC Tiger T606 processor, which was announced in September 2021. The C2 is running a custom kernel named “5.4.233-android12-9-g9c3a5d5b97e3.” Presumably, the Finnish company took Linux 5.4.233, which was released on 25 Feb 2023, and added Google’s Android 12 kernel modifications, so it is essentially using the same unsupported kernel as the FLX1/s/s+, which hasn’t received any security updates from Google since January 1, 2026. Jolla hasn’t even bothered to update the kernel to 5.4.302, which was the last maintenance release from Linux for the 5.4 kernel on December 3, 2025. Jolla has not released the source code for the C2’s kernel, so that Jolla’s so-called “Community Phone” can’t be upgraded by the community. Even if the community could upgrade the kernel to its last maintenance release, if is important to keep in mind that Linux 5.4.302 had 1539 unfixed CVE’s (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) when released, and new critical CVE’s for Linux are found on average every 2.5 days.

Like the FuriLabs FLX1/s/s+, the Jolla C2 also can run Android apps, which may contain malware, but it uses Jolla’s proprietary AppSupport (aka AlienDalvik), which runs AOSP inside an LXC container like Waydroid. With AppSupport, the Android apps have better integration into the host operating system than Waydroid. Presumably Jolla is running a more recent version of AOSP than Waydroid, since Jolla licenses the use of AppSupport to other companies, so it probably is applying Google’s security updates for AOSP, but not for the supported kernel on the C2 phone.

All the Linux phones running Android kernels, such as the Volla phones with Ubuntu Touch and the new Jolla Phone (2026) running Sailfish OS, will face this same problem that their lifespans are cut short by their Android kernels that can only get a major version upgrade from the SoC manufacturer due to their proprietary blobs only being compatible with one major version of the kernel. Unfortunately, all these phones are using MediaTek processors, which either have little or no mainline Linux support, so their lifespan can’t be extended by switching to a mainline Linux kernel.

Linux phones based on Android will become more viable due to longer support

Nonetheless, the planned obsolescence of the Android phone market has started to change. Google wanted its Android operating system to better compete with Apple’s iOS. Apple promises at least 5 years of support for its phones and typically provides over 6 years. Unlike the other Android phone makers, Google’s business model doesn’t depend on planned obsolescence. The more people that Google can convince to use its operating system, the more data Google can collect for its targeted advertising, so extending the life of Android phones is a way to attract more users to its platform.

In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic caused people to buy fewer new phones, and then the subsequent supply chain crunch caused phone prices to rise due to the more expensive components. The global average selling price of Apple’s iPhone increased from $724 to $903 between 2020 and 2024. Global smartphone sales collapsed in 2020 and have never recovered to their pre-pandemic levels. In order to convince people to open their wallets for more expensive phones, consumers needed to be convinced that they would last longer.

In August 2020, Samsung announced that its S, Note and Z series phones starting with the S10 would all get three years of OS updates and security updates, just like Google had been providing for its Pixels, since the brand was first launched in 2016. At the time when Samsung made this policy change, the smartphone industry had just experienced the worst decline in its history, with unit sales dropping 23% YoY in the second quarter of 2020. In October 2021, Google announced that it would significantly extended the lifespan of its Pixel devices, promising 3 years of OS updates and 5 years of security updates, beginning with the Pixel 6. Samsung couldn’t allow its Galaxy devices to usurped as the best Android brand. In February 2022, Samsung announced that it would surpass Google with a promise of four years of OS updates and 5 years of security patches for its flagship models, starting with the Galaxy S21, Z3 and Tab8.

This set off a competition between the two firms to see which one could provide the longest software support for its mobile devices. Google decided to leapfrog Samsung again and set a new standard that would best Apple’s support policy. In October 2023, Google pledged that the Pixel 8 series would get 7 years of OS updates and security updates, plus “Pixel Feature Drops” and “AI technology from Google”. Google’s announcement that it would support the Pixel 8 into 2030 sent shock waves through the mobile industry. Samsung was determined to not be outdone by Google, and announced in January 2024 that its new Galaxy S24 and S24 Ultra would also get 7 years of OS updates and security updates. In 2025, Samsung extended the software support to six years for all its new Galaxy models, including its low-end Galaxy A06 4G, which costs around $125.

In October 2024 during its Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm commented that it would be offering 8 years of OS upgrades and security updates for its high-end mobile processors, and in February 2025, it formally announced that its new 7, 8 and 8 Elite processors released that year would all get this unprecedented level of support. Just as important, Qualcomm promised that its high-end Snapdragon processors would also get two kernel upgrades, so they would be using kernels that are officially supported by new Android releases. MediaTek couldn’t let Qualcomm corner the high-end mobile processor market for the next generation of flagship phones. On May 27, 2025, MediaTek posted that its Dimensity 8400 and 9400 chips would also get 8 years of support.

Traditionally each new Android version only supports three years of kernels, but in 2024 Google added a fourth year with Android 15 (android12-5.10 to android15-6.6) and a fifth year with Android 16 (android12-5.10 to android16-6.12) and a sixth year with Android 17 (android12-5.10 to android17-6.18). However, these extra years of support in Android are likely a temporary fix that Google implemented until it can move the chipmakers into its Longevity Google Requirements Freeze (LGRF) program which Google began in October 2024. Under this program, chipmakers are expected to upgrade their kernels every 3 years in order to be able to support their SoC’s in the long term. After the Linux kernel maintainers announced that they would be reducing their support of their LTS kernels from 6 to 2 years, Google announced in July 2024 that it would provide security updates to its kernels for 4 years, so that suggests that future Android releases will go back to only supporting 3 years of kernels.

Qualcomm has promised to provide two kernel updates for its high end processors, but Qualcomm has said nothing about its lower-tier processors, except for its announcement back in December 2020 that all of its Snapdragon processors would get three years of OS updates and 4 years of security updates. Other SoC manufacturers have been similarly mum on the support for their lower-tier processors. In all likelihood, most smartphones with mid-range and low-end processors will only get 4 years of support, which means that all the existing Linux phones from Volla, FuriLabs, Jolla and Brax will probably face the same problem of using unsupported Android kernels that can’t be upgraded.

New Linux phones, however, can be designed in the future to get 8 years of support if they use a higher-end Snapdragon or Dimensity processor. Even if designing a custom phone like the FLX1, which took three years to bring to market, because it has three hardware kill switches for the microphone, cameras and cellular modem and it required a lot of software dev work, the Linux phone should still be viable because it will still have 5 more years of software support and can be sold for at least 3 years.

If selecting the Snapdragon 8 or Dimensity 9000 series to take advantage of its longer software support, the phone will get the added benefit of offering video out via DisplayPort Alt Mode over its USB-C port. That means that the phone can be marketed as a convergent device that allows it to be used as both a phone and a desktop PC. Unlike an Android desktop, a Linux desktop is far more useful as a PC. If the phone has enough RAM and storage space, it can become a replacement for the traditional PC for people who don’t need a lot of processing power, but it has the convenience of being more portable than a laptop, and not needing to transfer data between multiple devices. For people who have to work in multiple locations and want to be able to carry their data around with them, a convergent phone can be a very attractive option.

If designing a more economical phone, however, that doesn’t need video out, the Snapdragon 7 and Dimensity 8400 are processors designed for upper mid-range phones, and they still get the 8 years of support (if the phone maker is willing to pay Qualcomm or MediaTek for the extended support). This will be the most attractive option for Volla, Jolla, FuriLabs and Brax, which all sell mid-range phones.

If a Snapdragon chip is selected, there is a decent chance that the chip will eventually gain some mainline Linux support, so the phone can have a second life after the official support ends, although its functions requiring binary blobs probably won’t work with the upgraded mainline Linux kernel. What is so frustrating is that many of the makers of Linux phones are selecting MediaTek processors over Snapdragon processors, so there is little hope for that second life.

Why software was a major challenge for the Librem 5

When Purism announced the Librem 5 in August 2017, the California-based company wasn’t just facing a major obstacle in using a new SoC, that hadn’t yet been released, which would significantly delay the phone. Purism, however, faced an even bigger challenge in the software to install on the phone.

Purism had observed how trying to develop mobile Linux had humbled larger companies with far more resources, and it tried to avoid their mistakes. Motorola developed half a dozen different varieties of Linux, but couldn’t unify and direct its development efforts, and eventually adopted Android which commoditized its phones, so it had to be sold off to Google and eventually Lenovo in order to survive. Palm took too long developing webOS and ran out of money as Android ate its market, so it had to sell itself off to HP in 2010 in order to survive. Likewise, Nokia took too long developing MeeGo as its business collapsed due to Android, so it turned to Microsoft in 2010 to provide Windows Mobile for its phones, which only hastened the destruction of the Finnish company. The Mozilla Foundation developed an entire operating system based on web standards, but found that it didn’t have the resources to match Google’s Android, and abandoned the development of Firefox OS for smartphones in December 2015, although it continued development for TVs and Internet of Things for another 10 months. Canonical attempted to unify the desktop and mobile spaces with its Unity8 interface and develop Ubuntu Touch as a mobile OS with good convergence for the desktop. However, it proved to be a costly endeavor with limited commercial interest, and Canonical’s CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, announced that the company would abandon the development of Ubuntu Touch in April 2017.

This tragic history has taught Linux hardware vendors that they should do as little software development as possible, except code to make their hardware work and some distro maintenance. However, avoiding software dev work was not viable strategy in 2017 for the kind of phone that Purism was attempting to create.

All the available mobile Linux interfaces in 2017 had major drawbacks, including Sailfish OS’s Silica, Firefox OS’s Gaia, KDE’s Plasma Mobile, UBports’ Unity8→Lomiri, Maemo Leste’s Hildon, LuneOS’s Luna Next and Nemo Mobile’s Glacier UI. Jolla had spent years polishing its Sailfish OS, but Purism’s goal of 100% free software disqualified Jolla’s proprietary Silica interface, as well as Samsung’s Tizen, whose problematic Flora License grants a patent license only to “Tizen certified platforms”. Nemo Mobile and Plasma Mobile were still incomplete and would have required a lot of dev work on Purism’s part to supply all the missing parts. LG had turned webOS into an operating system for smart TVs/projectors and automobiles, and replacing LG’s proprietary bits would have taken quite a bit of work. Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch were complete systems, but both of them would have required a huge commitment on Purism’s part to maintain their software in the long term. Firefox OS’s code was abandoned, and the volunteers at UBports didn’t have the manpower to maintain its huge codebase. All of the available interfaces were based on a separate mobile stack, whereas Purism wanted to unify with the software stack in desktop Linux, because one of its announced goals was that the Librem 5 could be used with the major distros, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE and Arch.

Purism originally leaned toward adopting Plasma Mobile for its Librem 5 phone, but that would have required maintaining both a GNOME-based stack on the desktop and a separate KDE-based mobile stack in its PureOS distribution. At that point in time, Plasma Mobile was still an inchoate system, that would have required a huge amount of dev work to get ready for a commercial product launch. Plasma Mobile was based on many things that were incapatible with a desktop stack, such as oFono telephony and the Halium Project, which was also used by LG’s webOS and UBport’s Ubuntu Touch, in order to run the system on top of libhybris with a Android kernel and drivers.

Purism was already working with GTK and GNOME in PureOS, and it marketed the Librem 5 as a phone aligned with the ideals of the Free Software Foundation, which sponsored GNOME, so it made sense for Purism to favor an interface based on GTK and the GNOME ecosystem. However, the only available GTK-based interface was Hildon, which was hopelessly outdated, and would have required a lot of work to upgrade from GTK 2 to GTK 3.

In the end, Purism decided that it would be easier to create a new mobile interface, which it called Phosh (phone + shell), as a thin overlay on top of GTK plus GNOME middleware, than do dev work on one of the existing mobile interfaces. By basing Phosh on the standard desktop stack consisting of Linux + Wayland + wlroots + GTK + GNOME and adding code to roughly 20 GNOME applications to make them adaptive, Purism was able to take advantage of all the corporate support provided by IBM/Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical and Google for this stack. Purism had to submit code upstream to Linux, wlroots, ModemManager, GTK/GNOME and Matrix to support its mobile operating system, but then it could rely on those projects to maintain the code in the future. This was arguably a better strategy than helping develop Plasma Mobile, which has minimal corporate support, and was focused at the time on developing a separate stack than KDE’s desktop Plasma. Purism started working on its libhandy library in mid-2018 to add to standard GTK3/GNOME desktop applications to make them adaptive for a smaller mobile interface. Then the Purism developers worked with the GNOME community to develop libadwaita in 2020, so GTK4/GNOME could become adaptive between mobile and desktop screens.

As detailed in my article, “The strategic advantages of Phosh for mobile Linux,” unifying with an existing desktop stack and getting the broader community to adopt its software to help maintain it was arguably the best strategy to reduce the long-term maintenance costs, especially for a tiny company like Purism that has limited resources.

Unfortunately, developing a new mobile interface involved higher costs upfront, and Purism ran into financial problems during the global COVID-19 pandemic. In early March of 2020, Purism stopped paying refunds to customers who cancelled their preorders, telling customers that they would have to wait till the phone started shipping in order to get their refunds. Between February and May of 2020, 5 of the 14 developers working on the Librem 5 quit the project, and there was a noticeable drop in the number of software commits by the Purism employees who stayed, indicating that Purism probably wasn’t paying them.

Purism was caught in a hopeless situation. If it publicly admitted in early 2020 that it was having financial problems, all of the orders for its products would have dried up and the company would likely have gone bankrupt. If it paid out all the refund requests, it also would have likely gone bankrupt, which would have harmed everyone who had put down $599 – $799 to pre-order the Librem 5. Purism held off on paying refunds, which probably allowed the company to survive and eventually start delivering its phones in November 2020. However, it didn’t appear to have the funds on hand to manufacture all the pre-ordered phones, because the manufacture of the Librem 5 was done in small batches until it was caught by COVID’s global supply chain shortages and couldn’t procure the i.MX 8M Quad processors for 6 months during 2021.

Purism never repaid the refunds for the canceled Librem 5 orders. Angry customers waiting for their refunds publicly denounced the company on public forums, which blackened the company’s public reputation and suppressed sales of the Librem 5. The early reviews for the phone noted the poor battery life and the fact that critical functionality was still not implemented, such as the cameras, VoLTE support in the modem and the ability to suspend. In order to recoup its high development costs, Purism kept raising the phone’s price, until it reached an eye-watering $1299 in March 2022, which further suppressed sales of the phone.

Instead of refunds, Purism offered customers who had canceled their orders credit plus 20% extra to buy another product from Purism. Customers who received the Librem 5 were able to resell it for more than they paid, but many customers who had canceled their orders refused to do that on principal. In a letter to Louis Rossmann in August 2023, Purism admitted that it still had 600 cancelled Librem 5 orders, which it still didn’t have the finances to refund.

The success of Phosh despite its limited funding

Despite all the controversy surrounding the California-based company, its strategy of making a sustainable mobile OS by unifying with a popular desktop stack with good corporate support and upstreaming its code so it would be maintained over the long term has proven to be correct. Of the 469k lines of code in the software projects that Purism initiated for the Librem 5, 98.7% of that code is now controlled by external organizations. GNOME adopted libhandy, Calls and Chat (i.e. chatty) as official projects. In late 2020, the Purism developers started worked with the GNOME community to develop libadwaita to become the canonical implementation of GNOME’s human interface guidelines (HIG). Not only did this make GNOME’s GTK4 applications adaptive between the desktop and mobile environoments, but it gained features like in-app notifications, customizable animations and speed/fluidity improvements. GNOME has continued developing its GNOME Shell on mobile based Mutter, which is its unified display server, compositor and window manager. In contrast, Phosh uses wlroots (a Wayland compositor library created by Sway) and its phoc (a Wayland compositor), which are lighter weight than Mutter. However, GNOME has helped promote Phosh by hosting its code and documentation at GNOME World to foster its development.

As Purism has cut its budget for code development, Phosh’s development has increasingly moved outside the company. FreeDesktop.org adopted feedbackd, which is a D-Bus activated daemon that provides haptic, visual and audio feedback in response to events. In February 2025, the non-profit association Phosh.mobi e.V. was created in Germany to guide the development of Phosh as an independent entity. Three of the nine founding members of Phosh.mobi were former or current Purism employees/contractors, including Guido Gunther, who is Phosh’s main developer.

Over the last five years, the amount of code in the projects that Purism created for the Librem 5 has grown by 74.9%, and much of that new code is being written by people who are no longer employed or contracted by Purism. The only code projects still controlled by Purism are gtherm, haegtesse and wys, which are DBus daemons for thermals, transfering modem audio and bringing up PulseAudio during calls, respectively. Together, these projects only represent 6173 lines or 1.3% of the total code.

In a survey that PINE64 took of 3079 PinePhone users in January 2022, 39.3% selected Phosh as their favorite interface, compared to 15.5% for Sxmo/Sxmo, 15.0% for Plasma Mobile and 6.7% for Lomiri (formerly Unity8). Despite Phosh only starting its development in April 2018, more users preferred it over Lomiri and Plasma Mobile, which have been under development since March 2013 and July 2015, respectively. Purism’s strategy of using the existing infrastructure and applications from GNOME allowed the tiny company to create a usable interface faster than other competing interfaces.

It is surprising that Phosh became the most popular mobile Linux interface, considering that the Qt toolkit and KDE had such a head start over GTK and GNOME in supporting mobile environments. Qt Quick was introduced with Qt 5.1 in June 2013 to make Qt controls adaptive for small screens, and Qt Mobile was introduced in December 2013 to make them cross-platform, and KDE’s Kirigami library for adaptive applications was introduced in March 2016. GTK didn’t gain similar abilities until 2019 with libhandy and GNOME didn’t have an answer to Kirigami until libadwaita was introduced in 2021.

Phosh has some glaring limitations. Its default Squeekboard keyboard is basic and kludgy. Only in 2025 did Phosh gain an alternative keyboard with word correction and word completion, plus the ability to select from multiple characters by long pressing a key. The desktop mode in Phosh to output video to an external monitor or projector has a very limited interface. Phosh has no camera app, and most installations rely on Megapixels developed by Martijn Braam for the PinePhone or its Millipixels fork developed by Purism for the Librem 5. Millipixels only gained basic support for auto-focus and the ability to shoot video in January 2023.

Phosh doesn’t have the three buttons at the bottom or the swipe gestures from Android that most people are used to. Plasma Mobile’s interface is much closer to the familiar Android interface, and it is nicer visually. Phosh’s interface is much simplier. It doesn’t use system navigation buttons and has fewer configuration options than Plasma Mobile. A swipe from the bottom displays Phosh’s Overview screen where apps can be opened or closed. A swipe from the top displays a Quick-Setting panel, notifications, and buttons in the top corners to lock or turn off the phone.

Phosh became the more popular interface, partly because Purism was paying developers to work on it, so it was more stable, whereas Plasma Mobile was more prone to stalls and crashes. Plasma relies on hardware acceleration from the GPU to speed up its interface, which isn’t supported by the drivers for the A64 and i.MX 8M Quad in the PinePhone and Librem 5, whereas Phosh is faster and more responsive just using software rendering. Phosh also requires less RAM, although it does run more background processes that use more CPU.

Adoption of mobile interfaces by Linux distros

Phosh succeeded because its close adherence to a common desktop stack made it easier to package and distribute in different distros. Phosh was first adopted by postmarketOS (now Nura) in September 2018, just a two months after Purism first debuted it. The close ties between the Phosh developers and Debian helped get Phosh packaged into Debian in February 2020, where it became the basis of the new Mobian distro. Phosh allowed Debian, Arch, Manjaro, Fedora, OpenSUSE and NixOS to become mobile distros for the first time, which in turn encouraged Linux application developers to start testing their software in a mobile interface to see how it functioned on smaller screens. Because Phosh didn’t stay isolated in one Linux distro, it attracted more volunteers to help develop the software and work on porting it.

Over time, Plasma Mobile has followed Phosh’s example and increasingly unified with its Plasma desktop stack. Originally the Plasma Mobile stack was quite different from the standard desktop Plasma stack, since Plasma Mobile was based on the oFono telephony library and could be run either on the standard Linux kernel or on the Halium Project, which allows Plasma Mobile to run in an LXC container on top of an Android kernel and drivers, and using libhybris to translate its Linux calls to libc into Android’s Bionic. Over time the KDE has jettisoned parts of Plasma Mobile to unify it with its desktop stack. In December 2020, KDE announced that it would get rid of Halium and only run on a Linux kernel, because that change would allow Plasma Mobile to employ a traditional Linux userspace without blobs and upgrade their KWin composer. A year later in December 2021, Plasma Mobile announced that it was switching from the oFono library to ModemManager, because it was more stable and better maintained than oFono. Finally, in February 2026, Plasma Mobile announced it would be switching from the Maliit on-screen keyboard to the new Plasma Keyboard. Over time, KDE has incorporated Kirigami into more of its standard applications, so it doesn’t need two different applications for Plasma and Plasma Mobile.

The unification of the mobile and desktop stacks made it easier for Plasma Mobile to follow Phosh’s example in getting packaged and incorporated into all the major Linux desktop distributions, so they could also be used on mobile devices. Nearly every major distro started testing its code on the PinePhone, which helped get more people testing and contributing to Phosh and Plasma Mobile.

Despite the fact that these two interfaces have fewer developers than desktop GNOME and desktop Plasma, they have don’t need nearly as much manpower because they can piggy back on the desktop stack and the convergent apps, so they can thrive with much less dev work and maintenance than big siloed codebases like Ubuntu Touch, Firefox OS, Tizen, webOS, etc.

Sxmo (Simple X Mobile) has followed simple strategy of building on top an existing deskop stack. It was created by Miles Alan, as a “collection of simple programs and shell scripts” on top of Sway and its wlroots library. It was first released in February 2020, and quickly became the second most popular interface on the PinePhone due to its light-weight and simple design, which made it easy to customize. Sxmo has been incorporated into the mobile distros (postmarketOS, Mobian and DanctNIX), but the desktop distros haven’t adopted it, which has limited its reach.

UBport’s Lomiri interface is faster and more responsive and consumes less RAM than Phosh and Plasma Mobile, but it was originally isolated in Ubuntu Touch. Canonical spent years developing its Unity8 interface, which is based on Qt Quick and used in Ubuntu Touch. The UBports community renamed the interface as Lomiri in February 2020. UBports has followed a similar strategy of trying to attract more people to its Lomiri interface by getting it incorporated into the major distros. UBports modified Ubuntu Touch and the Lomiri interface so they could run on either Halium or a standard Linux kernel, and switched to using more standardized libraries that were easier to upgrade over time. Nonetheless its small number of volunteers has struggled to maintain its huge codebase, and update it to new versions of Qt.

Despite the head start of Plasma Mobile and Lomiri, they stayed isolated for longer in KDE Neon and Ubuntu Touch. In contrast, Phosh got adopted almost immediately by postmarketOS, and once it got packaged by Debian in early 2020, most of the other major distros quickly adopted it. When postmarketOS was first released in May 2017, it used Weston, which is Wayland’s reference compositor, but within the first 100 days of its existence, postmarketOS adopted Plasma Mobile. However, postmarketOS chose to ship its PinePhone Community Edition with Phosh due to its greater stability.

Unlike in the past, when mobile Linux interfaces were isolated in a few distros, many distros now support Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Lomiri. Because mobile Linux is no longer isolated and locked into silos controlled by large companies, such as Nokia, Samsung, LG, Mozilla and Canonical, it has a much greater chance of succeeding and attracted contributors than it did in the past. Because Phosh and Plasma Mobile and Sxmo are based on using existing software stacks that are maintained by outside organizations, it is much less likely to be abandoned, as happened with Firefox OS, or to ossify and fade into obscurity, as happened with Hildon.

PINE64’s attempt to get around the cost of developing software

PINE64 was founded as a crowd-funding campaign in October 2015 by TL Lim and Johnson Jeng to develop a single board computer based on the Allwinner A64 processor. The company based in Hong Kong focuses on producing economical Linux hardware devices. It gets around the high costs of developing software by just producing the hardware and then invites the community to develop the software for its devices. By allying with various different Linux distros, PINE64 initially had a great deal of success.

PINE64 probably shipped over 100,000 PinePhones, which greatly stimulated the development of mobile Linux. The release of the PinePhone led to the creation of the Mobian (Mobile Debian) and DanctNIX (based on Arch ARM) distros and inspired the creation of the Sxmo interface. The PinePhone helped Plasma Mobile decide that it only needed to run on a Linux stack and pushed UBports to add support for running on a Linux kernel. It also caused many of the major distros to work on porting to a mobile device for the first time.

PINE64 played an important service for the community by getting cheap hardware into people’s hands so they develop software for that hardware, but it made the fundamental mistake of focusing on the distros, which only works if the hardware already has kernel support and good free/open source drivers. Drew DeVault, the lead developer of Sway and one of the volunteer developers who worked on the PinePhone, observed that PINE64 was putting the cart before the horse, by helping to finance the packaging work in particular distos, rather than first paying developers to work on the booting and driver development, that would have benefitted all the distros.

Because PINE64 chose hardware for the PinePhone that was mostly already supported by FOSS drivers, it was able to attract a large number of distros to work on the phone. Volunteer developer Ondřej Jirman (aka “mega” or “megi”) created a custom Linux kernel for the PinePhone. Volunteers at UBports did the initial work on bringing up the hardware. Arnaud Ferraris (aka “a-wai”) at Mobian developed the telephony stack using the eg25-manager in userspace. Martijn Braam at postmarketOS worked on the camera. PINE64 initially released a series of five development batches of the PinePhone, which had different distros preinstalled (Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS with Phosh, Manjaro with Phosh, Manjaro with Plasma Mobile and Mobian with Phosh). For each phone sold, PINE64 donated $10 to the distro which provided the software. After that, PINE64 planned to let the buyer select which distro to support by selecting the distro’s logo to display on the back plate of the PinePhone’s case.

Nonetheless, there were arguments among the different distros behind the scenes over the design of the hardware projects. PINE64’s founder, TL Lim, grew frustrated and decided to just ship PINE64’s devices with one distro and one interface preinstalled. Given the complexity of trying to work with so many different distros, this wasn’t an unreasonable decision, but it had to be handled with care to not alienate the other distros. Unfortunately, Lim chose to only ship PINE64 devices with Manjaro and Plasma Mobile preinstalled. PINE64’s own poll of PinePhone users showed that Phosh was the most popular interface, but it was controlled by Purism, a competitor to PINE64. Plasma Mobile wasn’t a bad choice, since it was a community-based interface that needed corporate support. Manjaro, however, was a very poor choice, since it wasn’t doing any software dev work and has been widely criticized for its bad practice of shipping software in development that is known to be broken, which creates more work and public backlash for the projects developing the software.

Many of the crucial volunteers who worked on the PinePhone were burned out by the time that development on the PinePhone Pro started. They were frustrated by the internal arguments and the fact that PINE64 had shifted from sharing revenue with many distros to only paying Manjaro, rather than the people who were doing the necessary dev work. The PinePhone Pro’s hardware required quite a bit of software dev work to support it. In August 2022, Martijn Braam at postmarketOS publicly broke up with PINE64 due to its bad decisions in favor of Manjaro. PINE64’s response failed to address Braam’s frustrations, and Drew DeVault posted that “PINE64 has let its community down.” Most of the volunteer developers stopped collaborating with PINE64, so the community-based company didn’t have the manpower to do the necessary software development for its new hardware. Most distros weren’t willing to work on a phone that couldn’t even properly boot. Thousands of people bought the PinePhone Pro after it was released in December 2021, expecting that eventually it would become a functional device, but it still had major software problems when its sales were cancelled in August 2025. The failure of the PinePhone Pro illustrates that PINE64 had its priorities backwards by focusing on one distro that mainly does packaging work, rather than focusing on the booting and kernel work.

Another of the problems was that PINE64 sent out its free hardware samples to the same small number of volunteers. By the time that the PinePhone Pro started its development, those volunteers were overwhelmed by all the new hardware that PINE64 was releasing, which all needed serious software dev work to ever be functional. With so many projects needing attention, the volunteers couldn’t focus their energy on any one device, so all of them got neglected.

PINE64 charges such low prices for its hardware, that it doesn’t have the necessary funds to pay for serious software dev work. However, its revenue sharing model with the distros was working to convince talented people associated with those distros to do the hard work of supporting its hardware. Then, PINE64 undermined its whole community development model by deciding that it would only sell its hardware with one distro and one interface preinstalled, and its decision to only share its revenue with that one distro. Then, PINE64 made matters worse by only listening to Manjaro in how it designed its hardware, which alienated many of the volunteers from other distros that it needed to do the software dev work. Once the best volunteers abandoned PINE64, the company hasn’t been able to complete the development of the PinePhone Pro, PineNote, PineTab2 and many of its other projects, so the people who ordered these devices are unlikely to ever be able to use them as fully functional devices.

Rather than sharing revenue with many different distros, PINE64 should have used any profits that it generated to pay developers to work on the drivers and kernel support for the hardware. It could have taken a community-based approach by observing who was making progress, and helping to finance their work. Because the Allwinner A64 already had decent free/open source drivers, volunteers were able to fill in the gaps with the PinePhone. However, many of the kernel changes that they made never got upstreamed to mainline Linux, which PINE64 could have required if it were paying for that work.

PINE64 also could have directed its revenue sharing program to help finance development work that would benefit all users of PinePhone, regardless of which distro they chose, such as Martijn Braam’s work on the Megapixels camera app or Biktorgj’s work on freeing the EG25-G modem firmware. Given that Phosh, Plasma Mobile, Lomiri and Sxmo/Swmo were being packaged in many different distros, it would have been better to pay people to work on developing those mobile interfaces than giving money to the distros. There are plenty of volunteers in the community who were willing to work on porting distros to the PinePhone, but there are far fewer people who are willing to do difficult driver and software dev work in their spare time.

The waning enthusiasm for Linux phones

After the initial enthusiasm for the Librem 5, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro in 2020-21, there was a noticeable drop in people’s interest in Linux phones. The number of posts about the Librem 5 and PinePhone on Reddit and the Purism and PINE64 forums reduced in 2022-25. The subsequent announcements of new Linux phones, namely the F(x)tec Pro¹ X with Sailfish OS and Ubuntu Touch, the Volla phones with Ubuntu Touch, Furi Labs FLX1/s/s+, the Jolla C2 with Sailfish OS, Liberux NEXX, Commodore Callback 8020 and Mecha Comet, haven’t generated nearly as much public interest and community engagement as the announcements of the Librem 5, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. This difference is partly due to the fact that Purism and PINE64 were established companies that were already shipping Linux devices and they had community forums and Subreddits where people could gather and discuss the upcoming devices.

Nonetheless, I suspect that many of the people who bought the Librem 5 and PinePhone had a similar experiences to mine which dampened their enthusiasm for Linux phones over time. When both of those phones first arrived, they were fascinating devices for geeks like me, who had been playing around with Linux for years on their desktop PCs. I had a blast flashing different distros on the PinePhone and I frequently downloaded the latest version of PureOS and reflashed my Librem 5. I ran benchmarks on the two phones and eagerly followed the dev work to add support for the phones’ hardware. I had spent years waiting for the Librem 5, and after it arrived, I followed the development of Phosh and Adwaita by the Purism developers, like I was rooting for my favorite sports team. I considered the development of Phosh and Plasma Mobile to be the most exciting thing that was happening in the Linux world, and I enjoyed trying out new versions of the interfaces to see what was new in each release.

The first year after the Librem 5 and PinePhone were released were exciting times. I was so intrigued by the phones that I looked up every component on the Librem 5 and PinePhone schematics and documented them on the projects’ wikis. However, each time I flashed a new distro on the PinePhone to try it out, I only played with the phone for a day or two, before it went back in the drawer on my desk. I took the PinePhone apart and admired how it was designed, but I never used the phone for very long before I put it down. Its performance was poor. It took a long time to load apps and there was a noticeable delay in the interface. I also found it distracting to use the phone when the screen was dimmed or the battery was low, because of the noticeable flicker on the screen. I considered pulling out the soldering iron to implement a fix that would speed up the Flash memory storage, but I feared that I might accidentally ruin the board. I expected that PINE64 would issue an new version of the PinePhone that would fix the problems, but instead PINE64 dismissed the screen flicker as a problem and hasn’t changed the eMMC’s voltage from 3.3 to 1.8 volts, which would have increased its sequential read speed from 55 to 125 MB/s. I was also annoyed that PINE64 provided no way to communicate with its hardware developers, so I wasn’t able to get errors fixed that I found in the PinePhone schematics.

Unlike the Pinephone which I rarely used, I kept using the Librem 5, because its better CPU and memory performance made its interface much more responsive than the PinePhone. Nonetheless, the Librem 5’s screen and aluminum frame got hot, since Purism used thermal paste to join the i.MX 8M Quad to the LCD’s backplate to dissipate the processor’s heat through the screen and aluminum frame. I often felt like I was walking around with a heater in my pocket. The battery drained fast, so I was constantly having to charge the Librem 5.

Eventually the Purism developers got the Librem 5’s camera to work, and I tried out each new version of the Millipixels app. It was fun playing with the camera and I learned a lot about how cameras work trying to adjust the settings to get a good photo. However, the Librem 5 took a long time to process each photo in software after taking a picture, since its i.MX 8M Quad processor lacked an image signal processor and hardware encoder in the VPU. It also took me way too long fiddling with the Millipixels’ settings for me to rely on the camera. Whenever I wanted to make sure that I would get a decent photo, I pulled out my Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 running LineageOS to take the photo. Eventually it was possible to shoot video on the Librem 5 at a low resolution and frame rate, but it took so long to process the video and the quality was so limited, that I never bothered using it.

In the end, the PinePhone sat most of the time in a drawer in my desk, and the Librem 5 sat charging on my desk. They were good entertainment for the geek in me, but I didn’t use either of them as my primary phone. Many of the early adopters appear to have had similar experiences with their Linux phones. It was hard to justify buying another Linux phone, when there was already one sitting unused in the drawer. Many people were unwilling to take a chance on another Linux phone after witnessing how the community developers abandoned PINE64 in 2022, and software development stalled for the PinePhone Pro and how Purism refused to refund cancelled orders for the Librem 5.

When Furi Labs announced its upcoming FLX1 in June 2024, it solved many of the problems with the Librem 5 and PinePhone. It contained a 6nm MediaTek Dimensity 900, which was powerful enough shoot video and run 3D games with Vulkan. It offers three hardware privacy switches and multi-booting to run multiple operating systems on the phone. The phone’s software was developed by Bardia Moshiri, who is the lead developer of Droidian, which runs Phosh in a Debian-based distro on top of Halium with an Android kernel. It was based on well-supported projects and software which had already been developed, so its costs would be low, but it had an experienced developer to provide software support. In other words, it would avoid the high costs that troubled the Librem 5 and the lack of software support that bedeviled the PinePhone Pro. People report that the FLX1 and its following FLX1s and FLX1s+ variants work well, but the Linux phone is not well-known and appears to have gotten a limited number of orders. The company’s forum has been frozen and there has been limited activity on the Droidian forum, indicating that the phone has gained little traction in the Linux community.

Revision 1.1 of the Divine D. circuit board arrived on Aug 10, 2026.

In January 2025, Liberux, a startup based in Madrid, Spain, announced its upcoming NEXX Linux phone based on the RK3588S with specs to make nerds salivate: 4×2.4GHz Cortex-A76, 4x Cortex-A55, Mali-G610 MP4 GPU, 32GB LPDDR4X RAM, 256GB eMMC, 5G modem and 3 hardware kill switches. In June 2025, Liberux started the crowdfunding for the phone, and a couple days later announced a modular and open architecture that would allow the RAM board with an FPC connector to be upgraded up to 32GB, the eMMC board with a standard socket to be upgraded up to 512GB, and the cellular modem with a custom adapter board to be replaced/upgraded. The price varied between €790 and €1310, depending on the selected configuration. In addition, the NEXX would have two USB-C 3.1 ports to facilitate the phone being used a convergent desktop PC and an AW8737SCSR amplifier and a 3.5mm audio jack for better analog audio.

The NEXX was a revolutionary design, promising to be the first phone in history with two USB ports and the first one with the RAM and eMMC on separate boards, so it could be upgraded and connected like a normal PC. Liberux was attempting to offer the first truly convergent smartphone that had the right software and hardware to replace a desktop PC, yet it hardly generated any headlines in the tech press. It only got 120 pre-orders in a month, which generated a tenth of the $1.7 million in crowdfunding that it needed. When its crowdfunding campaign failed, Liberux reported that it was negotiating with investors for raise the funds to build a prototype. However, its last post on the company’s Mastadon account was in November 2025 about “moving forward with new self-funding.” After 11 months of silence, it is looking increasingly doubtful that the NEXX will ever come to market.

There is more hope for the Dawndrums Divine D. phone, which is being produced by a startup in Tunisia. The startup has continued to make slow progress according to its Mastodon posts. They are now on the second revision of their main board and have produced a breakout board for debugging it. They are developing their own distro known as DawnOS, which is based on Mobian and planning to support both the Phosh and Plasma Mobile interfaces. They are asking for donations, but appear to be largely self funded at this point. Like the NEXX, the Divine D. also promises to be an outstanding convergent phone, supporting up to 32GB RAM and offering a separate HDMI port for video out. It also offers a LoRa (long-range radio) chip, and a pogo pin interface to add accessories to the phone.

Jolla shows that there is still demand for Linux phones

While the failed crowdfunding of the Liberux NEXX and the limited sales of the Furi Labs FLX1 would suggest that there isn’t much hope for Linux phones, it is important to keep in mind that these phones were poorly advertised and produced by unknown startups that had no prior track record, so people were reluctant to order them. Bitter experience with the Librem 5 refunds, the failures of the PinePhone Pro, and all the cancelled Linux mobile devices over the years, such as the Ubuntu Edge in 2013, the Firefox OS phones in 2015, the Jolla Tablet in 2015 and the Necunos NC_1 in 2019, has taught Linux enthusiasts to be cautious about crowdfunding mobile devices.

However, there are reasons to believe that there is quite a bit of pent-up demand for mobile Linux, and it only requires the right kind of promotion and a company with a credible track record to unlock it. Ironically, the company demonstrating that people still want to use Linux phones is tiny Jolla, which has somehow managed to survive over the years.

The Finnish engineers who used to work on Nokia’s MeeGo founded their own company named Jolla Oy in 2011 to keep developing that code as Sailfish OS. They took the FOSS parts of MeeGo and added their proprietary Silica interface based on Qt QML, which imitates the Swipe UI that Nokia had developed for Meego on the N900/N9. They also developed their own proprietary AlienDalvik to run Android apps inside Linux. Jolla deserves credit for developing libhybris and helping to maintain much of the code developed by Nokia, including the oFono telephony library and the Maliit virtual keyboard. Remarkably, the small Finnish company managed to survive nearly going bankrupt in late 2015, when it cancelled its crowdfunded Jolla Tablet, which caused many of its customers who preordered to lose their money. It split off its hardware operations into a separate company named Jolla-Devices, which sells now Sony smartphones with Sailfish OS preinstalled to the European market, plus Volla Phones with Ubuntu Touch and Pixels with GrapheneOS.

After killing off the original company in 2024, because it was majority owned by Russian investors, who were politically toxic due to the war in Ukraine, Jolla reemerged under a new company named JollaBoys that bought the old company’s assets from Jolla Oy. The new Jolla company has returned to the business of selling hardware. Jolla announced its Jolla C2 Community Phone in May 2024, and started delivering them two months later, which helped reestablish the credibility of the company. When Jolla started taking preorders for its new Jolla Phone on December 5, 2025, it sold out its crowdfunding goal of 2000 phones within the first 48 hours and 5000 phones within the first week. People were pre-ordering the Jolla Phone without having seen any reviews of the phone and not even knowing what processor it would contain. The phone, which initially cost $499 and now costs was €679, was marketed as containing 12GB RAM, 256GB storage, a user-replaceable battery and a physical privacy switch. Jolla’s advertising for the phone clearly struck a chord with European consumers, which proclaimed it to be a “Do It Together (DIT) Linux phone, shaped by the people who use it.” The Finnish company emphasized the independence of the phone from the rest of the mobile phone industry, stating on the order page: “The Jolla Phone is not based on Big Tech technology. It is governed by European privacy thinking and a community-led model.”

Jolla has sold 15,000 units of its phone as of August 2026 just by taking pre-orders for production batches from its web site, and it probably could have sold far more units if it had paid for advertising, expanded beyond the European market, and kept the phone in stock, so customers didn’t have to wait months for the next production batch. Clearly, there is an untapped market of people who are dissatisfied with the reigning Android/iOS duopoly.

The mobile industry is shutting down the AOSP alternative

Today the use of Linux is growing on the desktop. Many people are installing Linux on their PCs, because they have become disgusted by how Microsoft has turned Windows into an advertising platform for surveillance capitalism and a vehicle for AI slop. Rather than buying new PCs, a growing number of people have decided to install Linux, because support for Windows 10 has ended and they can’t upgrade their old PCs to Windows 11 due to Microsoft’s arbitrary TPM restrictions.

Likewise, many people are equally disenchanted with Android and iOS on their phones. More people have grown distrustful of the surveillance capitalism which undergirds the Android market and the restrictions and rising prices of Apple’s “walled garden” on the iPhone, yet the options to escape the smartphone duopoly keep shrinking. In the past, people who wanted to gain some control over their digital lives could unlock the bootloader on their phone and install an AOSP derivative such as LineageOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS or GrapheneOS, however the mobile phone industry is increasingly shutting off this escape valve.

Every year there are fewer Android phone models on the market which allow the bootloader to be unlocked. The rise of Chinese brands, which now control roughly 60% of the global smartphone market, has driven many of the traditional phones brands out of the market which did allow their bootloaders to be unlocked. Many of the phone brands that were mod-friendly, such as LG, BQ, LeEco, WileyFox, Essential and Razer, are now gone from the market, and other mod-friendly brands like Sony and HTC now have so few sales that they are no longer relevant in the global smartphone market. Huawei stopped allowing its bootloaders to be unlocked in 2018. In the last couple years, Samsung, ASUS and Realme all followed Huawei’s bad example and no longer allow their bootloaders to be unlocked. Xiaomi, which rose to fame as a mod-friendly brand, has recently implemented so many restrictions to obtain its unlock codes, that it is unlikely that modders will bother porting custom ROMs to future Xiaomi models.

As noted in my article on LineageOS statistics, the brands which have good policies for bootloader unlocking has shrunk from 42.5% to about 7% of the global smartphone market over the last couple years. The brands which allow their bootloaders to be unlocked (without major restrictions like Xiaomi) only sold about 87 million phones in 2025, including Lenovo/Motorola (60M), Google (12M), OnePlus (11.6M), Nothing (2M), GigaSet (>1M), Sony (400k), Fairphone (145k), SHIFT (10k), Teracube, Volla and Brax. Together those brands only represent 7% of the 1245.5 million total smartphones sold in 2025.

However, that is an overestimate, since most phone models never get good custom ROMs made for them. A good portion of Motorola and Google phones are sold through carriers, and many carriers like Verizon don’t allow their phones to ever be unlocked, even if they are no longer under contract. MediaTek Dimensity and UNISOC Tiger processors have gained market share in recent years, and those chipmakers don’t publish the source code for their kernels like Qualcomm does for its Snapdragon processors. A few brands that use MediaTek SoC’s, such as Motorola, Xiaomi, Volla, Gigaset, TeraCube and Brax, do publish their kernel code, but that code for many other MediaTek phones will never get published, nor will custom ROMs be made for them. UNISOC processors are basically black boxes for the modding community. The bootloaders of all phones with Apple A-series, Huawei Kirin and recent Samsung Exynos processors are locked, so the modding community is restricted to just Qualcomm Snapdragon, Google Tensor and some MediaTek Dimensity processors. Motorola and Xiaomi have switched most of their budget model lines from Snapdragon to MediaTek Dimensity processors, so they are harder to mod.

Aside from the Motorola Moto G05, which was released in Jan 2025 and replaced 8 months later by the G06, there has not been a single budget phone released by a major phone maker in 2025 or 2026 that has gained official support by LineageOS. Gaining official LineageOS support is important, because many of the other custom ROMs are based on LineageOS and only port to its officially supported models. Just looking at phone models with official LineageOS support which allow their bootloaders to be unlocked, only about 20 million or 2% of smarphones sold each year are good for installing custom ROMs.

The situation is about to get much worse. Sadly, Oppo just announced that it will pull its OnePlus brand from the North American and European markets. OnePlus phones will still be sold in India and China (where the bootloader can be unlocked if the user presents an official Chinese ID card), but OnePlus is essentially gone for the modding community. Nothing, which was a rising star in the modding world, has been losing sales. The London-based company denies rumors that it will pull out of a third of the countries where it currently sells phones, but confirms that it plans to cut 100 jobs, which comprise 12% of its workforce. At any rate, none of the phones which Nothing has released in the last two years have gained official LineageOS support.

Samsung has been making it more and more difficult to mod its phones over the last decade, so the Korean company’s decision to lock the bootloader for all its phones getting its ONE UI 8 interface wasn’t a surprise, but Xiaomi’s decision to start restricting its bootloader unlock codes was a major blow for the modding community. The only major global brand left for modding is Motorola, but there are only unofficial ports available for recent Motorola models, meaning that some things don’t work correctly or security patches aren’t being provided. Motorola promises to launch phones with GrapheneOS in 2027, but they will be flagship models which probably cost over $1000 and be limited to a few select countries.

Aside from the Motorola Moto G15 (released in December 2024), people are unlikely to find a new phone where they can install an official LineageOS port for sale in Africa, most of Latin America (except Mexico) and most of Asia (except India, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia). The only option to run a custom ROM in most of the world is to buy a used Motorola or Xiaomi phone from a couple years ago, such as the Moto G (2024), Moto G32, Moto G34, Moto G84, POCO F5, POCO F5 Pro, POCO F6 Pro or Redmi Note 13 Pro. There are more recent phones like the Moto Edge 70, which have unofficial LineageOS ports, but it is a gamble if they will ever be officially supported by LineageOS.

As Google has pushed phone makers to support their phones for longer, many companies have decided to collect more personal data from their users for better targeted advertising and for training artificial intelligences. The smartphone industry is moving away from a business model based on planned obsolescence toward one based on surveillance capitalism, and the phone makers don’t want their users to opt out of the system, so they have removed the option to unlock the bootloader and made it harder to gain root access. That way they can recoup the cost of providing more years of support for their phones by monetizing their users’ data.

In addition, Google has made it harder to maintain custom ROMs, because it has moved more and more functionality from AOSP into its proprietary libraries and services (starting with Android 4.1 in 2012), and largely abandoned the development of many of the free/open source apps in AOSP in favor of its proprietary apps. Starting with AOSP 16 in 2025, Google stopped including the device trees and driver binaries for Pixel devices in AOSP, so ROM developers no longer had target devices, where they could easily test out and adapt the latest versions of AOSP on running hardware. Now custom ROM developers have to do painful trial and error to make the device trees for Pixel phones just like all the other phone brands. Google also squashed the kernel’s commit history, which makes it very difficult for ROMs like GrapheneOS to create their own custom kernels, because they can’t easily take new features, bug fixes and security patches from Google’s kernels.

Given how the smartphone industry is locking down their hardware and pushing business models that are inimical to users’ privacy, there is increased opportunity for Linux phones to be marketed to people who want to escape the Android/iOS duopoly and surveillance capitalism.

Three types of Linux phones are now possible

In the past, it was much harder to bring a Linux phone to market, but now there are three viable types of Linux phones that can be brought to market, and all of them have better prospects than in the past. The first type is the pure Linux phone which runs a Linux kernel, like the Librem 5, Liberty, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. These phones previously didn’t have the processing power to offer the functionality that people expect in a smartphone. They often lacked components such image signal processors, audio digital signal processors, hardware video encoders, Vulkan graphics, neural processors and encryption engines, or they lacked the FOSS drivers to support those components. The RK3588S and the upcoming RK3668, however, will give pure Linux phones the processing power to be viable alternatives to Android and iOS phones for the first time.

The pure Linux phone is the riskiest type because it requires the most investment in engineering the hardware. Companies can’t just modify a reference phone design from Qualcomm or MediaTek or call up a phone ODM and ask them to modify one of their existing designs. They have to work with a design house or ODM that has some experience with radio frequencies to custom design a phone with 2 to 3 times more components than a standard smartphone. This means many iterations of the circuit board to get it right, and some kernel work to use all those different chips. It will take a long time to get to market, which can lead to customer complaints and reputational loss if using crowdfunding to finance the dev work.

The benefit of the pure Linux approach is that it allows for true hardware kill switches that cut the current to separate components, rather than the use of pins on an integrated mobile SoC or software to turn off the WiFi/Bluetooth, cellular modem and GPS/GNSS. The second benefit is the ability to select components that have free/open source drivers, which allows for greater software freedom and more transparency to address security and privacy concerns. The use of proprietary blobs in the drivers often prevents the kernel from being upgraded because the blobs are often only compatible with a specific kernel version number, which allows the chipmakers to dictate the lifespan of devices. Another benefit of not using a reference design from an SoC maker or an ODM is the phone maker has full control over the design and can publish the schematics and board views for the circuit boards, so the hardware is as free as the software.

In the past, Qualcomm didn’t produce powerful Internet of Things processors with Linux support, but now it is possible to build a good Linux phone based on an Internet of Things processor, like the QCM6490 or QCM8850 with an integrated cellular modem. These Dragonwing processors are not as up-to-date as the latest Snapdragon processors, but most of them receive 10 years or 15 years of software support, and many of them will eventually get partial support in mainline Linux, so they can live on with community support after they are no longer supported by Qualcomm.

The third kind of Linux phone is built on an integrated mobile SoC, which runs a standard Linux stack on top of an Android kernel using libhybris to translate glib calls to Android’s Bionic. This used to not be a good option because Android SoC’s were not supported long enough for the long development cycles and lower annual sales of Linux phones, but now it is possible for the high-end processors that are getting 8 years of software support from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

This approach is the most economical way to bring a Linux phone to market, since many phone ODMs already have reference models available and are willing to work with phone sellers to tweak those models to their specifications. It is not impossible to work with an ODM to add privacy switches to a design, as Furi Labs demonstrated with its FLX1, but it takes longer to get a custom design to market, so it is important to select an SoC that gets 7 or 8 years of software support, so the phone will enjoy a reasonable lifespan.

It is no longer necessary for Linux phone companies to expend huge amounts of capital in developing mobile Linux, because there are now three good mobile interfaces—Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Lomiri—which offer a reasonably complete complement of applications, so hardware companies don’t need to risk bankruptcy developing the software like before. Because Phosh and now Plasma Mobile are based on a well-supported desktop stack and convergent applications, they will require much less work to maintain and it is easier and less costly to keep providing software updates for the phone. Companies offering Linux phones will still need to hire developers to work on things like power management and camera support, but they don’t have to bet the farm like Purism did with the Librem 5 or provide no software support as PINE64 did with the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro.

This reduction in software development costs, however, probably won’t result in more economical Linux phones. The shorter software support for the QMC4490 and the mid-range and low range Snapdragon and Dimensity processors rules out the making of an economical Linux phone. It is possible to make an upper mid-range Linux phone based on a Snapdragon 7 or Dimensity 8000 series processor, but it won’t support video out via DisplayPort Alt Mode over USB-C, so it can’t be used as a convergent PC, which is a major selling point for Linux phones. Given that the QMC6490 does support DisplayPort Alt Mode, it is probably the best option for making an upper mid-range phone.

Companies like Jolla, Furi Labs, Volla and Brax may choose to continue making mid-range Linux phones, but they will likely suffer from the same problem as the FLX1 and C2, where the Android kernel is unsupported and no longer getting security updates, so it is better to move up to a more expensive SoC that gets 8 years of support. Ideally, these companies will stop using MediaTek processors, and select Snapdragon processors that get partially supported in mainline Linux, so people can run a distro like Nura on them after they are no longer supported.

The real barrier holding back Linux phones is the companies

Now that the available SoC’s and software are no longer holding back the making of compelling Linux phones, the real barrier to creating a viable Linux phone market are the companies to make and sell those phones. There aren’t many companies with the experience and passion to make Linux phones, which historically have lost money.

PINE64 recently announced that it is pausing production of most of its devices due to the high prices of RAM and eMMC. Essentially PINE64 is admitting that it can’t raise the price of many of its products, because they don’t have the needed software support, so many people won’t pay elevated prices for them. It appears unlikely at this point that PINE64 will change its business model to pay for software developers to work on the kernels for its hardware, nor is it repairing its relationship with the distributions and volunteer developers who have abandoned the company, so it is unlikely to ever produce the rumored PinePhone 2 using the RK3566. In theory another community-based Linux hardware company could arise, that charges a bit more so it has the necessary funds to pay developers to work on the kernel support for the hardware, but it appears highly unlikely that another community-based hardware company like PINE64 will appear.

In contrast, Purism is clearly planning to produce a second version of its phone. In its July 2026 newsletter, Purism stated that it “is in the early stages of planning the Librem 5 v2 and Liberty 5 v2.” It is preparing a “crowdfunding campaign in the coming months” to “gauge customer interest and traction, which will help fund the production of our second version.” The problem is that Purism’s public reputation has been stained by its refusal to refund the Librem 5 backers who cancelled their orders. Refunding the 600 customers who are still waiting for their Librem 5 refunds would do a lot to restore the company’s public reputation, and it would cost the company less than $400k. Without taking that step, it seems unlikely that Purism will be able to crowdfund the “over $2 million” that it projects will be needed to produce its next Linux phone. Maybe Purism can charge a lesser amount (such as $99) to pre-order the phone, and then use those numbers to raise capital privately to develop the phone.

At any rate, the time and cost of producing the Librem 5 v2 will be much less than the first version of the phone, because Phosh and its applications have already been developed and the mainline Linux driver support for the RK3588S is already in a good state due to the last four years of work by Collabora. Hopefully, Purism will either provide funding or developers to help Collabora get the ISP and hardware video encoding working.

The challenge for Purism is that it also needs to finance the development of its next generation of Librem 14 notebook, Librem 11 tablet and Librem Mini. The Librem 11 and Mini are rebadged ODM designs, so they don’t require as much work, but the Librem 14 is a custom design, which requires quite a bit more work and financing to create. In addition, Purism reported in its July newsletter that it has been pre-approved to get over $50 million in funding from the CHIPS Act to develop a Librem Core-V processor based on the RISC-V architecture, which will be a huge undertaking for the tiny company which doesn’t have any prior experience in chip design. Presumably, Purism will have to raise some matching funds to get the government funding for its chip project. In other words, many projects will be competing for Purism’s attention in the future, and the Librem 5 v2 could be neglected and postponed in favor of other products.

Presumably Dawndrums will launch a crowdfunding campaign once it has a working prototype of its RK3588S-based phone to show to the public, but the company based in Tunis has been very tight lipped about its future plans to bring the phone to market. There has been no news from Furi Labs about a new phone model to follow the FLX1s+. The implementation of Ubuntu Touch on the BraX3 phone has been stalled for months, and it appears that Brax Technologies is depending on the UBports community to finish the porting work. Volla Phone continues to offer Ubuntu Touch as an alternative operating system on its phones, but the German company’s primary focus is on developing its own Volla OS, which is an AOSP derivative oriented toward privacy.

Jolla is making the right moves to create a viable Linux phone market. The Finnish company says that it plans to move to mass production of its Jolla Phone, so the phone will be in stock, and to offer the phone to the North American market. However, many in the Linux community will be reluctant to embrace Jolla’s phones, because of the proprietary software in its Silica interface and its AppSupport (aka AlienDalvik) to run Android apps. People who believe in free and open source software won’t want to buy a phone from a company that has been violating the GPL 2.0 license by not published the kernel code for its Jolla C2 and Jolla Phone. In addition, these phones use UNISOC and MediaTek processors that don’t have any mainline Linux support, and they will probably have short lifespans, since their kernel are unlikely to ever be upgraded.

A critical factor in the success of Linux phones is publicizing the phones to attract the niche customers who care about Linux, software freedom, privacy or security. Liberux appears to have failed because it did such a poor job of publicizing its future NEXX phone and didn’t attract enough crowdfunding. Furi Labs similarly has done a very poor job of publicizing its phone, so that most Linux enthusiasts have never heard of the phone. Likewise, Dawndrums has done a very poor job of publicizing it development work on a future RK3588S phone. In contrast, Jolla has very effectively used social media to market its Jolla Phone to European customers.

There are several dozen companies that sell Linux PCs, which could potentially expand into the Linux phone market. Most of those companies, however, don’t have experience in the design of custom hardware. Most of them use standard notebook designs from one of the ODM’s that make specialty notebooks such as Clevo or Tongfang. Most of these companies also don’t have much experience doing kernel work, so they are probably better off just using a standard Android design provided by a phone ODM and installing Linux on top of Halium, so they can use a well-tested Android kernel and drivers.

There are also a number of companies that make Linux single board computers (SBC’s), who could potentially jump into the Linux phone market. They have more experience in working with Chinese and Taiwanese companies to design and produce custom hardware. They are better equipped to undertake the engineering challenges of entering the Linux phone market, but most of them do a poor job of engaging the community. Many companies which sell Linux SBC’s don’t have public forums for their customers and do a poor job of using social media and online advertising to promote their products.

Public opinion surveys show that people are increasingly aware that they are losing their privacy online. Ipsos polls found that 79% of global respondants and 84% of American respondants express worry about their online privacy. A Malwarebytes survey found that 89% of consumers are concerned regarding corporate and AI data misuse. 62% of Americans in a YouGov poll report worrying about how much personal data third parties have about them online. If Linux phones can be created that provide the same functionality and ease of use as Android or iOS phones, they could tap into that huge potential market of consumers who wish to preserve their privacy online. In order to appeal to mainstream users, Linux phones will need to support the usage of Android apps through Waydroid or a similar solution. In the same way that Murena and iodé sell AOSP phones which block third party trackers, Linux phones need to incorporate similar software.

The conditions may be ripe for Linux phones, but it is unclear whether the companies selling Linux phones will take advantage of those conditions to create a viable alternative to the current Android/iOS duopoly. For the sake of software freedom, online privacy and the greater longevity of mobile devices, a concerted push is needed to promote mobile Linux.