All the existing apps are on Android and iOS. Graphene lets you run them. You can't have a bank account on a Linux phone* because they won't let you, but you can on Android including on Graphene.

* before replying snarkily that Android is Linux, please take a long walk off a short pier, thanks

Beyond the other answers here, doesn’t it make sense there were some reasonably bright people involved in the initial “let’s build a phone OS” and that given it’s sold more than a billion devices, maybe what Linux on a mobile device looks a heck of a lot like Android?

Everyone else mentioned the app support which is true, but for graphene specifically, they do not like desktop Linux at all because they don't like its security. They would much rather build on AOSP than desktop linux.

Because you need app support. Not even Microsoft could pull that off.

GOS is broadly compatible with most phone use cases out of the box--chat, mail, browsing. A Google Play profile lets me use almost all apps (including my bank apps, but I understand that's not true for everyone).

In principle I agree about a Linux phone, but the gaps are much greater. I am also sympathetic to the GOS team's arguments that sandboxing on Android is better, and important on a device that allows control of essentially my whole life (2FA apps etc.)

Because Android is miles ahead in terms of security, permission management, app separation, power management, privacy...

Linux crowd can not even agree on compositor, and if systemd or sudo is a good idea.

Like others have said, it comes down to apps mostly. But there is also the fact that Google and others have spent more than a decade optimizing the OS for appliances. Android was built from the ground up for mobile devices and handles things like background apps, notifications, and charging as expected on a phone. All of this could be ported or rebuilt, but the work has already been done for Android and billions of devices prove that it works.

once Huawei was forbidden from using Android - that's when people ie western markets & the world at large should've shifted. look at HarmonyOS.

in China - there's no google apps available on their 'android' versions.

their platforms are already performant and fluid - so people should build on that.

Seems like it's the same problem as chromium. Is it better to get off the Google controlled ecosystem? Yes. Is it easier to leverage the Google controlled ecosystem? Also yes.

People will tell you that chromium is "more up to date" as if Google wasn't the one setting the standards, making it impossible for anyone else to be similarly complete. Seems like we have a very similar problem here...

Apps. We'd love a completely different OS and it is viable on desktop because web almost does everything but on mobile you're basically locked out of very essential functionality like banking, transit, messaging etc. The compatibility layers aren't good enough (yet) to offer a seamless experience.

I have a Pinephone Pro. It's nowhere near usable as a daily driver.

AOSP has way better security and therefore privacy than desktop linux.

i recently put debian (mobian) on a pixel 3a and it's pretty solid, though i haven't tried it out as daily driver yet.

claude code makes stuff like that super accessible to do in your spare time. another example is installing debian on a synology 918+, there's no way i would've had the grit to do that without ai. it's open season for any gadget that's got a debug uart port.

Yes, there's SailfishOS, there's Ubuntu Touch, and a couple more. It would be nice if one of them could gain traction so people can have a third choice.

Because without Android I can't run WhatsApp and my bank's app on my phone, which promptly reduces it to a paperweight. I wish it wasn't so, but reality refuses to cooperate, so let's just be happy that we've got GrapheneOS which is so good it has its own column in Cellebrite's support matrix.

GrapheneOS primarily exists to greatly improve privacy and security compared to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP provides far better privacy and security than a traditional desktop Linux distribution. It has a strong mandatory app sandbox, an increasingly good permission model moving more and more towards case-by-case consent, broad use of memory safe languages throughout the OS and app ecosystem, strong MAC/MLS policies developed as part of the whole OS, modern exploit protections, verified boot with downgrade protection for the whole OS and far more. GrapheneOS starts from the already good privacy and security of AOSP and greatly improves upon it. We greatly improve the permission model, exploit protections and much more but we depend on starting from a foundation that's already decent.

Moving to a far less private and secure desktop software stack is going in the opposite direction from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS doesn't exist to simply provide an alternative to mainstream operating systems but rather to offer much better privacy and security. We wouldn't be doing that if we were forking a desktop Linux environment and doing similar work for it. It would be nowhere close to the privacy and security of simply using an iPhone. That's a major part of why GrapheneOS is based on AOSP rather than it solely being about compatibility.

Desktop distributions are incredibly far behind on privacy/security and lack any clear path to achieving the same things. Every year, Android makes backwards incompatible privacy and security improvements as part of a new target SDK version. Android retains compatibility with legacy apps, but apps distributed through the Play Store (and other app stores to an extent) are required to move to the new target API level within around a year. This results in apps being forced to conform to a gradually improving privacy and security model. There's no such thing for desktop Linux apps but rather apps choose how much they want to participate in nascent sandboxing efforts.

GrapheneOS has near perfect compatibility apps from the Play Store via our sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer with the exception of banking and government apps. 90% of banking apps currently work on GrapheneOS because it greatly succeeds all of their security requirements and is only wrongly banned by a subset of those apps. These apps are gradually adding more anti-tampering and attestation checks for the hardware and OS, so maintaining compatibility has required us to gradually add more functionality working around it. We've also had to actively convince apps to stop banning non-Google-certified operating systems or to permit GrapheneOS and other secure options alongside doing it. A growing number of apps are choosing to stop banning using GrapheneOS due to pressure from our expanding userbase.

Android is a large Linux operating system family. It's the mainstream form of Linux on personal computers. Android users are Linux users. For privacy and security, using a monolithic kernel written in C is definitely not a good thing. Doing much better than we are today partly requires moving away from so heavily depending on the Linux kernel for security. Android does a lot of Linux kernel hardening with attack surface reduction and exploit protections which are improved by GrapheneOS, but it's not enough. The massive torrent of severe vulnerabilities being discovered in the Linux kernel is going to get worse before it gets better and will remain a problem. Adopting hardware-based virtualization for isolation of apps and OS components including drivers is an important part of our roadmap.

One word: ecosystem. Phones are useless bricks without an ecosystem. This is why we only have 2 operating systems for portable devices when we used to have more than twice the amount.

Because it's a mobile platform and "GNU+Linux" is laughably terrible in this space.

It's almost like Android has put millions of expert dev hours into making it the most used OS in the world. Like GNU+linux on laptops only works the way it does because of android-upstreamed battery saver kernel features.

But a mobile is also people's most used devices with all of their data, bank accounts etc there - it has to be safe. And GNU+linux has not even a single thought about security, while android just has it worked out (every app runs as its own user, so it's even built on standard UNIX security).

A mobile OS also has to race to suspend and for that it needs cooperation from "apps" -- desktop apps just run, they don't care about anything besides SIGKILL. That's not a workable model on a mobile and android solves it.

And I say all that as someone who runs linux everywhere I can and I absolutely love it. It's imo the best kernel out there -- but the userspace is not where it should be and if anything, the correct question would be what can we take from Android and add to GNU+Linux. (And nix is fantastic, but it's a packaging solution, I don't really see how it comes into question here. I can run nix on my android phone just fine by the way)

I don't either. Don't we have free market capitalism? Why don't I have a Linux phone? And why do I need to worry that my government and banking apps won't work if I get a Linux phone?

Because the Android Runtime (ART) is very necessary to run APKs, and APKs are the only non-iOS standard for packaging mobile apps that is supported enough to be viable. Without it, you might get some open source apps to run on a linux phone, but you won't have banking apps, clash of clans, or a million other things people really would like to have on their phones.

Your point is valid for every flavor of Android except GrapheneOS.

GrapheneOS’ security model makes that of desktop Linux look like a joke.

This is an objective analysis based on x86 security, GrapheneOS hardening (including isolation and hardened mem allocator), Pixel hardware security.

All we had to do was build PWAs instead of native apps and instead all we did was build PWAs into bad browser wrappers.

> I've never really understood why we chase Android-alikes on mobile platforms instead of trying to build on mainstream Linux.

Because there is no such thing as "mainstream Linux" when it comes to anything related to user-facing consumer software. Not on desktops, not on tablets, not on phones.

I mean you invoked "mainstream Linux" and "Nix" in the same paragraph. That alone should clue you into why this, absolutely, does not work.

See here is the problem:

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Software_Releases

"Linux enthusiests" would rather muck around with rewriting the same software over and over and over again because they dislike using GTK or whatever, and put monumental amount of efforts making new package managers, then, say, getting the ability to take simple photographs using a phone camera.

I mean... In that page there is no less then 25 different "Linux Phone OSes" listed.

None of them actually work.

They are all going to be slow, they are all going to burn through battery life. There is no meaningful security to speak of.

If I handed a unlocked "Linux phone" to somebody and said "take a photograph of me"... The chances of that actually working is slim to none.

Meanwhile we have Android OS that is proven to work. It is open source. It is used by, literally, billions of people. The security model is as good as it gets. It has better application support then Windows.

Taking something that works and then making it more secure and more open and more privacy focused is infinitely more productive and meaningful then trying over from scratch because you want a phone based around Nix packages or whatever.

Even if Google decided to close source Android from now on and be actively hostile to any open source kernel modules... Forking the Android that exists today and trying to make it work is exponentially more likely to yield positive results then, say, starting on a Debian-based "Linux phone OS".

And Android can still use nix-pkgs if you really wanted to.

AOSP is Linux.

If by "mainstream" Linux you mean something like postmarketOS, I'd suggest you look up reviews or give it a try yourself. A few months ago, people were reporting a hard time placing a call, taking a photo, etc.