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postmarketOS revolutionizes smartphone hacking

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 26th of November 2021 08:58:47 PM Filed under
OS
Gadgets

I briefly mentioned postmarketOS in my Pinephone review two years ago, but after getting my Dutch SIM card set up in my Pinephone and having another go at using postmarketOS, I reckon they deserve special attention.

Let’s first consider the kind of ecosystem into which postmarketOS emerged: smartphone hacking in the XDA Forums era. This era was dominated by amateur hackers working independently for personal prestige, with little to no regard for the values of free software or collaboration. It was common to see hacked-together binary images shipped behind adfly links in XDA forum threads in blatant disregard of the GPL, with pages and pages of users asking redundant questions and receiving poor answers to the endless problems caused by this arrangement.

The XDA ecosystem is based on Android, which is a mess in and of itself. It’s an enormous, poorly documented ball of Google code, mixed with vendor drivers and private kernel trees, full of crappy workarounds and locked-down hardware. Most smart phones are essentially badly put-together black boxes and most smart phone hackers are working with their legs cut off. Not to mention that the software ecosystem which runs on the platform is full of scammers and ads and theft of private user information. Android may be Linux in implementation, but it’s about as far from the spirit of free software as you can get.

postmarketOS, on the other hand, is based on Alpine Linux, which happens to be my favorite Linux distribution. Instead of haphazard forum threads collecting inscrutable ports for dozens of devices, they have a single git repository where all of their ports are maintained under version control, complete with issue trackers and merge requests, plus a detailed centralized wiki providing a wealth of open technical info on their supported platforms. And, by virtue of being a proper Linux distribution, they essentially opt-out of the mess of predatory mobile apps and instead promote a culture of trusted applications which respect the user and are built by and for the community instead of by and for a corporation.

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