Tinkered with PinePhone/PinePhonePro and IMHO what’s missing (beside slightly more performant thus more expensive hardware) is a convenient way to run few, very few (basically just banking…) Android apps. Everything else has very rough UI-wise equivalents. Somehow WayDroid or equivalent might be the stopgap.
Edit: makes me wonder, is there a WayDroid equivalent to https://www.protondb.com/ or https://appdb.winehq.org/ in order to actually track what’s currently supported and why?
Do they not have web based apps?
They pretty much all do and the Web apps typically can do everything, from account status to transfers, etc.
Unfortunately… most of those require the native app for login. Also more and more online websites, even on desktop, do mobile payment (e.g. QRcode scanning) as an efficient way.
So without the native app, no convenient login (if any, some still have physical card + card reader as fallback) nor convenient payments.
I don’t believe my bank allows NFC payments or camera depositing cheques using the web app. I never use my bank card to pay anyway (not as protected as credit cards), so I don’t really know much about NFC payments by phone. I don’t think there are any significant technical barriers preventing them from implementing camera-based cheque depositing online, at least. I could live without that anyway… I get like 5 cheques a year?
I imagine NFC payments might have technical requirements that prevent a web app front end. They also might require more protection than just loading a website, but idk. We can already e-transfer once we’re logged in, so I’m not sure why NFC would need extra protection. But the cards they mail you has NFC payments built in, anyway, so I don’t get why this would be a deal breaker. It’s a minor inconvenience to get a bank-/credit-card phone case.
In Belgium (and quite a few other European countries) you can do payments via QR-codes on the phone in addition to NFC with phone, watches, or with credit cards and debit cards. This works with face-to-face points of sales, private and professionals other mobile phones and online Websites (which can also use a link to open the banking app itself). There are no more cheques in Belgium.
We need improved Linux support for power management on ARM platforms. In general Linux on ARM has been good for a long time now. (ex RaspberryPi, Gentoo, Ubuntu)
Where things aren’t so great is the choice in OEMs putting out ARM parts like Broadcom, Qualcomm and Apple. All of whom aren’t exactly open source champions. In a less imperfect world we’d have something like RISC-V with great power management and linux support available in mobile computing SKUs/TDPs.
It one of reason why i don’t like entire arm stack and ideas they put it in it. It wild garden without any standardised and closed gardgen of which vendor and mostly and the worst part is that most people are totally okay with it because 'the battery life is great. We are literally regressing thirty years in terms of hardware ownership. On x86, there’s an expectation of a ‘common language’ between the OS and the silicon, but the ARM ecosystem is a fragmented disaster of proprietary silos. Because there’s no UEFI and no ACPI for the vast majority of consumer ARM chips, the hardware can’t even describe itself to the operating system. You’re stuck relying on Device Trees hard-coded maps of the hardware that are almost always closed-source or trapped in some vendor’s stagnant 5.x kernel fork.
If the manufacturer decides to stop supporting your device, it doesn’t matter if the silicon is still powerful; it becomes a paperweight because you can’t just ‘install a clean OS’ on it. You’re a tenant on your own device, praying that some developer on a forum spends a year reverse-engineering the proprietary blobs just so you can get basic GPU acceleration or Wi-Fi working on a mainline kernel.
We’ve traded the ‘General Purpose Computer’ for a disposable appliance model. We’re letting vendors kill off the concept of standardized firmware in exchange for slightly better efficiency, and by the time people realize they don’t actually own the ‘stack’ they paid for, it’ll be too late to demand an open standard. It’s a walled garden where the walls are made of undocumented registers and signed bootloaders that treat the owner like an intruder
Yup, my thoughts on this subject exactly and its so frustrating watching both tech people and non-tech people alike, adopt it in the guise of better battery life. The tech people should know better, but they either aren’t “hardware people” so they don’t know, or they do know, and don’t care.
