I took all of last week off from work to clean my apartment and prepare food for a Thanksgiving feast of about 20 people. All this in spite of both my spouse and I having parents with extra medical needs these last few weeks.
This time of year is always its own animal, a distinct phase from the time before and after it. At work, somehow things both slow down and speed up with the sinking realization that there is only so much a team can accomplish in the next three weeks while not having your full staff. In my personal projects, including this website, it’s when I reflect on what I hoped to accomplish this year and re-evaluate what I might work in around the holidays.
This year is different. I declare 2025 over right now. With everything going on with multiple family medical emergencies and an active toddler, I know that I’m not accomplishing anything more of note this year. And that’s fine. It’s not my job right now to satisfy my interests and hobbies. It’s my job to facilitate things for my family and make sure things go as smoothly as they can.
That said, I’ve tried to keep a bi-weekly publishing cadence for this website. Nobody is imposing that on me, but I’ve found that two weeks is a sweet spot to take something I want to write about and polish it into something to publish. If you look back at the dates on previous posts, you’ll see that there may be months between them. And that’s what happens when I don’t have a schedule and rather wait until I think a piece is a pretty enough flower to pick.
Since 2025 is over for me, my posts from now until whenever I run out of things to say will be retrospectives on the last year. What went well, my favorite things, and thoughts for the next year.
We need alternative software that extends the useful lifespan of mobile phones and we need it now. The phones getting pushed into the back of junk drawers today1 have 8-core processors with 6 GB of RAM or more2. We’re talking about hardware comparable to low-end and mid-range laptops. And for many of those devices, the manufacturer stopped providing software updates, locking it to a version of Android that falls farther behind every year.
postmarketOS
I want to re-purpose abandoned devices. And if possible I’d like to use the opportunity to support my other values and priorities like software freedom and breaking out of the iOS/Android duopoly. In my perfect world, an alternative mobile operating system is one based on Linux because of its openness, extensibility, and access to a large ecosystem of software. That lead me to postmarketOS. It’s a real Linux distribution for (mostly) Android phones with the goal “to extend the life of consumer electronics… [to] promote a healthier and more sustainable society.” Exactly what I’m looking for!
Playing around with postmarketOS has been less playing and more fumbling. I installed it on any device that might work, including a Nexus 5, a Moto G5 Plus, and a Pixel 3a XL. The results range from a non-starter (Moto G5 Plus), to unusable even with the most minimal user interface (Nexus 5), to lousy but recognizable as a mobile operating system (Pixel 3a XL).
To be fair, the postmarketOS team is open about the rough edges. They say that “postmarketOS is definitely not yet ready for everyone”. But based on my tinkering, the word “yet” still does a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. The things that aren’t working, or not working well, means that postmarketOS is not ready for pretty much anyone. I’ve heard anecdotally that certain devices such as the OnePlus 6T work well. I could buy one of those, but it’s not really my goal to use postmarketOS. I want to install something useful onto the hardware I already have lying around.
My hope was that even if I couldn’t use postmarketOS as a full-fledged mobile platform, I could at least use it as a web/application server since that’s a pretty baseline Linux-y activity. And if the only thing postmarketOS could do is turn Android phones into home servers, that’s still a very useful tool in the fight against e-waste. But very few postmarketOS phones have support for USB-OTG (on-the-go) – 20 by my count. USB-OTG allows a phone to act more like a normal computer and be the host for other USB devices that connect to it. USB-OTG is necessary to use wired Ethernet, an essential feature even for small home servers. The Pixel 3a XL didn’t have support for that, so I couldn’t use it as a server. Since postmarketOS on the Pixel 3a XL was already a lousy experience from a mobile/graphical perspective, that was the end of the experiment. I don’t have any devices on-hand that will become more capable by using postmarketOS.
A lot of great work is happening in the postmarketOS project. More devices are added to their stable release every few months, and the feature support for existing devices is improving. I still think postmarketOS will play a role in the future of up-cycling old phones, but what that role will be and when it will happen is unclear. Today postmarketOS does not solve the problem of having an out-of-support smartphone that I want to revive. It’s more oddity than utility.
LineageOS
LineageOS is another alternative operating system available for Android phones. It’s based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), the open source core of the Android operating system that Google and device manufacturers use to create their own versions of Android. It’s been around a long time, having split out from the CyanogenMod project.
I have to admit, as someone looking for an alternative to Apple and Google, a version of Android feels a little unsatisfying. Though much of Android is open source, it’s still controlled and directed by Google. On the app side, Google has total control over the Google Play Store, which has been deemed (correctly) to be a gate keeper between software providers and end users. While it’s possible to load (not sideload) applications outside of the Play Store, Google is asserting control3 over that too.
Even if Google is a perfectly benevolent steward of the platform, Google’s involvement in any project casts doubt on its future. Will they lose interest in Android in favor of another operating system or kill it off entirely?
Setting aside concerns about the future of Android, let’s focus on what LineageOS can do today. It’s available for a relatively large number of Android devices, and those devices have full hardware support. It keeps updated with the latest major Android version updates. And it can run the Google Play Store. It has everything a normal person would expect from a mobile operating system.
I installed LineageOS on a Motorola G7 Play and it instantly became a modern device. Previously the phone was stuck on Android 10 and LineageOS brought it up to Android 15, adding on about five years of modern software and application support. Installing LineageOS made the phone more capable today. I can’t ask for more than that.
Conclusion
When thinking about smartphone hardware as future garbage, I’m forced to reckon with the gap between how I think the world should be and how the world really is. I don’t love that my best option for old smartphones is Android, but squeezing more life out of aging electronics is an exercise in making do. It doesn’t do any good to get bogged down in a middle class morality when the choice is between something useful or the landfill.
I’d prefer to install new software that lives up to my highest aspirations of security, privacy, openness, software freedom, and all that good stuff, but that ship has sailed. The original sin of e-waste is in the product design and manufacturing. Now whatever’s in the product is in the product. And of course it’s easier to put an alternative Android on a device designed to work with Android than it is to port over a completely different operating system.
LineageOS is here now and it’s quite good. For the time being, I’m taking a pause on tinkering with postmarketOS and Linux for smartphones. My time is better spent getting comfortable with Android rather than holding out for some ideal that may never come.
What I want to see happen is for Apple to allow iPhone and iPad users to load — not sideload, a term I detest, because it assumes Apple’s side of things — whatever apps they want to. Because those devices are computers.
I’ve been calling it sideloading all along, but of course installing software is not sideloading! Words matter. The way things are framed affects how we think about them. We’re so used to locked down systems that installing software from anywhere other than Apple’s blessed App Store feels practically like a hack. Our expectations have been manipulated and now there’s no accountability for it. I think most about these low consumer expectations and lack of corporate accountability in the context of e-waste.
Smartphones are computers. They have an open-ended purpose. We expect to be able to use them for things in the future that we don’t use them for today. If you’ve ever downloaded an app in a pinch, like for hailing a cab or presenting your ticket for an event, then you’ve seen this in action. Despite smartphones’ open-ended purpose, they’re locked down like appliances. And based on how we talk about “sideloading” of software, that’s what we expect as consumers.
It’s refreshing to come across a re-framing of loading (formerly sideloading) because it’s something I’ve taken for granted for so long. And I can feel that I’ve grown quite cynical. I wouldn’t have re-examined this framing of loading software without someone else pointing it out. When I learn about most any of today’s products, I just think Well, what do you expect?, I get to feel smug, and then I move on. I think that cynicism has ironically caused me to give a pass for some consumer-hostile practices. So this is a gentle reminder to expect better because when we expect less and less, corporations get away with giving us just that.