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Reset my phone so I could get the latest version of #LineageOS, and I am again saddened by how poorly an Android phone works without Google Play Services.

Apps crash randomly. "Open source" apps are either missing on F-Droid or their versions are months out of date. There's no way to get either Chromium or Firefox through F-Droid. Yalp Store (Play Store proxy) is the only reasonable solution.

On the bright side: geolocation actually seems to be working this time, for some reason. Huzzah!

And before someone says "microG": I have tried it, but I've found it causes more problems than it solves. Better to have no Google Play Services than a half-working Google Play Services.

The main issue with LineageOS is that my phone feels like it's held together with duct tape. Stuff randomly breaks, it's awkward, and every few months when there's a firmware upgrade I have to factory reset and start all over again, which takes hours, and I'm always afraid I'm going to break something when I muck around in recovery mode.

Using Ubuntu on a laptop is really not that hard; I don't feel like I'm missing much compared to either macOS or Windows. Why are open-source phones so hard??

Stuart Langridge

@nolan they're so hard for a couple of reasons:
1. every hardware platform is different, and undocumented, and locked, and out of date in one year, which means that most of the (small) effort dedicated to open phone OSes ends up going into hardware work, not design and foundations and UX
2. because it's so hard, the community are self-selected for "I want open even if it's crap UX", which means their desires are "let me change the wifi stack", not "make this nice for people who aren't hackers"