Linux phones are still behind android and iPhone, but the gap shrank a surprising amount while I wasn’t looking. These are damn near usable day to day phones now! But there are still a few things that need done and I was wondering what everyone’s thoughts on these were:
1 - tap to pay. I don’t see how this can practically be done. Like, at all.
2 - android auto/apple CarPlay emulation. A Linux phones could theoretically emulate one of these protocols and display a separate session on the head unit of a car. But I dont see any kind of project out there that already does this in an open-source kind of way. The closest I can find are some shady dongles on amazon that give wireless CarPlay to head units that normally require USB cables. It can be done, but I don’t see it being done in our community.
3 - voice assistants. wether done on device or phoning into our home servers and having requests processed there, this should be doable and integrated with convenient shortcuts. Home assistant has some things like this, and there’s good-old Mycroft blowing around out there still. Siri is used every day by plenty of people and she sucks. If that’s the benchmark I think our community can easily meet that.
I started looking at Linux phones again because I loathe what apple is doing to this UI now and android has some interesting foldables but now that google is forcing Gemini into everything and you can’t turn it off, killing third party ROMS, and getting somehow even MORE invasive, that whole ecosystem seems like it’s about to march right off a cliff so its not an option anymore for me.
Tap to pay was relatively common even 10 years ago in US cities. I’ve been tap to pay almost exclusively for 5 years.
Mind you the US is BEHIND on tap to pay technology compared to other countries.
It was not that common 10 years ago, it was only JUST being fully rolled out in the US in 2015 when they finally made it mandatory for cards to have chips in them. I guess I’m just an old man yelling at clouds here, but i just never really felt like using cash or a card was that inconvenient.
I suppose for you tap2pay is as essential as being able to run custom software on my devices is to me, I have been using custom roms since 2009 and I wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice my ability to use GrapheneOS just so i can carry one less card that i can literally fit in my phone case, but hey, different strokes ig.