Ask HN: Why is it so hard to design an open-source smartphone?

Following the discussion around Librephone [1], it seems that every project regarding open source smartphones OS are centered around the software only.

Lineage and GrapheneOS have proven that reverse engineering is hard. So I'm wondering why can't we have a project that starts from scratch and build the electronics and the OS? In the same spirit of what Apple did with iPhone+iOS. I'm sorry if I sound naive, I just don't realize how hard it is to design a smartphone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45586339

6 points

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hamburgererror

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18 hours ago

21 comments

al_borland ・ 12 hours ago

What I see as the challenge for open-source is organization and incentives. It’s hard to find good people who want to volunteer their time to create the less fun and glamorous parts of the puzzle. There needs to be someone directing the talent pool and incentives to do hard and otherwise unrewarding work.

I think this is the same thing that holds back desktop Linux. There aren’t a lot of people willing to do that last 10% to make it really great for the average user. Instead we have a dozen different package managers, that average users simply don’t care about.

paulwilsonn ・ 16 hours ago

It’s basically a scale problem. Modern smartphones are insanely complex: custom chips, radios, antennas, battery/thermal management, and tight OS-hardware integration. Doing software only is feasible for a small team, but building a full open-source phone from scratch would need hundreds of engineers and billions in investment - which is why almost everyone focuses on OS mods instead.

  • 0xCE0 ・ 15 hours ago

    Also patents and other per-country legal stuff.

    And also the current application ecosystem: all the apps for iPhone/Android must be runnable. Not mentioned payment systems etc.

toast0 ・ 9 hours ago

> So I'm wondering why can't we have a project that starts from scratch and build the electronics and the OS?

That was kind of what OpenMoko was ... the end result was pretty lackluster IMHO. Starting from a finished, proven hardware design is probably worthwhile to avoid shipping a phone that can't actually connect to real networks, and can't actually make phone calls if it does connect.

easyThrowaway ・ 18 hours ago

IIRC the development budget of the iPhone was around 2 billions and half (did a brief search on google and most sites confirm it was around that estimate), rebuilding a somewhat modern mobile phone (say, circa 2015 specs) without using proprietary components from Qualcomm, Samsung, or even a cheapo chinese foundry like Allwinner would be probably even more expensive.

  • hamburgererror ・ 17 hours ago

    I didn't know about the size of their budget...

    But even for a phone from 2015 there were many models on the market, I don't expect every brands poured that much money in developing a phone. What justifies such a big budget? And what could be a minimal budget for a decent phone?

    By decent I mean an average phone: can run most of basic apps, average battery life and pictures quality.

    • easyThrowaway ・ 16 hours ago

      I just did a brief frontend job for a smart-top device, so take this with a grain of salt, but basically when you're planning to release a cheap mobile phone (It was very common until a few years ago to find weird in-house phone brands in European supermarkets) you mainly license a SoC and some sort of development platform from a foundry and that's it.

      Most drivers, radio devices, kernel, android releases are those you get at the beginning, you can't really change a thing due to them being closed source or just one step above from being a firmware blob with a few kernel hooks and once your contract expires your devices die with it.

      We investigated if we could at least maintain the software on our own (so to not tell some telco clients their streaming devices were gonna die after 4 years) but it was a big fat no from the licensees. And reverse engineering what we already had was forbidden by contract.

      In other words, if you want yo build a free phone, you need to build a free radio, a free storage solution, thousands of weird DACs, graphic cards, screen controllers, sensors and whatnot. Making sure you're not infringing on some patents. It's like starting from ground-up. And it's expensive.

      A possible solution would be to invest into building into a raspberry-pi binary compatible base platform (and take advantage of their already open sourced drivers), but it was 100% economically unfeasible for a 100-200€ device.

runjake ・ 10 hours ago

- The hardware is complex. It requires an immense amount of resources, skill, and money to reverse engineer or design.

- Hardware components are often closed and/or documentation is confidential.

- Manufacturing is hard, manufacturers are busy with bigger customers, and you're at the lowest priority to manufacturers.

incomingpain ・ 14 hours ago

The correct answer is anti-competition; but not by who you think.

You absolutely can produce an open source smartphone. Pine64 has done it. ubuntu and purism have done it. Nokia was doing it, woot n900. Many chinese brands do it. fairphone kinda?

They can build fully open hardware and we have loads of OS that work just fine.

But why then does no mobility provider at all offer them in their phone offerings. Even if they were on page 34. Tmobile usa, everyone in canada for sure, has AOSP and KaiOS for dumb flip phones. But no open options? If you bring an open phone to them, you'll be imei capped and isolated and separately tracked.

But the answer comes when you also realize ulefone or umidigi are also not offered. It's about who is in control. I highly recommend your next phone is imported from a different region than you are in.

  • 0xEF ・ 12 hours ago

    > It's about who is in control.

    Nail on the head. So long as the consumer does not have any power, we can be herded like cattle to wherever the devices we now depend on want us to go.

    As an aside, perhaps you can help me remember the name of project? I think about a decade ago, now, someone was working on a completely modular smartphone. The idea behind it was that you purchased the base "frame" with the screen and rudimentary functionality, but then purchased modules based on your needs, to add things like wifi capability, cameras, speakers, etc. Perhaps more importantly, these all snapped into the back of the frame, which made them easy for even the casual user to install/uninstall functionality at-will.

    Do you (or anyone reading) remember the name of that project?

throwaway81523 ・ 18 hours ago

Because of all the secrecy in phone hardware.

  • hamburgererror ・ 18 hours ago

    Ok but if we design the hardware ourselves there's no secrecy anymore?

    • throwaway81523 ・ 18 hours ago

      If you design the HW yourself you suddenly need a vastly larger development budget. It's not like x86 stuff where the interfaces have been pretty open since the days of the original IBM PC.

    • raw_anon_1111 ・ 13 hours ago

      Apple acquired Intels already existing cellular modem business in 2019 and just this year started shipping its own cellular modem and only on low end phones.

      If you design the hardware, who are you going to get to manufacture it? How are you going to get TSMC to commit to a low volume?

d--b ・ 8 hours ago

I would like to rephrase that question slightly:

Since the raspberry came out, we can produce pocket-sized computers with touch screens and cameras fairly easily. These are ALMOST smartphones. So why can't we have a raspberry based smartphone?

To me it looks like the problem is around GSM/4G and battery, since pretty much everything else is easily supported by a raspberry pi.

I could cope with Pine phone literally crashing all the time, but I could not cope with the fact that I was not able to place/receive a single call or text message.

Right now, I'd be happy just having a pocket computer with call/4g functionality.

superconduct123 ・ 10 hours ago

I mean think of all the things a smartphone has to do nowadays, there's so much complexity