Ubuntu on a phone, anyone? UBports reaches 18th stable update, but it's still based on 16.04 UBports, which took on the task of maintaining the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS after Canonical abandoned it, has released OTA-18 with lots of improvements, but still based on the ancient Ubuntu 16.04. According to the team, one of the big changes in this release is a rewritten Media-hub service, responsible for media playback and …
"There is plenty of interest in the idea of a phone that is free from Google or Apple..."
Oooh, I recall there being just such a thing some five to ten years ago... it got up to about 10% of the UK market share too, along with widespread panning from a lot of people on here who had never used it, but preferred Android "because Android was Linux-based", and therefore open source...
... oh yeah, that right. It was made by Microsoft...
Nokia had already shot themselves in the foot long before the MS purchase, they certainly had the talent and several Reg articles appeared to show they had 2 touch OS' (One being Symbian correct me if I am wrong as its been a while since I saq that article) which looks like it could have launched at the same time as Apple.
"since they added all the telemetry to Windows 10"
WinPhone 7 / 7.5 / 8 predates WIn10 and its telemetry... that's not to say that I don't believe for a second that they wouldn't have added it.
In fact, I think that one of Microsoft's greatest own-goals (of which there are too many to count) is not taking advantage of the growing concern over privacy - had they continued supporting and developing WinPhone/Windows Mobile (and by that I don't mean "totally rewriting it every version) and made a public commitment to not collecting data, they would have stood a reasonable chance of grabbing and holding a decent chunk of the mobile market share.
... but then this is Microsoft we're talking about - the only thing they've got anywhere near right recently is cloud technologies - and I'm pretty sure that that was only because the law of averages means that they had it had to happen at some point.
"you can guarantee that... they would have added all that Windows 10 telemetry to Windows Phone 10!"
Wow.
I suggest you take a look at the second line of my post - here it is in all it's glory:
"... that's not to say that I don't believe for a second that they wouldn't have added it."
For those on Android who prefer to minimise their Google contact - but without the buttock clenching frisson of going full Lineage on their precious hardware - there is Aurora (see F-Droid (other APK repos are available)), which basically anonymises your access to the Playstore - and works very well in my ongoing experience.
I think you're being trolled, because the whole idea of gmail is to let Google spy on your e-mails, and since they tell you they're doing it, it's an in-your-face security nightmare (by design).
At first using an anonymized gmail account was annoying because it always barked for a credit card, phone number, blah. At one point they "locked" the account, but after about 4 weeks they came crawling back for me to use it with one of those "Is this your account?" bot-mails, which proves just how anonymized it can ever be :-( They haven't "relocked" it since, that was 4 years ago.
For the security I don't see anything listed about keeping the latest patches, although I don't see why they wouldn't. The article calls 16.04 ancient, but it's fully maintainable, so...
"unsupported". Do you mean on a mobile exclusively? I have no idea. IIRC, Ubuntu changed how LTS is maintained vs. licensed LTS, support itself isn't gone. Trust me, the little update center ("A") annoyingly lets me know EVERY DAY on my Gnome based 2-in-1.
Ubuntu+Gnome isn't dying, it's growing. It's poping up in videos all over the place covering all kinds of things, which usually are not about installing Ubuntu or even related to Linux at all. Somebody... somewhere... is making it trendy. "It", as in Ubuntu+Gnome straight vanilla style, also no other desktops like the superior KDE.
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You can get one of those. A few devices out there support a straight Linux OS without any Android additions. The problem with them has been that they're not polished for nontechnical use; some software is beta quality and requires you to enter command line commands in order to do some things. From your requirements, I'm guessing that's not going to be a problem for you. Calling from bash should be pretty easy with it.
Sailfish is a very polished OS and it's fully Linux-based. I have it on my Sony Xperia as my daily driver. It comes with a terminal too if you enable developer mode. It's not fully open source unfortunately, but a lot of it is. It's somewhat of a spiritual successor of Maemo, a lot of the ex-Nokia people are involved.
It even lets you run Android apps if you buy the licence. No Google Play of course, but it works pretty well in my experience. Then again, I don't use a lot of apps, so YMMV.
I have UBports running on an LG Nexus 6p and it works pretty well really. I have not had dropped calls which some people report. The recent update downloaded and installed in pretty quick time too, I was impressed by how smoothly that went.
The real problem of course is a lack of apps, and several that I use daily will never be available for a minority platform like this one.
I am hopeful however that one of the Linux phone projects gets to the point of mainstream acceptance, and in an effort to help with that I have thrown some money at the Pinephone guys.
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