Furilabs Linux Phone

Apparently it is based on Halium, so it's probably not going to run mainline Linux any time soon. On the other hand, I'm less happy with Android than I pretty much ever have been, so having some more options outside of relatively unusable Linux phones and being stuck with modified Android firmware certainly does not hurt.

I am definitely interested, especially if the team working on it is as active as it seems they are. Definitely one of the biggest bummers with PinePhone and PinePhone Pro was realizing that the community was largely on its own; that could work well, but in practice progress has been slow and painful and I stopped paying attention.

I would really like to see more projects doing cellular Linux devices in general. It doesn't need to be a candybar smartphone, if someone can jam a cellular modem into a MicroPC I'm sold at any price I can afford.

I work on this device. We are currently QAing the latest update with our community, which contains a lot of goodies and improvements shaped directly from community feedback. You can see previous changelogs at https://furilabs.com/changelog

I am obviously a little biased, but this is probably the first Linux phone that people can actually use. Someone in our community switched from iPhone to this without much of an issue.

My gripe with any of the open source phones is that id apps such as bankid don’t work without the secure token storage of Android. Is this Solvable?

You could always protect the signing certificates in the apps with derived passwords, still the length of passkeys practically acceptable to type in on a phone is too short to safely protect a certificate vs a bruteforce attack without some kind of HW assisted storage.

In the end it also boils down to what devices the BankID app providers are willing to support, I have a hard time seeing anything but iOS or Android devices being supported in the near future, Esp as Swedish BankID's now also requires NFC support to read the local police issued ID cards (had to get a new testing-device just due to this requirement).

Note: BankID is the name of personal identity apps that support authentication and signatures in Sweden, Norway and Finland, the authentication is used to access a myriad of both public and private sites like tax office, unemployment, healthcare and gyms. The signatures done via the apps are generally accepted to be of as good legal standing as a signed paper.

I've never heard of BankID in Finland - perhaps the common name is something else?