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

6 points hamburgererror | 1 comments | 16 Oct 25 07:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | source

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

1. d--b ◴[16 Oct 25 18:41 UTC] No.45609098[source]▶
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.