Ironically sourced from google trends data.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
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Linux Phones
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The Discussion on Linux-based Phones.
Benefits:
- Hardware freedom.
- Perfect operating-system competition.
- Full utilization of specs.
- Phone lifespan raises to 10+ years.
- Less e-waste.
Linux Mobile Distros:
- Ubuntu Touch
- Sailfish
- FuriOS
- Postmarket OS
- Mobian
- Pure OS
- Plasma Mobile
- LuneOS
- Nemomobile
- Droidian
- Mobile NixOS
- ExpidusOS
- Maemo Leste
- Manjaro Arm
- Tizen
- WebOS
Linux Mobile Hardware:
- Fairphone 5
- Volla Phone
- PinePhone
- FLX1
- Librem 5
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The attention other mobile platforms are receiving:
What about Lineage?
Don't get me wrong, LineageOS is great, I use it myself. However, LineageOS is primarily made as a way to still receive feature updates on phones no longer supported by the manufacturer. This means that they don't do things like switch DNS checks from Google to someone else, for example.
No uptick unfortunately.
Would Linux phones be able to run APK's easily?
I don't see a phone OS beign viable unless it will work with most mobile apps
I mean, you can run APKs on desktop Linux, so I don’t see why not. Plenty of emulators, but also other options like WayDroid, a compatibility layer, or Anbox which puts android in to a container and then merges the system services.
Makes sense, I hope it can be made to work smoothly, I would so love a Linux phone. But would only switch if I can run my banking apps etc. on there
I'm planning to get a fairphone before my current phone dies, so I can try out Linux on a phone and still have a good android phone if it doesn't work out.
I really really hope it does work out though.
Would be amazing if you could dual-boot. Could run Linux as your main, and dual boot to something else for banking apps etc.
Easily for sure, but the problem is more with securely. First of all, I saw another commenter said anbox is a choice, but atp anbox is dead, the repo is archived and to my knowledge, there is no big fork for it yet. Okay let move on to the next candidate, waydroid, it is good for game/simple app without account etc: things that are not important(so low security requirements). Why? Because waydroid turn off a lot of android security mechanisms in order to achieve their goal of integration android in linux. This make waydroid inherently less secure than real android. Also, if you are installing apk app with stricter requirements check like bank app, they will mostly not going to work. In fact, you don't want to install anything important anyway on waydroid because of the security issues mentioned above.
Oh no, you are right, anbox is deaded :/.
KVMing everything might get taxing.
A Linux phone would definitely benefit from being able to run Android apps but Huawei seems to be doing fine with HarmonyOS and as far as I can tell that doesn't run APKs anymore.
You can, with waydroid. It runs nicely and is performant but rather underfeatured (no GPS access/emulation!)
Every project starts small.