(09-07-2026, 02:19 PM)The Almighty Doer of Stuff Wrote: Hello! I am alarmed that several apps I rely on will possibly stop working in 2027 on Android, and I heard about PinePhone from Ecosia's AI chatbot. It says the newest model of PinePhone is the PinePhone2, which supports microSD cards which is important to me because I have a large music collection. But it couldn't find any info about whether PinePhone2 supports Cricket Wireless, which is important for me because I'm on a very tight budget. I'm honestly not even sure I can afford a PinePhone2, but I'm terrified of Google's new restrictions so I figure it's best to do research.
Also, do VLC Media Player and Brave Browser work with PinePhone2? I can switch to Firefox if I need to, I just found that Firefox was slow last time I tried to use it on my phone.
Also, I've been using Alarm Clock Xtreme from AVG for years, but I'm not sure it will be supported through 2027. I like that it lets me set daily and weekly alarms and appointment reminders with music from my collection. Are there alternatives to that app available for PinePhone2? It's OK if I have to use two separate apps, one for alarms and one for reminders. Really I should be using a calendar instead of one-off reminders but I don't like Google's calendar app.
Lastly, how is the battery life? Can I replace the battery on a PinePhone 2? I know most phones don't let you do that but I wonder if this more open alternative bucks that trend. That would be cool.
I'm sorry for asking so many questions in one thread. I don't really know if it's best to split it up or not. I'm kinda scared right now and I'm just looking for some hope in an increasingly scary world. FOSS software always made me happy.
Sadly the Pinephone Pro is no longer available for about a year, and now Pine64 is temporarily exiting the mobile device category due to the massive component price spike brought to us by the cartelization of manufacturing sales and to the demands from LLM(AI) server farm bubble pricing. There is still the used market and there is also Purism. After running a PPand a PPpro I bought a Purism Librem 5. THese pure linux phone are more for the brave hacker class of people and the battery life optomization would appear terrible to an apple or android user though you can replace the battery carrying a battery bank is smarter. VLC and I think brave have implementations the VLC is native though not yet built optimized for the GPU, but if you have or convert to mp4s(mkv doesn't work) Clapper is built for the Pinephone(pro)'s and Librem's GPU. That said the appropriate paranoia, as in nearly impossible to hack-ness is on-pointe for both the pine and the purism devices. Not only is there a paranoia hardware power kill switch on the baseband module but the wireless is isolated from the system so this doesn't happen:
https://forums.puri.sm/t/volte-stack-ove...gh/31267/2
As far as a customized alarms go there is a app which sets alarms in the modem, which wakes the phone when it is in battery savings mode similar to a phone call or sms wakeup. You could hack that or maybe vibe code in the features you feel are missing.