Posh, GNOME’s mobile shell, published a look back on the project’s 2025.
The Phosh developers focus from day one was to make devices running Phosh daily drivable without having to resort to any proprietary OSes as a fallback. This year showed improvements in some important areas people rely on like cell broadcasts and emergency calls, further improving usability and starting some ground work we’ll need for some upcoming features.
↫ Phosh developers
In 2025, Posh gained support for cell broadcasts – like the emergency messages regarding storms, or alerts about missing persons, that sort of stuff – which is a pretty important feature in this day and age. Posh also improved its support for per-source audio volumes and one source of audio muting another, its on-screen keyboard, its compositor, and much more.
Of course, the main problem for shells like Phosh is hardware support, which is handled by the underlying operating system, like PostmarketOS. These Linux mobile operating systems are fighting an uphill battle when it comes to hardware support, and while Android application support can fill some of the application shortcomings, you’re going to be making pretty significant concessions by switching to mobile Linux at the moment. When even Android ROMs not sanctioned by Google are having issues with banking applications or government ID stuff, using mobile Linux will be even more of a problem.
None of this is the fault of any of the people dedicating their free time to things like Phosh or PostmarketOS, of course – it’s just a sad reality of a market we once again just gave up to a few megacorporations, with our governments too cowardly to stand up and fix this issue.
Vietnam just has enacted a new regulation that forces banks to ban rooted phones or phones with an unlocked bootloader so governments are supporting megacorporations deliberately.
Magnusmaster,
A link would be useful to share the news.
Many banks here are doing this without government coercion. Either way it’s obviously bad for owner rights. Apple has been towing the line for owner restrictions, but at least google were more tolerant of owner rights (ie not outright block stuff). But several decisions over the past few years show google are not only thinking about, but trying to execute on more restrictions. Google’s planed sideloading restrictions on android were very alarming – fortunately they reacted to the media and changed course for now. Same deal with their web-DRM initiative. And of course there’s manifest v3. I’m concerned to see them repeatedly testing the waters like this. It could be indicative of their intent to keep chiping away at freedoms slowly. After all Microsoft went all in on this strategy for windows and frankly it sucks.
And now hardware itself is experiencing inflation like I’ve never seen before. I don’t know how much of this will become the new permanent norm versus another temporary hurdle. All of this is bleak for the future of tech. For now linux offers a path out of the clutches of corporate rent seeking business models, but if the hardware situation does not improve, even alt-OS on PCs may prove increasingly expensive.
see https://xdaforums.com/t/discussion-the-root-and-mod-hiding-fingerprint-spoofing-keybox-stealing-cat-and-mouse-game.4425939/page-118#post-90441375