Review

I recently received the Furi Labs FLX1s Linux phone. This is presently the most usable Linux Mobile phone on the market. I used it for a week and I’m documenting my overall thoughts about it here. I haven’t done any extensive testing but I did change some services around in regard to my stack to make it as effective as I could and used it as much as possible. I’m still using it but not with my sim in it.

This being a early generation Linux Phone, it cannot compete with a Pixel or Samsung device in regards to build quality but it is acceptable for day to day use. In regard to software, understanding the role of this phone in the market place and not trying to compare it some of the best phones available should be a baseline when observing how this machine performs. That said there are some issues present that stop me from using this phone with my sim card everyday.

The FLX1s Andromeda Android system worked well. It is running Lineage OS as well as MicroG for Google Services all in a container. This allows the owner to turn off the entire Android system by clicking a button. Some Android apps worked, some didn’t. Some app notifications passed upwards through Andromeda to the host os, some didn’t. I didn’t even try any banking or high security applications. The pre-installed F-Droid marketplace is very limiting but installing the more robust Aurora Store was easy and worked without any issues.

As much as possible, I tried to use Linux apps installed from the Linux App Store which was pre-installed on the phone. Not every app worked on the device. It seemed that only flatpaks were available but some apps sourced from a Furios repository and worked much smoother. I would guess that 2 in 5 apps I downloaded and test worked on the phone. It was mostly a hunt to and find replacements for easily downloaded Android apps. I have used Proton apps and services for several years but they were not effective on this phone. The Proton suite of Android apps sometimes worked. The critical ones I needed were mail, calendar, password manager and authenticator. Proton mail and calendar worked but notifications did not always bubble up to the host os. If I turned off Android then of course they would do nothing, which did happen a few times. Password Manager worked but it only sometimes offered to fill out fields in Firefox for known sites. Manually copying and pasting the password was ineffective since often that did not work as well. So, while it ran on the phone the primary functionality was limited. The authenticator would work for a while and then stop opening for some reason. I did not research why this occurred.

After a night of trying to use Proton services I switched over to Fastmail and was able to configure Geary with IMAP, Calendar and Contacts fairly quickly. It opened my eyes to just how locked in I was to Proton’s ecosystem and how restrictive the ecosystem was, which I hadn’t really considered before hand. Btw, don’t use the Accounts feature to setup IMAP mail for Geary. After about 24 hours the authorization between Geary and Fastmail desynced and it refused to connect to Fastmail anymore. Configuring the IMAP service in Geary resolved that issue.

One of the biggest hurdles I had with software was that copying and pasting information in between apps was nearly non-functioning. Not being able to copy complex passwords or long text into other apps was exceptionally painful.

T-Mobile phone service. As soon as I put my sim card in the phone I got a text message from T-Mobile that mu phone may not be compatible and services may be degraded. To get the cell service to enable data I had to turn off all of the 5G channels except one. This forced my phone into the 4G spectrum if I wanted to have data as well. This wasn’t too bad overall but there was no guide to this anywhere I spent about an hour trying different combinations of 5G channels in hopes of getting something working. Call quality was ok. The speaker phone was a bit tinny but effective and people I called could hear me fine.

Connecting to bluetooth speakers and headphones are was straightforward and worked as expected. The volume steps up and down seemed larger than my Android but it didn’t bother me at all.

I was able to turn on the phone ssh server and shell right into it. Then I ran sftp to connect my NAS and pull down some albums to have on the device. I didn’t have to install anything to make this work. That was a cool moment.

Overall, I could use this phone everyday if there were a few more applications and copy / paste worked similar to Android.

Reflections

I have been using Linux at work and home or 20 years but switching away from Android made me realize how dependent I have become on the ease of doing most things on the phone. I have my set of apps and actions built up muscle memory in them so they are fluent and require no thought. I’ve also be pulled into closed ecosystems like Proton Mail that I never considered because they were convenient on the device. Convenience is absolutely the driving force to move consumers into this walled garden and closed product ecosystems.

Beyond the technical limitations, there was a lot of mental resistance to doing things differently on the phone. It was uncomfortable to not use the familiar motions, to move slowly, carefully. It was stressful when simple tasks on Android took much, much longer on the FLX1s and I had to remind myself that this wasn’t an urgent matter. It could wait a bit. I feel like I might over-value efficiency and speed and when that changed it was very jarring. I think getting away from the Google or Apple ecosystem is going to require some painful transitions both in service expectations and our own viewpoint of using mobile devices.

So, using the FLX1s is difficult right now but I’m keeping it in hopes that it improves with upgrades. I am moving away from Proton products and trying find new open source solutions which adhere to common standards.