It's been a while since I've written a post however today I have a lot that I'd like to discuss. In this Behind the Scenes, I'll be talking about some issues that has been occurring with how the project has been structured up to this point along with the solutions that we've come up with. I also want to quickly discuss some changes that will be made when it comes to communications so please stick around for that or jump to the very end because it's an important announcement.

The Problems with Maintaining FOSS Alone

For a majority of my time with working on FreeTube, the process has been pretty basic. I've had my plans for new features and fixes and I would go ahead and implement them. Users would be able to visit me on GitHub or Matrix to discuss a feature or bug and I'd be able to quickly fix it or add it to the queue of changes to make. Sometimes a pull request would come in and I'd be able to review it or even merge it over without too many complications along the way.

As time has moved on, it's become much more difficult to keep up this process. The “Problem” now is that FreeTube has become fairly popular in essentially all aspects. I'm extremely grateful that everyone enjoys using and even developing with FreeTube. Seeing FreeTube grow and watching others get excited for it just like I have has definitely made me enjoy being a part of it.

Because of this new popularity, the tasks that I do for the project has somewhat changed. I've become less of a developer for FreeTube and more of a maintainer. More of my time is now spent on responding to issues and reviewing pull requests. One of the major features that everyone is looking forward to has been the full implementation of playlists. I've been telling myself and others that I'll be able to work on it very soon, however the increase of “maintaining” the repository has made it difficult to work on large features such as this.

It isn't that I dislike responding to issues and reviewing pull requests. It's that there are now much more of them compared to before that being able to balance everything together has been extremely difficult. I've been able to add a couple of more people to the team to help out with this, however even with 3 of us, the amount of things that come in has started to become overwhelming.

I don't want this to sound like a bad thing however. Like I said, I'm extremely happy to know that so many people are enjoying FreeTube and that there are even groups starting to form that are even contributing back to the project. It's great to see so many people involved, but when progress on even the smallest things are bottle-necked from a very small group of people's free time, responses and reviews can feel stalled at times.

So What's the Solution?

In order to keep up with this growing community, we need to expand, a lot, and that's exactly what we did! You may have seen them recently if you're active on our GitHub page, however we have created a team of contributors that will be assisting in various places moving forward. Each one of them are developers that have been active in the project who have each made quality contributions to the project who I have entrusted to assist others in doing the same. The new team is as follows:

Jason Henriquez Hiers “John Doe” ChunkyProgrammer PikachuEXE XIII

These six members, along with myself, GilgusMaximus, and Svallinn (Who has joined the team in between this blog and the last one) now brings the FreeTube team up to 9 members! These new team members will be assisting with helping out within the repository by answering questions along with reviewing the pull requests that come our way. Having a team this large will be a huge help with everything going on with FreeTube and will ensure that progress will continue in all aspects even if someone's free time doesn't allow it.

This means that the way that FreeTube as a project handles new contributions will change. In the past, all pull requests were reviewed by myself and I would merge these contributions when I felt ready. Moving forward, contributions will need to be approved by several members of the team before a change can be merged over. This ensures that contributions coming in will still be reviewed properly, while also allowing much smaller contributions to be merged quicker than before.

Because of the large amount of members, this should be enough where no one should have to wait too long in order for their pull request to be reviewed. Since I won't have to be as involved in this process, this means that I will have more time to focus on working on some of the features that everyone is looking forward to, such as Playlists.

I'm very hopeful that this will be a great help with keeping progress more consistent with the project. If you haven't been on our GitHub in a while and have been waiting for a review, I'd recommend checking back as it's likely that someone has reviewed your changes already.

Release Candidate Builds

In the past, it hasn't been very clear for when we decide to start testing for the new release. We've had nightly builds for a while now to test changes, though that doesn't set in stone the final revision of the next release, nor does it show what changes have been made since the last release.

Starting today, we'll be revising this approach. When we're ready for testing, we will release separate Release Candidate builds along with a list of patch notes of what to expect with the next release. This makes it more accessible to those in the community that would like to test the upcoming release but doesn't know exactly what to test and when. These are installed the same way as our nightly builds, however we won't have to worry about interfering with changes to our nightly builds and can focus more on testing with these builds.

So when will the first Release Candidate be out then? Right now! We've started a release candidate for the upcoming v0.15.0 release. If you're interested in testing, check out this discussion thread for information on how to help out. There's some important information in that thread so please make sure you read all of it before you decide to participate.

Communication Changes

Because of the changes that we're making above, I'll be making some changes to how the team communicates with the rest of the community. We want the entire team to be able to have access to incoming feedback so that those that report to us can reason a response as fast as possible. To help with this, we'll be making the following changes.

GitHub

We've opened up the Discussions tab within GitHub. This section is open to the public to create threads and ask questions that may not be suitable for the issues board. All members of the team will be able to see new threads and respond quickly here. Questions can even have answers marked for those stopping by at a later time wanting to ask a similar question. Feel free to stop by on GitHub and start a discussion with us.

I may consider opening up the subreddit to users as well in the near future if it's desired as I know that GitHub isn't the most favored service to some.

Matrix

Nothing much will be changing here. Matrix has deprecated their Community feature in favor of Spaces. I wanted to convert the community over to Spaces, however it didn't seem to want to, so I instead created a a new group (Plus it would have notified over 100 people, which probably isn't ideal). There shouldn't be any major changes with this however it should be a neater way to group channels if we decide to split conversations in that way. Unfortunately anyone currently a part of the FreeTube community on Matrix will need to rejoin to the new Spaces group. Anyone can join by following this link.

Email

This is likely the biggest change of them all. I regret to inform everyone that I will no longer be responding to email messages. Email has been nice up to this point however it leaves a lot of people missing in conversations and makes it much harder to respond to. I get a lot of emails and since I'm the only one with access to the inbox, I become a bottleneck to a potential conversation with no chance of a response from anyone else. A lot of the emails end up asking very similar questions as well. It isn't practical giving similar answers to users separately.

Some of you may have seen this coming. It has been very difficult for me to respond to emails recently and there is a very large amount sitting in my inbox waiting for a response. To me, email is a very formal conversation and I feel like I need to give more thorough answers when I respond to them. I know that this isn't always the case, but it's what I feel is right when I respond and I simply don't have time to do that for everyone that contacts me.

Conclusion

As you can tell, there's been a lot of changes recently. The recent updates to FreeTube itself has already shown that these changes have been well worth it as both v0.14.0 and the upcoming v0.15.0 releases have been primarily handled by the new team and they have all been doing an amazing job so far. This should increase the amount of updates that we see which should be good for everyone. We're still revising some of our workflows so there's a chance that we'll be making more changes as time goes by.

If you'd like to talk about these changes (Or if you wanna say hi to the new members), you can come chat with us on Matrix or discuss this on GitHub.

Document All the Things!

As FreeTube grows, it's become more difficult to answer all the questions that come my way. I try my best to answer what I can, however time just doesn't allow me to answer everything in a timely manner (If you've sent me an email in the past month or so, I'm very sorry I haven't gotten around to responding, I'll try to do so here soon!). To add to that, many questions that come my way are questions that I've answered several times before (Like if I'll be adding a port for iOS / Android, the answer is I'm not) and there currently isn't any good location to keep these answers for others to reference. We've been using the Wiki feature on GitHub for a while now, however it's clear that it's time for something a little more accessible.

I'm pleased to announce the new official documentation site for FreeTube, found at https://docs.freetubeapp.io/. This site contains a lot of information about FreeTube along with projects that are associated with the application. There's already articles on general usage, community, and even getting started with contributing towards the project. To get started with the site, I'd recommend going through our FAQ page as well as our common issues that will answer most of the questions that I typically receive. Outside of that, you might find something useful in the usage section.

This site is generated using Jekyll and is hosted via GitHub pages. This means that we don't have to worry about any extra hosting costs for this site and it means that it's easy for others to contribute to the documenation. The repository is hosted here and all articles are written using Markdown, which means you don't have to have any programming knowledge to contribute to the documentation.

Early feedback has told me that there's a bit of information here that wasn't known about the project or features that are in the application, so do give it a read if you ever have some time. I'm also open to feedback on how we can improve our documentation along with new articles / topics we should add to the site. Please add a new issue over on the Docs GitHub repository and we can start a discussion on what to include.

Really looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks!

Blog Changes

In other news, you might have noticed a slightly different look to the blog site (If you're viewing this on Write.as that is). Write.as has a platform has been a nice platform to host our blogs and because of this I have decided to commit to the platform and have purchased a pro plan for this blog.

Not only do we get to support a company dedicated to providing a free and open source solution, but we also get some extra perks that we didn't receive before. The first one that you've probably noticed is the slightly new look for the blog page. I wanted to keep the minimal layout that's currently on the site but wanted to add some of the theming that's located on the main FreeTube website, I hope you like it!

The other big feature is that we can now use our own domain for the site. You can now find all of the FreeTube blog posts over at https://blog.freetubeapp.io. The next FreeTube update will start using this URL as well so hopefully this makes it easy to find the site.

Lastly, we can now have a couple of more blogs separate from this one in case we want to categorize some different types of blog posts. Nothing with this will be happening right away, however there's a chance we could have one for non-FreeTube posts and be more generalized around privacy. I can say for sure that I'll eventually do a follow up on last year's Pinephone Review and when that happens it'll be located in a new blog location. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated for when that happens. If you happen to have other ideas for non-FreeTube blog posts, then please let me know.

Wrapping Up

That's all I had for today. There's some really nice updates in store for FreeTube in the near future, so hopefully I'll be able to share more about that at some point. Thanks again to everyone for their continued support!

The new year has finally come through for everyone in the world at this point. I want to wish everyone a happy new year as well as talk a bit about some things going on with FreeTube along with my plans for future updates going into 2021. There's some important information here so please take a moment to look over everything.

Future Updates

One of my goals for the new year with FreeTube is that I'd like to push out updates faster / more frequently. Having the automated nightly builds has helped a bit with this, however there isn't much of a reason to hold off fixes or features from everyone if there isn't a reason to do so.

My mindset on this has been that updating an app like FreeTube as a user isn't very fun and can be annoying to deal with. I try my best to make an effort to give users a valid reason to upgrade, where the next update has a variety of fixes or features instead of just one small fix per update. I fear that this will discourage users from upgrading in this case which is why I space out new releases.

One way to help with this would be to move up automatic updates in the road map. This would make it much more convenient to update for Windows / Mac users, however some Linux users will be left behind depending on their installation method of choice. Users installing via Flathub already have the benefit of automated updates, so I encourage anyone to download through there if possible. I likely won't be able to do automatic updates for all Linux builds so I'll have to see which ones are worth supported and how possible / difficult it is to do so.

I'm curious on everyone's opinion towards this. Do you want to see more frequent, yet smaller updates? Or should we keep doing less frequent, yet larger updates? Getting all of this figured out and setup will likely be time consuming, which will halt any other features or changes, so that needs to be taken into consideration if I prioritize this. Let me know through our various social streams.

Road Map

There's an exciting list of updates that I want to work on for FreeTube in 2021.

For v0.11.0, I want to finally bring FreeTube back to parity with the old v0.7.3 before the rewrite happened. This means bringing back the Tor proxy functionality, along with having an initial implementation of playlists. The playlist implementation will behave similarly to the old “Favorites” functionality, though once fully implemented, your favorites will move to a “Favorites” playlist instead. Also in this update, I'd like to revamp the About page to open it up for translating as well as add / update some links and information there.

For v0.12.0, I'd like to finish the playlist implementation and add some smaller features like allowing the user to choose where their data is stored on their machine.

After this, it may very well be time to work on getting FreeTube out of beta. We've been in beta ever since we've released and we're close to possibly removing that label. We'll be focusing on fixing bugs, setting up automatic updates (assuming we haven't done this already) and just overall polishing up what we can before hand.

I realistically believe that this can be done. I would consider this a successful year if these are the only things we get done with FreeTube. This doesn't mean that nothing else will be done though. There's always bug fixes and pull requests that are usually merged to add to our ever growing features set, so we're unlikely to stagnate in that regards.

Even if we finish all of this, there's still a huge laundry list of features that I'd like to get done at some point. Things like WebDAV sync and a web release of FreeTube are already in the backlog, so those are also things that could end up being next on our road map. I don't want to promise too many things as the progress on everything here is dependent on my motivation / free time to work on everything. Either way, the next few updates are looking promising.

FreeTube Browser Extension Update

I didn't really have a great place to mention this, so I'm just going to add this here.

A few users are likely aware that FreeTube has a Firefox extension that can open up YouTube links into FreeTube. It works in most situations however the functionality has been less than ideal and has been neglected essentially ever since it's been released.

Starting today, I'll be deprecating the freetube-redirect extension. It just hasn't been something I've been keeping up with and doesn't seem to be worth my time any more to support. The repository will go into read only sometime this month, though I'll keep the extension up in the Firefox store.

This doesn't mean that there won't be a solution any more, quite the opposite in fact. A while ago, the much more popular extension, Privacy Redirect added support for FreeTube in their browser extension. It has many more features such as also redirecting to Nitter, Invidious, Bibliogram, and OpenStreetMap along with having much better logic for redirection than what my extension did. You can enable FreeTube redirection in their advanced settings.

From now on, I will be directing users to use this instead of my own extension as the experience will generally be better and will lower the amount of extensions installed in their browser. You can download the extension on both Firefox and Chrome.

The last thing I will mention about this is that if you use the extension and you find an issue about how FreeTube handles a link, please send the issue to me instead of the developer of the extension. Issues you have with the extension and FreeTube is 99% of the time going to be a problem with FreeTube itself and not with the extension. Please send issues with the extension over to the FreeTube repo on GitHub so that I can properly fix it.

I want to thank Simon Brazell for his work on the extension and also to thank him for including support for FreeTube. Please consider supporting him through Liberapay if you enjoy the work he does.

Finishing Up

I think that's everything I wanted to cover. Hopefully 2021 ends up better than 2020 did for everyone. I'll likely be slowly getting back into development as the month goes on, so be on the lookout for more FreeTube updates.

I want to thank everyone for their continued support. 2020 was a big year for FreeTube and I'm extremely pleased with how FreeTube and the community has come along through out everything.

If you'd like to discuss these updates, feel free to join us over on Matrix, Reddit, or Mastodon.

Take care!

I'm simply making this blog post to notify everyone that version 0.10.0 of FreeTube is now available. Turns out there's some faulty logic in v0.9.3 where it doesn't detect this update, so I'm making this blog post so that everyone can still be notified.

You can check out the patch notes for the latest release over here and you can download the new builds over on the website.

I've already fixed this problem for the next release we do, so this shouldn't happen again. Apologies for the inconvenience!

What is it?

A 429 error means that your IP address has sent too many requests to the server (YouTube's server in this case). It's essentially a safety block to prevent a server from being DDOSed from bots and other automated software. Most servers might have something like this enabled with higher or lower limits.

With FreeTube, we have to send a lot of requests to YouTube, and depending on your usage of the app, it's possible to hit this limit.

The process of reloading subscriptions is the most expensive task that can be done in FreeTube, as each channel you're subscribed to is equal to 1 request. As you can imagine, having more subscriptions means that you can hit this daily limit faster than someone who has fewer subscriptions.

What's the limit?

I've done some unscientific tests on this and determined that YouTube's limit is roughly ~1500 requests. So far, we haven't even been able to confirm if this is a daily amount of requests or if it's within a set time. Early tests are showing that this is not a daily limit but we're still looking into it.

How do we avoid this?

As far as solutions go, there are a couple you could do. The first and easiest method to help avoid this is to go to your settings within FreeTube and enable RSS as your preferred method for refreshing your subscriptions. Calls to RSS are not counted towards your request limit and can go a long way to preventing this error from popping up.

The next solution would be to have a VPN enabled. Since VPNs change your IP, your limit will be reset (assuming someone else isn't attempting to make requests with that same node). You can also change the location your VPN is based in if the error comes up again.

This next solution would be to change your habits when you use FreeTube. Try not to refresh as often if you can get away with it. Taking advantage of FreeTube's built in profiles can help as well. Using a profile will only refresh the subscriptions within that profile, so it lowers the amount of requests being sent out. Use this to only refresh a select few of your subscriptions at a time.

The last solution is to simply wait it out. This limit doesn't seem to be permanent and will go away after a certain amount of time. Again, we don't know how long it will take but I've heard reports of it taking a couple of hours to a day or so.

What about more permanent solutions?

With this issue being so common, I'll be making some small changes with FreeTube to try and prevent this.

To start off, any profile that will have more than 125 subscriptions (including the “All Channels” profile) will be forced to load through RSS. You will receive a message that FreeTube is doing this whenever you attempt to refresh. If the 429 errors continue to be a problem, this limit might be lowered.

We'll be continuing to look at for possible changes we can make to improve on this.

Conclusion

Expect to see an update sometime this week introducing the new limit. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Thank you!

I want to give a huge shout out to the FreeTube community over on our Matrix channel. We have been extensively testing this rewrite for months now and the contributions that have been given along the way has been a tremendous effort to get this new FreeTube in the state that it's in. Thank you so much to each and every one of you that has been contributing with this rewrite. Regardless if you're contributing code or reporting bugs, I'm very proud of the teamwork that's been put into this and I really think it shows in this initial release.

If you're someone who has tried FreeTube in the past and wasn't pleased with it's stability or feature set, I highly encourage you to give FreeTube another try. The feedback that I've received compared to the old release has been extremely positive and the differences are night and day. I really hope you enjoy this new release.

There's almost too much that's been changed that it'll be difficult to mention every little thing in this blog post. If you'd like to learn a little bit more about the efforts that's went into this, I highly encourage you to read some of the other blog posts that go over why I decided to start this effort and the work that was done along the way.

In this blog, I'll be going over the highlights of what's changed.

Backup Your Subscriptions!

Backup Your Subscriptions!

Backup Your Subscriptions!

Backup Your Subscriptions!

I'll go over this more later, but I want to get this out of the way. Do this before you update please. You will NOT see your subscriptions transfer over automatically in this release.

A Brand New Code Base

FreeTube has been rewritten from the ground up to include an entirely new code base. The code in the last release of FreeTube was extremely messy and new features were difficult to include because of this. With this new code base, we're much more prepared to include the new features that you want. Everything is much cleaner under the hood and this will go a long way with future maintainability and updates. I can't stress enough how much nicer this is. You might not see it directly, but you'll see it with the greater ability to include new updates in the future.

A Brand New Design

The current UI design has done us well so far, however I believe it's time for a fresh coat of paint. While working on this rewrite, I've taken the time to improve the looks of FreeTube to something that looks a little more modern.

You'll see that we have a more similar design to modern day YouTube, while not being too modern. Every page within FreeTube has been retouched to include a new design. I really hope you like it!

A Brand New API

A while ago, we were given the unfortunate news that Omar Roth, the lead developer of Invidious, will be stepping down from development. You can read more about his announcement here along with my thoughts about this over here.

With the development of Invidious slowing down, the future of it is uncertain, though it seems like some small patches are starting to be made. Any major changes to YouTube could be trouble for the project as it might not get patched right away. It could even take a long time to patch this unless someone decides to step up and work on it.

When I started on this, I intended this next feature to be on the side while Invidious was still the primary way of obtaining data. With the above news and a lot of extra work put on this, I feel comfortable swapping the roles with this next feature.

FreeTube now features a brand new API that is built into the application. This local API features many projects owned by others combined with many custom elements created specifically for FreeTube by myself and others within our community. FreeTube will now be able to run independently on it's own without any reliance on an Invidious server.

That doesn't mean that Invidious is gone. It's extremely easy to change your API preference through the settings page, so pick your favorite! There's even a fallback option you can enable. When enabled, FreeTube will fallback to the opposite API when your preferred API fails, meaning that there's a much lower chance of experiencing interruptions when using FreeTube.

With the main Invidious instance shut down, https://invidious.snopyta.org has become the new default instance. I was given permission by the instance owner to do so, so thank you very much Perflyst!

This new local API even allowed us to provide a new feature that I wasn't originally intended on being able to provide.

Live Chat Support

This is something that wasn't provided by the Invidious API, however with the local API it's now possible! When watching a live video, you can now follow along with the live chat to give you more context while you're watching a stream. You won't be able to chat yourself, however being able to see the chat is a huge improvement to enjoyability.

Live chat is disabled if Invidious is your preferred option and fallback is disabled. Since a direct connection to YouTube is required, we don't want to enable this without your permission. You'll still be able to selectively enable it without changing your settings. You're completely in control of when and how this works.

Full Theme Support

Dark Themes are cool and all, but what if you could take it a little bit further? With this release of FreeTube, the theme is much more customizable! Pick between Light, Dark, and Black for your base theme, and pick a variety of colours for your primary and secondary colors. These settings will change everything from buttons to the video player itself, so go crazy!

This setup could open up even more themes in the future. ;)

Full Localization Support

Why should English get all the fun? With v0.8.0, FreeTube has full localization support and now supports a variety of different languages! We are starting off with 20 different language!

The current language list is as follows:

• English (US)
• English (UK)
• Arabic
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Croation
• Danish
• Dutch
• Finish
• French
• German
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Russian
• Spanish
• Spanish (Mexico)
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Vietnamese

Do you not see your language in this list? We're actively accepting translations via Weblate. You can go to this link to get started! We'll accept any language that is at least 80% translated.

(The About page of FreeTube is not properly translated because it will be revamped in a future update)

Other Changes

There are many other smaller changes that have been included, some of which include:

• Full page navigation! Move forward and backwards with a click of a button to navigate to pages you've previously or recently went to.
• Latest blog posts now show up within the app (Can be disabled)
• Update changelogs can now be viewed within the app (Can be disabled)
• Change the thumbnail that's displayed to a frame of the video instead (So long clickbait!)
• Theatre Mode, which allows you to increase / decrease the size of the video player when watching.
• Audio formats are now much more visible. They can be chosen as your preferred format when watching videos.
• Subscriptions can now optionally be fetched through RSS feeds. You'll lose some bits of information with this method, but it's very fast! The exact feed you grab depends on your API preference.
• History can now be imported / exported from your instance.
• Subscriptions / History can now show more than 100 items.
• Comments in a video are more supported, with showing more comments as well as replies already complete (Sorting comments will be coming out in a future update).
• Playlists can now be ordered / played in reverse
• The Mini-player has been replaced by the built in picture-in-picture mode. This is a much smoother experience than the mini-player ever was.
  • The PiP player can even be put back into the main player if you've navigated away from the video page and came back.

Missing Features

When using v0.8.0, you might notice that a couple of things from v0.7.3 are missing. This is because of slightly unfortunate timing as I wanted to get this release out as soon as possible. The following features are currently missing from v0.8.0:

• Favorites (Will be superseded by custom playlists, which is why I didn't include it)
• Tor / Proxy Support
• Distraction Free Mode
• Video Qualities higher than 1080p

If any of these missing features are a deal breaker to you, then v0.7.3 should continue to work for you. These will be the first features I tackle for the next release, so hopefully you won't have to deal with the loss of these for long.

Migrating To The New Release

With the sheer amount of changes made to the app, it was inevitable that these changes wouldn't be backwards compatible. When you update, your subscriptions / history / favorites will not be transferring over. There's too many changes to keep them working without doing a lot of work that will become obsolete in a few months once more users are using this new release.

If you'd like to transfer your subscriptions over to the new release, please export them from FreeTube before you update. I originally intended to not allow you to import the FreeTube export into v0.8.0, however a PR was made by someone else so it ended up making it's way in. I may not keep this functionality in the app for long, so please transition your subscriptions as soon as you can.

If I end up removing the functionality before you had time to transition, there is a new project available that will convert your old FreeTube subscriptions to the new format, which can then be imported. You can check out this project over here.

History and Favorites will be unable to be imported at this time, however they won't be deleted. They'll still be available on your machine but won't be accessed by the new FreeTube. If you are interested in creating a migration script for these files, feel free to reach out.

Automated Builds

While not directly an update to FreeTube, it is an update to our workflow. FreeTube now has support for automated builds. This means that any change that is made to our code will automatically have binaries built with those changes. This allows those who don't want to wait for official updates are free to update more often than usual. There are no major differences with these builds compared to the ones you'll find on the website, so feel free to try them out if you want to see what the next update has in store.

If you head over to the GitHub Actions tab, you'll see the latest builds for FreeTube that have been generated. The first build you see at the top with a green check mark will be the latest build. Clicking on this will give you download links to the binaries generated by that build. You will have to be signed in to GitHub in order to download these. There isn't anything I can do about that unfortunetely.

Team Updates

Up to this point, I've been working on FreeTube almost entirely by myself. This rewrite has brought along some fresh new faces that have shown interest in the project and a select few have been getting their hands dirty and putting in some work towards getting FreeTube ready for this release. This is something I've been hoping to happen for a long time and I'm extremely happy to announce this.

FreeTube is no longer a solo effort, and we have grown to start a dev team! With today's release, I'm also announcing the first new member of the FreeTube Dev Team, GilgusMaximus.

Gilgus has been helping out a ton over the past few months, primarily helping get the local API up to parity with Invidious in time before the release. His help has been tremendous as I've been able to focus on other aspects of FreeTube while he gets the local API ready. I would not have gotten the local API finished in time without his help, so I'm very grateful to officially have him on the team!

You'll likely see him around over on the main GitHub repository answering questions along with being in the Matrix server. Be sure to say hi if you see him around!

Welcome once again Gilgus, glad to have you aboard!

Donation Updates

I don't like talking about donations very much. It's distracting to talk about them when everyone is here for the application itself and mentioning them too much essentially resorts to subliminally begging for donations. I've said this before and I'll say this again. Only donate if you really want to, I have no financial need for your donations and I'm doing just fine for myself. Donating to this project doesn't magically make progress go any faster or anything. I do this in my free time because I want to and that's all that matters to me.

With that said, we have officially reached our donation goal through Liberapay! (At least, it was when I originally wrote this, but we're close enough anyways)

This means that FreeTube is fully funded by your donations. This includes server / domain costs, along with being able to afford certs for signing the Windows and Mac versions of FreeTube.

This means that soon FreeTube will no longer be labeled as a virus on some machines (Seriously, why is this a thing?). More importantly, this means that Windows / Mac builds will soon be able to support automatic updates! I'm hoping to get this figured out in a future update, so stay on the lookout for those.

Thank you so much to each and every person who donates! This is yet another amazing milestone that we've been able to make today!

Conclusion

After one good look at this new app, I hope you understand why there hasn't been many FreeTube updates recently. I'm excited to finally get this out to everyone and I really hope that everyone enjoys this brand new update.

While a ton of time was spent trying to fix as many bugs as we could find, there's always a chance that we've missed a few of them along the way. We encourage you to send us what you find so that we can get them fixed in a timely manner.

Another huge thanks to everyone involved in making this release possible. This release wouldn't have been nearly as good without everyone's help and I'm extremely proud of the progress that we've made.

Expect some more updates in the future. I'm likely going to slow down a bit on development for the next month or so to recharge but I'll still be around interacting with everyone and making patches where necessary.

The latest downloads can be found on our website.

If you like what we do, please consider donating through Liberapay.

If you'd like to join the community, feel free to interact with us on Matrix, Mastodon, GitHub, or Reddit.

Take care! Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on the new release!

NOTE: Packages are not signed and your virus protection may take notice. Please check out the F.A.Q. for more info.

Release Plans / Strategy

At this point, the UI for the main Invidious instance has closed their doors. Their API is still running which means that anyone using the live release of FreeTube should still be able to make use of the main Invidious instance. Even then, that doesn't mean that we'll get to keep using it for much longer. To tie in with the shut down of the Invidious API on the main instance, I'm pleased to announce the release date of the FreeTube rewrite.

The rewrite of FreeTube will be officially released on October 2nd, 2020

This should allow a transition to the new version while also allowing me to focus on any potential bug fixes that may occur during the first few hours of release. I will do my best to keep this release date. I do not foresee any major issues coming up that will delay this release, but I will make sure everyone is aware if we do have to push it back.

So What will be Changed?

I need to go ahead and get this out of the way, because this is a very important change and every single person needs to be aware of it.

Your data WILL NOT carry over to the rewrite

This includes everything. Your settings, history, profiles, and even subscriptions will not be carrying over to the rewrite release.

I know, I know, this sounds pretty bad, however let me explain my reasoning.

The rewrite includes major data structure changes, where the data objects within the current version just won't fit the same structure within the rewrite. It's very possible to convert your data into the new format. While I could include this functionality within FreeTube, I have opted to not do so.

Backwards compatibility is a wonderful thing. It makes transitions easier to handle as a user and ensures that you can get up and running in the quickest way possible. Having said that, if I include backwards compatibility with the live data structure, there will never be a clear cut time on how long I should keep that. The live release has a lot of structural changes that handle backwards compatibility from previous releases and now feels like a good time to get rid of a majority of that and start fresh. I want to be able to move forward without worrying too much about backwards compatibility. While this could be a slight problem for everyone in the short term, I believe it will be better for the long term.

So what can you do? As for subscriptions, you can use the built in export functionality to export your subscriptions in an OPML or NewPipe format and those formats will be supported for importing in the rewrite. These formats will not carry over your profiles though.

If you do want to carry over your profiles, you will need to use the FreeTube export format. By default, this format will not import into the rewrite and will need to be convert. While the conversion logic won't be within FreeTube itself, there is a solution.

A member of our community has been kind enough to put together a working script to convert your live FreeTube subscriptions into a usable file to import your subscriptions into the rewrite. You can find more information about the script here and all credit goes to GilgusMaximus for putting this script together.

For exporting anything else, you have probably noticed that no option is available in the current settings. When you install the rewrite, non of this data will be removed, however you won't be able to find it within the app. If you go to this comment that I have made on GitHub, I have listed out the file locations for all of the data saved by FreeTube. From there, you can manually copy those files to another location of your desktop so that we can convert them in the near future. The exact files you want to look for are savedvideos.db, subscriptions.db, and videohistory.db. settings.db is also available, however I wouldn't imagine it being as needed to grab this file as well.

Settings Changes

As you may be curious, some of the settings options will be changed in the rewrite and I'd like to go over those changes.

The first big settings change will be the default Invidious instance. Obviously with the main Invidious instance shutting down, https://invidio.us will not be able to be used as the default instance. For future releases, the new default will be https://invidious.snopyta.org. I have already asked and received permission from the maintainer to use their instance as the default and a big thanks to Perflyst for giving me permission.

The other big default change will be the API preference. The local API will become the new default for data retrieval within FreeTube. Myself as well as others in out Matrix community, have been using the local API on a near daily basis at this point with very few issues. It is clear that it is stable enough to be the default API moving forward. Fallback mode will be enabled by default as well which means that any failure with the local API will automatically fallback to the Invidious equivalent in an attempt to retrieve the information you need. It is very easy to disable this fallback or swap your API preference if you so desired.

Missing Features

With the initial release of the rewrite, there will be a few features missing from the live release that won't make it in time. I'd like to go over them here.

The biggest one is going to be the Favorites functionality. I could probably make a quick equivalent before the release, however I want to do something better and don't want to deal with any backwards compatibility when I remove that functionality. I want this feature to be replaced with full local playlists support and I won't have enough time to get it done.

Another big one is going to be Tor / Proxy support. It's just another case of me not having enough time to get to it, so this likely won't be included either. This one may be able to squeeze into the release depending on how fast I can get everything else done, but I'm not going to promise it's availability just to be safe. If this is a deal breaker for you, I highly recommend using a VPN while using FreeTube as a substitute.

Distraction Free mode will also not be available. This functionality has been very basic to begin with, however I'd like to include an advanced version of this feature. Instead of me picking what to hide in this mode, I'd like to make it up to the user to decide what to include and what not to include within the UI. This will be easy to do with the new code base however like the other features I simply haven't had time to get to it.

Resolutions above 1080p will also be missing in videos. There is an issue with the new video player where it doesn't display these higher quality formats for some reason and it's something I want to look into. Once more, this is something that I haven't been able to have time to get to.

When we are past the initial release, these will be the first features that I focus on so that I can get them available as soon as possible. I understand that these are features used a lot by users so I will do my best to get them ready quickly.

Version Number

When I set off to work on this rewrite, my initial plan was that the finished build of this rewrite would be considered v1.0.0. A v1.0.0 release is a huge milestone for any project and symbolizes that a project has all core features as well as being very stable. While I think we've nailed the stable part, we still have a little ways to go to reach the “has all core features” part of that definition.

Up to this point in development, I have been calling the rewrite v0.8.0. While that version number doesn't really reflect the amount of work that's gone into this rewrite, it does reflect the idea that it's the next iteration of FreeTube and that it's not yet at a finished state. I will likely be keeping this version number with the initial release of the rewrite, however I would expect a v1.0.0 release to soon follow. I imagine a few people were curious on what the rewrite will be called so I figured I'd answer that here.

Available Builds

FreeTube currently provides a large amount of builds. Some of you may not be aware, there are some builds that I do not publish myself, namely the Flathub and AUR builds. They are both maintained by someone else, however they are popular enough that I have included them on the main website.

Having said that, I cannot guarantee that these builds will be updated to the rewrite at the same time as the initial release. I am however interested in taking over the publishing for the Flathub release. The maintainer has already made some effort in getting the Flathub build ready to transition, however he has hit a blocker and is in need of some help. If you are familiar with the process of bundling Electron apps to Flatpak, please reach out to me as I'd like to get this put together in time. Regardless I will be spending some time trying to put this together once most of the other tasks have been complete.

Code Repository

As you know, all of the development with the rewrite has been done over on the secondary FreeTube-Vue repository. It's been nice having a dedicated space to focus on this, however we need to prepare for a transition.

I hope to transition all of the code over to the FreeTube repository that many already follow. During this transition, I will be doing my best to also include the Git history, so that those that have been contributing up to this point can still be credited for their work.

Regardless of what happens, the FreeTube-Vue repository will be archived but not deleted for those who would still like to view it.

This now leaves the question of what to do with the code in the current release. I don't want to delete it and want to archive it in some way. I could transfer everything to a new repository or I could simply keep the code in it's own branch within the main repository. I'm open to suggestions on how we'd like to do this, I don't have any strong preference one way or the other.

Updating to New Versions in the Future

Due to the nature of including a local API within FreeTube now, future updates of FreeTube will be slightly different. I will no longer be providing a full blog post for every new update. Updates will still include a small changelog that can be viewed, however it won't be the same full updates that I've been doing up to this point.

It will be more important than ever that you stay up to date with your FreeTube version. YouTube can easily change their layout at any given point and I will try to be faster in getting these changes out. If you ever see an update for FreeTube, it should probably be updated.

Rewrite Updates

Oh man, we're only half way through everything. That was everything I needed to mention for the release itself. I'd now like to go over the recent updates that has been made to the rewrite.

Local API Updates

As I mentioned earlier, the local API has been run through it's course as far as testing goes and several people within our Matrix community has been giving this some serious attention and reporting any issues that have occurred. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone that has been testings the local API recently. At this point, it is working very well.

We have also finally reached feature parity with the Invidious API. The local API now handles all features that we used within Invidious and FreeTube can now be 100% independently of Invidious. This includes the few features that were missing from last time such as grabbing channel information, Dash file generation, storyboard URL generation, and grabbing Trending information. I wanna give a huge shout out to GilgusMaximus for the help on finishing out the local API. I don't think I would have finished all of this in time without his help!

This is a huge milestone for FreeTube, and I'm really glad that we're finally at this point.

Full Localization

A huge effort has been made to include full localization within FreeTube. This has honestly been a pain having to go in and replace every single hard coded string within the app to a new string that detects the language you're using. I do think the end result is worth it as we can know have FreeTube in a variety of different languages. At the time of writing, we are on track to include at least 13 different languages with FreeTube for the first release. To me, that's extremely awesome that we can offer something such as this with our first release.

There's still time to add even more languages before the first release. If you'd like to see your language added to the first release of the FreeTube rewrite, please consider adding your language to our Weblate Page before the release deadline. I will accept any language that has translated at least 80% of all available strings within FreeTube by the time the release date has arrived.

Full Subscriptions Support

Here is the feature that a lot of people have been waiting for (as well as what I'd consider one of the flagship features of FreeTube). Subscriptions have now been fully implemented into the rewrite. This also includes the ability to sort your subscriptions within “Profiles” so that you can have a more tailored experience on which channels you'd like to see updates for.

Along with the usual API preference for subscriptions, you'll even have the option of fetching your subscriptions via an RSS feed. Both YouTube and Invidious provides an RSS feed for channels so the feed that FreeTube grabs from will depend on your API settings. RSS is a much faster option for grabbing subscriptions and is much less likely to be blocked by YouTube (which has been an issue with the public Invidious instances for a while). So if you're someone who likes to refresh your subscriptions fairly often, I would highly recommend using RSS instead of the traditional method.

Using RSS does have some small drawbacks though. To start, RSS does not provide the duration of a video, so I will be unable to provide that within your feed. It also does not indicate whether a video is currently live or not, along with if the video is a premiere. There is a little bit of information included where I can do some guess work for the later issue, however telling if it's live or not is a no go. Please keep this in mind if you enable RSS.

There's also one last change that I believe everyone will like when it comes to subscriptions. In the live release, if you were in a different profile, refreshing your subscriptions would still refresh all of the subscriptions you had, even if they weren't in your current profile. This is changed in the rewrite. Your subscriptions will only update the channels in your currently active profile, which should speed up some loading depending on how many subscriptions you have. This should be a welcoming change for those with a large list of subscriptions.

So What's Next?

There actually isn't too much left to get done. I need to add some small features to the profile functionality as well as include some notifications for new updates and new blog posts. Once those are finished, then everything should be complete for a release (minus the features I mentioned that won't be worked on of course).

I don't expect these last few features to take the rest of the time to complete. Any time left before the release date will be spent fixing any last few bugs that may have occurred because of our rapid development. We hope that we'll be able to have a nice and stable release by the time everything is put together.

Conclusion

I want to thank everybody who uses FreeTube for their patience while I get this rewrite together. This is shaping up to become a well put together application and I hope that you feel the same once it's out. It's just a little bit longer before the release now, however there's still a lot that needs to be done. I will be continuing my work so that the rewrite can come out in time while also being as stable as possible.

If you'd like to discuss anything related to the rewrite, the best way to do so is over in our Matrix Community. You can also find me on Mastodon and Reddit.

Take care!

Weblate Link

I'll cut right to the chase, if you'd like to help with translations for FreeTube, the Weblate link is right here. You'll have to be registered on the site to contribute. I hope to see you over there!

Localization

Getting FreeTube (or any app for that matter) setup and ready for translations is no easy task. To start, you have to get a base file created so that all other translations have something to base off of. This means that I have to compile a list of every single phrase that is currently within FreeTube. Luckily I've had some recent help from a few members of the community to help get this file put together. You guys are awesome!

Once that's complete, I then have to hook up that compiled list to the app, and replace every hard coded phrase with an object that references that compiled file. This is a fairly time consuming task and sometimes remember which strings of text is where can be difficult to find.

Both of these together is why it has taken so long to get this properly setup. In the past the base file was so outdated that I couldn't take advantage of any translations. We've since then been able to completely catch up with it, so we're finally ready to start using these files.

Weblate

If you're new to Weblate, Weblate is a service that allows translators to quickly and easily view all of the words within an application and convert them into a language of their choice. They are able to receive updates when a new word or phrase has been introduced into the app as well which allows them to focus on localization and skip anything code related. Translators can also discuss about certain phrases and ask questions to both myself and other translators.

At the time of writing, Weblate is currently hooked up to push new translations over to the rewrite I'm currently working on. Once the rewrite is finished and the project has been transferred to the main repo (more details about that in the near future), I will be able to update Weblate to point to the other repository.

Since we have a brand new format that we're using for the source strings (And because they're fairly outdated at this point), I won't be able to transfer any translations that were done for the live build of FreeTube. If you sent over translations in the past, I kindly ask that you do it again under this new build so that we can have your language of choice in a new build.

Once a certain threshold has been met (I haven't decided on anything specific yet, I'm thinking about 80% of words translated), then I will enable that language within our automated builds for FreeTube. Since FreeTube is in active development, new strings will likely be added fairly often, so be sure to check back periodically or enable notifications via Weblate for when new strings are added.

If your language has a specific use case for phrases (Ex: Your language is right aligned instead of left aligned, your language requires certain things that need changed around) that has to be solved by a coding change, please let me know. I will likely not prioritize it for now due to a soft deadline that I'd like to meet, but please feel free to make a comment about it so that I can get to it at a later point. Feel free to make translations in the mean time, I just likely won't enable them until the appropriate changes have been made.

Conclusion

Once again, you can head over here if you'd like to get started with helping. I hope to see you there soon and I can't wait to get more languages supported.

If you'd like to discuss anything related to the translations or FreeTube, the best way to do so is over in our Matrix Community. You can also find me on Mastodon and Reddit.

Take care!

In a recent blog post, it has been announced that the main Invidious instance (https://invidio.us) will be shutting down and that Omar Roth will be stepping down as the lead developer of the project. I'd like to take some time to give my thoughts on the situation as well as lay out what this means for the future of FreeTube. If you'd like to read more about his announcement, check out his blog post over here.

My Thoughts

When FreeTube was released almost 3 years ago, I started off using YouTube's official API to bypass their tracking. YouTube provides a key that gives you a limited amount of access to their API and so that they can prevent misuse. As development of FreeTube continued, it became very apparent that it was going to be difficult to continue using this API. HookTube had some legal troubles for a very similar reason and more users were coming to FreeTube which caused times where the API key would often hit it's limit. This was sorta solved by adding more keys to the project however it completely ignored the legal issues that HookTube was involved in.

Not soon after, the Invidious project became public. Omar reached out to me to let me know that he's been working on a scraper based API similar to NewPipe's extractor. Since I've been familiar with YouTube's API at this point, we worked together on trying to make this community driven API as close to YouTube's as possible. I'd provide feedback on how the API has been working and Omar was able to make adjustments as needed.

Since then, FreeTube has migrated to the Invidious API full time and both FreeTube and Invidious saw a lot of usage within the privacy community. It has been amazing watching both of the projects grow and I feel like we were both successful in what we originally sought out to do.

At this point, you could almost say we were too successful. More users started to come in and with it more requests for features and bug fixes were happening at a pace that made it difficult to respond. Invidious had even more activity than FreeTube did, so it's no wonder Omar felt overwhelmed with this response to what started as a simple passion project.

I don't say this to invoke pity on myself or Omar. Burnout is a very real thing and it's amplified when you work on open source. The work we do is for fun and not for any sort of fame or monetary gain. When something stops being fun, you simply don't want to do it any more. When you have grown a community around your project, even if you're not being paid, there's still a feeling of obligation to keep going. When you combine it all together, you feel forced to work on something you have no interest in and you might even feel like there's no way out.

Omar, I sincerely thank you for the time that you've put into the Invidious project. Your work ethic has been incredible to watch and I can only hope that I have half that type of work ethic towards my own projects. I know that is isn't quite the same, but I feel like I can relate to the overwhelming activity that can be experienced within an open source project. Sometimes you don't want to work on a particular feature, sometimes you don't want to respond to a particular issue and so on. Managing an open source project is a massive time commitment and if it becomes something that you no longer enjoy doing, then I see no reason why you shouldn't be allowed to walk away.

I'll say this one more time. Omar, from myself and the entire privacy community, thank you.

The Future of Invidious

At this point, it isn't clear what will happen to Invidious as a project when the main instance is shut down.

Perflyst, a very active member of Invidious and other communities, will be taking ownership of the project. He currently maintains the Snopyta site along with the respective Invidious instance. While I'm sure he will do a great job with managing the project, he himself has admitted that he is not a developer and cannot maintain the project.

This effectively leaves Invidious without a lead developer. While the current instances will still be functional, they could all break overnight because of a YouTube change. This has always been a concern, however Omar has always been around to make that fix so that everyone can continue using Invidious. With Omar not being around, all instances can effectively be broken and unable to be used again. If that happens, the instances may as well not exist. This is why I'm not very keen to suggest that we simply add more instances to make up for the main one like a few people have been suggesting. It's only a very temporary solution.

Having said that, there's always the possibility that someone else can come in and help out. If you are a developer who is familiar with Crystal and front-end technologies, I encourage you to take a look at the Invidious repository and see if you can help out. Even just keeping up with any breaking changes and not working on new features would be a huge help to the community.

Now you might be thinking, why don't I do it? I'm already fairly involved so it might make sense for me to start contributing. I haven't ruled out the possibility, but I want to make sure that I have the time to handle it if I start to do so. I don't think I'd want to become the lead for it, as that would definitely be overwhelming managing two big projects, but I might be able to contribute to some fixes that break the functionality of the site. My priority is FreeTube however and my focus will stay on that for the time being.

The Future of FreeTube

Before I talk about FreeTube, I wanna talk about myself for a moment. While burnout is a very real thing with projects like these, I want to reaffirm my dedication to this project. I love what I do and I love being able to help out the community. If I was still making FreeTube for just myself, I would have quit a long time ago. I have no intentions on quitting any time soon.

As you're probably aware, FreeTube relies on the Invidious API to function. Any issues that pop up in Invidious are reflected to FreeTube because of it. At the same time, any fixes are also available to FreeTube without the user ever having to update the app.

This will obviously change moving forward. While I would really like to see a new maintainer for the project, FreeTube needs to move forward with the assumption that no maintainer will be found. The API will continue to function until October 1st, which means we have roughly two months to find a solution. If I wasn't already working on a potential solution, the recent news would have been much more devastating to the progress of FreeTube.

As I've mentioned in the past, I am working on a complete rewrite of FreeTube. The goals of this rewrite are to introduce better coding standards to the project and to give FreeTube a more stable base to build on top of. This project has been going on for several months now. If you've recently tried FreeTube and decided that there were too many issues, I encourage you to wait for this rewrite as it already fixes many issues found in the live release of FreeTube.

One other feature that was added to this rewrite was the inclusion of a local API. This makes FreeTube function similarly to NewPipe as it parses the information itself with no extra server involved. At the time of writing this, all core functionality of FreeTube (Search, Channels, Videos, Playlists) are all functional under this local API. This means that FreeTube will be able to survive as a project even after Invidious shuts down.

While a lot is already done, there's still a lot that needs to be finished. Subscriptions, History, Local Playlists, and Profile support are all missing still. There are also a few bugs here and there that need to be fixed. Because of the recent announcements, I will be trying to make an effort to speed up development of this rewrite. I consider it important that the community still has a way to watch YouTube privately moving forward and I hope that I can get this finished by the deadline.

I hope that FreeTube can be the Invidious replacement that everyone is looking for moving forward. I understand that it's a different work flow and that there are some use cases that will be missed (mobile specifically comes to mind) but I want to be able to cater to as many people as I can. Please let me know how you use Invidious and I will do my best to include that functionality within FreeTube as well.

How You Can Help

I considered making this a different article, but I want to put it here instead. Some of you might be wondering if there's anything you can do to help out with this effort, so I want to lay out a few options for everyone. These suggestions apply to any open source project and you don't have to have any programming experience to get involved.

Create Pull Requests

I'll start with the big one right away. If you do happen to have any programming knowledge, please consider creating a pull request. Contributing to the code directly is the best way to speed up development and can be a big help with finishing up the project. FreeTube itself is written in Node / Vue.js so if you're familiar with those technologies then feel free to jump in and help out. If you're not familiar with them (Or even if you are) feel free to ask questions on what to do and I'll be more than happy to help out.

Answer Questions on GitHub

For most projects, issues are created frequently on GitHub discussing one problem or another. Sometimes the issue needs more details, other times there's already an issue out there, finally there might have been a source where the issue has been addressed. In any of these situations, it's possible to resolve an issue or at least move it forward without any input from the maintainer them self.

Responding to issues on GitHub can be a big help. It allows the maintainer to focus more on the fix / feature itself more so than having to go back and forth between questions / answers before work can be started. If you're able to get more information out of what's being asked then we can save the maintainer some time as well. Even linking to duplicate issues or linking to a previous response from the maintainer can help a lot. Consider taking some time to sift through some unanswered issues whenever you have time.

In FreeTube's situation, the rewrite repository doesn't have many issues at this time, so I've been able to have time to respond to all of them. In the future when the rewrite is released to more people, this can quickly change.

Testing / Creating Issues

No matter what your programming background is (even if it's nothing), being able to test out the current progress of an application is easily one of the most helpful things you can do for a project. Creating an issue of any problem you find can help the maintainer log that issue and fix it at a later point. Try to include as much detail as you can when creating these issues so that the maintainer is able to quickly find and patch the problem so that they can move to another part of the app.

For the FreeTube rewrite, builds are published every commit over on the Actions tab on GitHub. Here you can download the latest build of the rewrite for testing so that you can provide feedback. Obviously parts of it are missing but providing feedback (Even if it's to say that you can't find any problems with it) is very helpful.

Conclusion

At this point, it looks like we have a lot that needs to be done. I will do my best to get the FreeTube rewrite done in time before Invidious is shut down. If you happen to have spare time, feel free to help out in any way you can. Even if I don't get the rewrite done in time, we'll still have a way to watch YouTube privately, I'll make sure of it.

If you want to join in on the discussion, feel free to join our Matrix Community. I'm also available for email at FreeTubeApp@protonmail.com

If you want to learn more about the rewrite itself, check out it's GitHub repo here.

Take care!

The Pinephone has become a popular device to chat about in the privacy circles. It's price ($149 USD) alongside it's promises has made it a very appealing device for those that are looking for an option to get away from devices offered by Apple and Google. It also provides an option for those who want a “pure” Linux based smartphone where the hardware shares the same freedom respecting principles as the software. I've been able to get my hands on one and I'd like to share my thoughts. This also ended up getting fairly long, so here's an index!

• My Background
• Packaging
• Hardware
• Performance
• Hardware Final Thoughts
• Software
  • Ubuntu Touch
    • UI Navigation
    • Settings Configuration
    • App Experience – Default Apps
    • App Experience – App Store
    • Ubuntu Touch Final Thoughts
  • KDE Neon
    • UI Navigation
    • Settings Configuration
    • App Experience – Default Apps
    • App Experience – App Store
    • KDE Neon Final Thoughts
  • Mobian
    • Performance
    • UI Navigation
    • Settings Configuration
    • App Experience
    • Mobian Final Thoughts
  • PostmarketOS
    • Performance
    • Differences with Mobian
    • PostmarketOS Final Thoughts
• Pinephone Conclusion
• Bonus Content: FreeTube Experience
  • Ubuntu Touch
  • PostmarketOS
  • KDE Neon and Mobian
  • FreeTube Final Thoughts
• Conclusion

My Background

I feel like I should give a little background on who I am as a potential user. The device I'm transferring from is an Asus Zenfone 6 with Lineage OS and Micro G installed. I have been an active Linux user for about 5-6 years now. I self-host nearly every service that I actively use. I'm also a full time developer.

The point I'm trying to make is: I'm a prime example of the ideal user who could realistically make the switch to a Pinephone while also giving up the least amount of convenience in their life.

People like me are going to be the people that advocate for the Pinephone in years to come and to show others that privacy / FOSS can be both self-respecting and convenient to use. Before we can get this product out to the masses, we need a few who are willing to deal with some rough patches within that process so that the developers working hard on this software can fix any pain points that we might have before more users are aware of it.

I hope that my experiences can educate those who are considering buying a Pinephone and whether or not the Pinephone can be a potential device for daily usage. I will be reviewing the hardware as well as a few of the more popular operating systems currently available for the phone. These won't be full on reviews per-say but more so of my opinions and experiences as I try out each and every one.

Packaging

I don't consider packaging very exciting, but with a device like this I guess it's worth talking about. The box didn't come with much. It came with the phone, a USB-C cable, and a small amount of paperwork. It also came with a nano SIM to micro SIM adapter which I definitely appreciate. It ended up not fitting my nano SIM though so I had to use a different one. It does not come with a power brick but I have no complaints with that. I already have so many I don't really want another one at this point.

Hardware

I must say, for the price of this phone, I'm very impressed with the hardware here.

It's a bit thicker than most of the other phones out there, but it's about the same thickness as the Zenfone 6 that I've been using. The extra thickness likely has to do with all the modularity that this phone has, along with other features like a removable battery, which is something I haven't seen in a long time. I don't consider the thickness a negative, though if they manage to make it thinner while keeping the modularity of it then that'd be a huge plus for me.

The speaker is fairly mediocre. The cutouts on the back plate makes it seem bigger than it actually is, but it only takes up about a fourth of what was cut out for it. Even if it's supposed to help, it doesn't sound great. The Pinephone does include a headphone jack, which I'd end up using more than the speakers any way, so I don't mind if it isn't that great. It's usable when you need one which is what matters.

Call quality is bad. Just about any phone I could find in the past 10+ years probably has better call quality than this. This is assuming that calls even work with the OS that you choose.

The camera is much worse. Only one OS had a working camera and it was completely unusable. The view finder in the camera app looked more like a slideshow. The pictures that it took weren't good either. The front camera also doesn't work without entering in a command in a terminal to change it. I didn't expect much but it's probably worse than I expected. You should assume that there isn't any camera on this phone if you decide to buy one. It's that unusable.

The back plate was fairly difficult to remove at first, but after a few times it's been much easier to remove. Once removed, there's a decent collection of goodies underneath. Here we have the removable battery as mentioned earlier, along with a SIM card and SD card slot. The SD card slot is used more to flash operating systems than to be used as expansion storage. You can still use it as mounted storage but you have to mount it through the command line to use it. Even then, the phone attempts to boot to the SD card even if there isn't a flashable OS installed on it. The most user friendly way to use this slot would be to have the OS installed on your SD card instead of the built in storage. There might be a way to prevent it from booting into the SD card but I didn't spend any time to find out.

There are also a few pins towards the top that looks like they could provide some expansion to the phone. This could open up some extra discussions about adding some extra features like a bigger battery or even wireless charging. I'm definitely looking forward to see what they use these for.

The last things in the back of the phone are these tiny switches that allows you to disable certain features of the phone like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or even the headphone jack. There's even a handy little sticker next to them that allows you to keep track of which switch does what. This is a huge feature for the privacy community as it gives you that peace of mind that nothing is using your camera for example.

The last part of the hardware that I wanted to talk about is the screen. I feel like the screen is the best part of the Pinephone. It's a 720p screen and doesn't get that bright so it isn't going to be winning many prizes of course, but it's actually not bad to use for the amount of phone you're getting. This is the one thing that usually disappoints me with cheaper phones but I really can't complain with what I'm given here. The phone did come with a plastic screen protector that made the screen look slightly worse. I'd definitely recommend removing that and replacing it with the glass screen protector that Pine64 offers in their store.

Performance

I won't really go over the specs too much here, but the phone has 2GB of RAM with a quad core ARM SoC. My opinions on the performance fluctuated drastically as I was trying different operating systems with the phone. As you'll see for the first few operating systems, performance wasn't that great. Navigation was slow but usable. The screen responsiveness typically lagged behind your touches quite a bit as well.

During the second half of my testing, I was able to try a few systems that were more optimized, and my experience improved significantly. Apps were suddenly running better and navigation felt much smoother. It still wasn't as smooth as a low end Android device, but the improvements made the phone usable.

Video playback wasn't great regardless of the optimizations. Loading a video on Invidious (which is a lightweight option to browse YouTube) resulted in choppy videos, even on 720p. It wasn't until I lowered it to 480p that I was able to watch videos at a smooth frame rate.

I understand that the phone is very cheap compared to most other phones, so I can't complain too much. Eventually I'd love to see some more expensive options with a faster SoC to ease the performance issues. I'm aware that Pine64 recently announced a slight upgrade with more storage and more RAM, though I don't think more RAM will fix the current issues. I'd much rather see that higher price go towards a better Soc.

Hardware Final Thoughts

Overall, this is a very nice device for the price and Pine64 absolutely nailed it. Please keep up the great work guys, I'm overall very satisfied with the hardware that I was given. I'd eventually like to see a little more performance in a future device but either way it's a very solid device. Huge props to the Pine64 team on their accomplishments.

Software

I wanted to keep the software experience section separate from the hardware, as Pine64 technically doesn't make software for the Pinephone. Instead, they rely on community driven projects to develop operating systems that are compatible with the Pinephone. This really drives the “openness” of the project as it right away makes you know that this phone is meant to be configured the way you want it to be. I'm going to try out a few different operating systems before I settle on which one I like the most. I'll be giving each option a fair chance regardless of what my preferences are on desktop.

Ubuntu Touch

My Pinephone is the UBPorts Community Edition, which means that it was pre-loaded with Ubuntu Touch installed. With that being the case, I started here first. Many consider Ubuntu Touch to be the most polished option out of the major operating systems available, so I was definitely interested in seeing just how it works.

UI Navigation

The initial experience with Ubuntu Touch is actually really nice. Having the most frequent apps on the side bar ended up being much nicer to use than I originally thought it would be. I'm fairly used to how Android works and Ubuntu Touch pleasantly has some of that similar feel while also changing the UX in a way that makes it feel more like Linux / Ubuntu.

Swiping from the left brings up your favorite apps. Continuing the swipe opens up the app drawer with all of your apps. Swiping from the right swaps to your most recent app. Continuing to swipe right shows a list of all of your open apps in a carousel of sorts. It didn't take too long to learn this process and I'd say it's fairly intuitive.

Swiping from the top opens what I'd probably call a “Settings Tray”. It shows your notifications like Android does but gives full access to a majority of the more common items you'd find in the settings app. It gives you access to your Wi-fi / Bluetooth settings, screen rotation, sound, brightness, and even a calendar. Swiping down from a certain icon at the top determines which settings you see when the drawer is open. If you slightly miss, you can adjust your thumbnail as you're swiping to navigate to a different tab in the drawer. It's a much appreciated fail safe to make sure you open up the setting that you intended to open.

Overall Ubuntu Touch has a unique and friendly interface that's easy to pick up on.

Settings Configuration

One of the first things I wanted to do was get my VPN setup. I use Mullvad if it matters. Once I got it setup, the device said that it was connected, however it was never able to make a connection to anything once the VPN was enabled. It's possible I misconfigured something here so I'll look more into it. It didn't allow me to upload any pre-configured OVPN file or anything so I had to manually set it up.

After that failure, I wanted to hook up the Pinephone to my Nextcloud account so that I could sync up files / contacts / calendar / etc. The option to do so is here in the settings but it never did work. Clicking on the Nextcloud icon just makes it load indefinitely. During one attempt the phone completely crashed on me and I had to remove the battery to reboot it. I never got to the point where I could attempt to sign in. Another failure.

The last notable thing I saw in the settings page was “Libertine”. Libertine is apparently a compatibility layer for Ubuntu Touch which gives the device a container with access to apt and the ability to install packages through dpkg. This also ended up not working. Any attempt to create a container simply kicked me back to the Getting Started page. Doing a little bit of research on this and it seems that the team isn't focusing on this functionality right now and instead focusing on features that will likely get used more like the camera and GPS. That's fair enough, though if this isn't ready it should probably be hidden or at least prevent me from creating containers.

App Experience – Default Apps

Moving outside of the settings app, the default apps included seem fine. Basic apps like calculator and calendar work as you'd expect. The messaging and calling apps are fine as well. Everything is basic to get the job done and that's actually what I'd want out of default apps. They don't need to be feature rich to be usable. It also comes with apps you wouldn't find by default in an Android phone like a file browser will full OS access and a terminal.

The music app experience was mediocre. You can't listen to music when the screen is off which is a huge disappointment. The headphone jack ended up not working on my unit either. Any sound would simply continue playing through the speaker. I made sure that the kill switch wasn't enabled and even flipped it on for good measure. I'll see if this is fixed with a different OS later in this review but even something basic like listening to music is basically non-existent here with UT. This is a big deal breaker for me when it comes to daily driver status. Looking into it more, this is an issue with the OS itself and not necessarily the music app.

The last default app was the browser. It's called the Morph Browser but I was curious what was running under the hood. I accessed the FreeTube Website and checked the analytics there. Morph is apparently a very old version of Chrome (v65) and is detected as an Android 4.4 device. Some elements of the UI didn't render in the same way as it does on my Android device though I don't know if I'd contribute that to my questionable web design skills or because of the very old browser. Likely a combination of both. Firefox or other alternatives are nowhere to be found here, so if this is our only option, then it really needs to be updated more. Being this far away from the latest release of Chrome could make this an insecure way of browsing the internet and doesn't go well with trying to have a private experience with the Pinephone.

App Experience – App Store

Finally we're here at the app store, or the OpenStore as UT likes to call it. The Ubuntu Touch team has decided to focus primarily on Progressive Web Apps (PWA) for the available apps in their OS. Anything that wasn't a PWA was based on QML though there are many more web apps available. This means that FreeTube will fit right in with the rest of the apps available once I get the PWA version finished. Having said that, I'm not too convinced that having only PWA available is the right way forward.

I understand the appeal though. A PWA is much easier to develop and it also allows them to publish unofficial versions of apps that would probably never be in their store otherwise. It's also much easier to convince developers to create a PWA than it is to make a native app. I feel like there are a plentiful amount of excellently created Linux apps that are simply being ignored on this platform. Terminal methods like apt are blocked off as well so you don't even get the option to sideload them. This type of blocking removes the appeal of a “Linux” smartphone to me and the UBPorts team should really backtrack their stance on this.

With the apps that are available, I had a difficult time finding anything in the OpenStore that were good and worth using for long periods of time. There's a Reddit app called uReadIt that looked nice at first, however trying to open any image or video just shows a blank screen with no way to get back besides closing the app completely and reopening it. Comments would only load if no link / image / video were included in the post. It also hasn't been updated in a very long time which means it likely won't be fixed.

The YouTube app (which is just a wrapper of the website) wouldn't load, I was just greeted by another blank screen.

Syncthing works well. Downloading the app gives access to their web UI which is usable. Closing the app causes Syncthing to stop running which I feel like should still run. Turning off the screen when it was running completely stopped any progress as well. I couldn't sync too much anyways since I'm limited to the small amount of storage on the device, but it's still disappointing. I'm assuming this is also an OS issue and not an issue with Syncthing itself.

There was an app I found called Active Screen which allows the screen to stay on without having to touch it constantly. It works as intended and helped me get Syncthing working a little bit better, but functionality like this really needs to be built into the OS itself as a setting.

The last notable app I tried was the UT Tweak Tool. This app allows you to change a few of the UI elements within UT and allows you to view more information about the apps you have installed. Options included things like changing the theme and the icon / font sizes. I'd consider this app a must have if you insist on using UT touch. When browsing the list of installed apps, there's a toggle to prevent the selected app from suspending. This didn't seem to fix my issue with the music but it did party fix the Syncthing issue. Syncthing still wouldn't work if the screen was off just like music though.

Ubuntu Touch Final Thoughts

Ubuntu Touch overall feels like a decent phone experience, but it doesn't feel like a “Linux” experience. The lack of typical Linux apps and the focus of web apps leaves a lot to be desired. Using this OS feels like they're trying to be a successor to Firefox OS because of this focus. It doesn't feel like it's trying to be a Linux device no more than Android is.

Even with access to a terminal, the lack of installing packages outside of their app store via methods such as apt removes a lot of customization potential for a device such as this. I should be allowed to try out different things regardless if it breaks the OS or not. In it's current position, I couldn't even install languages such as Python to run small scripts if I wanted to.

The OS issues with app processes not persisting when the screen is off makes this a hard sell for me as well. Having Syncthing stop working or have music shut off just because I want to save battery life makes this very unusable to me. At the very least these issues need to be fixed before I can seriously consider using this OS myself.

The UI and experience is easily the best part of Ubuntu Touch. It's considerably better than the competition at this point and everything is user-friendly enough where just about anyone who has ever used an Android or iPhone could probably pick this up and start using it right away.

To reiterate, Ubuntu Touch just isn't for me. My ideal Linux smartphone would have the ability to function as my phone and my desktop and it doesn't look like Ubuntu Touch is aiming for this eventual convergence. Nevertheless, I am pleased with my experience with Ubuntu Touch and I wish the team good luck in their work. I look forward to seeing what has changed the next time I look into it.

KDE Neon

The nice thing about the Pinephone is that it has options. Even if Ubuntu Touch isn't for me, that doesn't stop me from finding another OS that is. With that in mind, I decided to put KDE Neon on my phone next to see what they have to offer.

I chose them next mostly because I'm fully expecting to not stick with it as a permanent solution. I don't use KDE software very much mostly because I don't like the experience very well whenever I do. I don't want that to stop me from giving this a fair chance though as the phone ecosystem is brand new and full of opportunities to be innovative, so here's my experience.

UI Navigation

Upon first boot, I'm greeted by an interface that looks much more familiar to the average user. A home screen with a notification bar and 3 navigation buttons at the bottom, with a dock of your most used apps. Swiping up on the home screen will open your app drawer just like an Android device. You can hold and drag apps from your app drawer to the home screen to customize your look. There are even a few basic widgets that can be added to your home screen. I had some trouble pinning apps to the dock, but it eventually works.

The bottom 3 buttons behave very similarly to Android as well. In Android, you normally have a back, home, and open apps buttons at the bottom of the screen at all times. With KDE Neon, you have your open apps, home, and a close current app button. I would have much preferred a universal back button, though I imagine that might be hard to implement.

At the top is your notification tray. This also works just like Android. Swiping down opens up the notification tray and will show any notifications along with quick applets to enable / disable common settings like Wi-Fi and Auto Rotate. Some of the settings up here, like the flashlight and screenshot applets, didn't work in my testing. Hopefully this will be fixed in a future update.

The keyboard with KDE Neon takes a more traditional keyboard style layout compared to Android and even Ubuntu Touch. Keys like the backspace button are in the top right and the enter key is in the middle right instead of where you normally find them in mobile keyboards. The bottom corners are now populated with a button that will close the keyboard when pressed. I ended up having a lot of issues with the keyboard in KDE Neon. A lot of the issues I had with KDE Neon were because of the keyboard bugging out on me in one way or the other. Apps wouldn't resize properly in some cases when the keyboard goes away and other times the keyboard would completely disappear but still be usable. Some times switching to the numbers page would cause the keyboard to flash as well. During a lot of the times I had problems, I couldn't hide the keyboard either to make these problems go away. Eventually clicking to something else fixed it, but it came back too many times to not mention it. The keyboard is easily the worst part of KDE Neon.

If it isn't clear yet, KDE Neon has a ton of similarities to Android and I don't consider this a bad thing. A Linux based smartphone is going to be difficult to transition to for some people and having some familiarity will go a long way in user adoption. I'm a huge fan of the workflow that the KDE team has put together and I really look forward to seeing this in a more polished state.

Settings Configuration

The settings options are much more bare compared to Ubuntu Touch. For starters, there isn't even any Bluetooth settings here. I didn't use any Bluetooth devices in my testing but it's still something I expected to be here. We get WiFi, Broadband, Hotspot, Cellular Networks, Sound, Time, Language, Appearance, Accounts, and Information. It isn't a lot, but it gets us started at least. There were no settings for VPN either, so I didn't even get to attempt to set that up.

The sound settings allowed me to switch to the headphone jack, so it's at least usable, though it doesn't switch automatically when you plug in a device. There is a setting that can supposedly do this but it didn't work in my testing.

The account settings finally allowed me to add my Nextcloud account. Having said that, I wasn't able to fully set it up because of the keyboard issues I was having. I was very close to finishing the setup before the OS crashed and I had to remove the battery, so I gave up on trying. I will assume this works though as I saw no reason why it wouldn't.

Nothing else really seemed worth talking about settings wise. So moving on!

App Experience – Default Apps

Like Ubuntu Touch, KDE Neon provides mostly basic apps that do basic functions like Calendar, Alarms, Gallery, Contacts, Music, etc. Unlike Ubuntu Touch, these are native apps and not web apps. This definitely gave them a more unified look and also allowed for some nicer swipe gestures compared to a lot of the apps I tried on UT.

The music app for example felt a lot more polished than the default app that is available on UT. I can swipe left and right to toggle between tracks, albums, artists and playlists. It also has the ability to select a folder of tracks unlike the app on UT which would only look in your default Music folder. I wasn't able to actually add a folder though, so I didn't get to test this too much. KDE Neon has the same problem as UT where apps stop working when the screen is off as well so listening to music was never going to be a good experience anyways.

KDE Connect was installed out of the box as well, which is a very welcomed addition. I didn't actually set this up, as I couldn't get my desktop to detect it (My smartphone did, however I wasn't interested in connecting the two), but it's one of those apps that really contributes in the overall convenience of a phone.

The file browser is fairly good. Had no real complaints here. Works as intended.

There wasn't a camera app, even though I wasn't expecting the camera to work. Not really a problem but something that I noticed.

Phone calls still didn't work.

The default browser here is an app called Angelfish. It is a QTWebEngine based browser so I wasn't familiar with how out of date it is compared to upstream, though it did render the FreeTube website much better than the browser on UT did. The Analytics thinks that the device is an Android 9 device (Compared to an Android 4.4 device on UT) so that was a better sight to see.

App Experience – App Store

This is where all the fun begins. KDE Neon on the Pinephone is a standard ARM device running Debian / Ubuntu which means that any app that would theoretically run on a Raspberry Pi running a 64 bit OS. This includes the ability to run staple Linux apps like LibreOffice and even allows for you to install .deb files from the internet. The apt command is also available in the command line so the available apps are almost limitless compared to the selection in Ubuntu Touch.

That isn't to say that it's always the best experience. Out of the few apps that I tried, they didn't scale properly to the size of the phone, which made it basically impossible to run the apps. Some that I tried to download (Like a caffeine app that should keep the screen on) didn't work at all.

Even with the bad experience on the phone screen, these problems can likely be solved by plugging the phone into a bigger screen and attaching a keyboard and mouse to it. This is what will eventually make this ecosystem a powerhouse with the large amount of apps already available for this device. As more users adopt devices like the Pinephone, I expect app developers will pay more attention to smaller screen sizes and better optimize their apps for this type of experience.

I wanted to spend a little bit of more time on this section, however my phone decided to stop connecting to the WiFi so I couldn't install any more apps. I'm still satisfied with stopping here as I feel like I've seen enough. Seeing the available apps for this has made me excited to try this out again.

KDE Neon Final Thoughts

I overall had a much better experience with KDE Neon. Mostly because I'm more excited about the future of this project. This is a prime example of what the future of Linux smartphones should look like. Access to the already plentiful selection of ARM Linux apps makes this OS (and the others I'll talk about later) much more appealing than the more closed Ecosystem of Ubuntu Touch.

I do want to mention that I had a few more crashes on KDE Neon compared to Ubuntu Touch and I had to remove my battery several times to fix a few issues. This along with the keyboard issues made it very annoying to use in the worst of times.

I can't recommend it at this time, but there's a lot of potential here.

I came into this OS not expecting to care too much about it, however I left with a potential candidate of a daily driver that I will be more than happy to recommend in the future once a few of their issues have been fixed. I will be paying more attention to this project moving forward as I'm really looking forward to see what the KDE has to offer in the future.

As before though, calls still don't work and there are still too many issues to be had, so it still has a long way to go before being daily driver ready.

Mobian

I wasn't sure if I wanted to try out Mobian or PostmarketOS next. Both operating systems feature the Phosh environment, which I have been really looking forward to trying. I made a self prediction before I received my Pinephone that Phosh is what I would most likely end up settling on so I wanted to save these two systems for last. I'm a big fan of GNOME and GNOME apps so a mobile UI based on GNOME while also featuring GNOME apps sounded like a good thing to me.

I decided I was going to try Mobian first. My reasoning is because Mobian is a smaller project compared to PostmarketOS (There's only one dev working on it I believe) so it might have a few more issues. As you might have guessed, Mobian is based on Debian while PostmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux. While I much prefer Debian based systems, PostmarketOS claims a much more lightweight OS because of it's Alpine base while Alpine Linux claims to be extremely lightweight itself. With all of these together, PostmarketOS should have the better overall experience in theory. If that is the case, I will save it for last simply to prevent an extra cycle of flashing a new OS on here as it's very slow to do so.

Even with all of that, it's still possible that Mobian can win me over, so here's my experience with using it.

Performance

On first boot, there was an immediate performance difference. Mobian was performing much smoother overall compared to both UT and KDE Neon. UT had some good performance don't get me wrong, but scrolling specifically felt snappier on Mobian than UT. Up to this point I've assumed that the unresponsiveness was just because of the poor SoC (which still might be the case), but the Phosh environment is extremely optimized. The stability is much better as well. Apps as well as the OS itself crashed much less than what I've dealt with up to this point. More parts of the hardware works as well.

The performance along with the stability makes this a winner to me. If you are considering an OS for your Pinephone, please do not skip on trying out Mobian.

UI Navigation

Phosh takes a similar approach to Android, while also keeping the same guidelines established by the GNOME environment. Unlike Android, you will very rarely see your home screen unless there are no apps are running. Your “Home” screen typically is also your app drawer. At the bottom of the screen where the home button normally is on Android, there's instead a button that opens up your app drawer. This button can not be opened by swiping up which is a little disappointing and something that I'd like to see included eventually. In your app drawer is where you also view your currently open apps along with being able to close any of them.

There's a notification bar at the top as well. Tapping the top bar opens up your notifications while also giving access to applets to enable / disable common settings. Auto rotate doesn't work on Mobian and requires that you manually swap it using one of these applets. A small annoyance though I don't use landscape view too often, so it isn't a huge deal for me.

The navigation of the OS is fairly basic and boring. The important part is that navigation is stable, which is much more important than a full list of features.

Settings Configuration

The settings you see here are also similar to how they appear on GNOME. Bluetooth settings are available unlike KDE Neon. There are privacy settings which allows you to disable the camera and microphone (Even though there are hardware switches, this is still nice). A notable option in the settings is the users setting which allows you to change your pass code within the UI, however this ended up not working.

There's a setting to select your default applications. I don't think this was available in UT or KDE Neon.

Mobian also did not have any settings options to setup a VPN.

Setting up my Nextcloud account finally worked! I had no problem accessing my files / contacts once connected.

The sound settings behave similarly to KDE Neon, except for a few major differences. The headphone jack works and it works as expected. Plugging headphones into the Pinephone actually switches the sound source on Mobian. Listening to music even persists when the screen it's off. It's really silly that I have to praise an OS for doing this, so I really hope that the other systems can get this fixed soon. The issues might have been because of some battery optimizations that they've done recently, so it's hard to say if it's a good or bad thing that Mobian doesn't have that implemented.

App Experience

For Mobian, I'm going to talk about both default and third party apps in the same section, as most of it is the same as from KDE Neon.

Being based on GNOME, a majority of the default apps are the same default apps you'd fine in a typical GNOME environment. GNOME Web, Contacts, Calculator, Clock, Calendar, Fractal, Geary, Lollypop, Maps, Gedit, To Do, and System Monitor are all available. Other apps like Firefox and Telegram are pre-installed as well. Most of these apps worked fairly well and as intended. I didn't notice any major issues with many of the default apps I tried.

GNOME Web ended up being the weakest part of Mobian. Even on the FreeTube website, which has no JavaScript and just static web pages, scrolling through the site is like a slideshow. It's extremely unusable.

With GNOME Web being mediocre, it's probably why Firefox was also included. Firefox runs websites much better, however the UI is not optimized for mobile at all so you're stuck with sometimes tiny buttons you have to click on in order to navigate through the browser. Even if you get to certain preferences it might not be sized properly. Once you start browsing it's a fine experience, but navigating around the browser itself is really annoying.

The one default app that caught me by surprise though was the camera app. The app actually works! This was the first time I was able to interact with the camera. I must say that it's a very bad camera experience. The view finder is more of a slideshow than GNOME Web and obviously doesn't take the greatest of pictures. I never expected it to, but the fact that the camera app works at all means that this is the best camera experience on the Pinephone.

Calls still didn't work for me, however it seems that calls are working for a few users. If I come back to Mobian as a daily driver I'll experiment more and see if I can get this to work. Text messaging and mobile data was working though.

Like KDE Neon, Mobian is a normal, Debian based computer, which means that is also has access to any ARM version of the many apps already available. You can once again open up a terminal and install applications through apt. Flatpak is also installed by default here, though I didn't test any Flatpak apps during my time.

Generally any GTK or QT based app runs very well. There were a few that didn't size properly but they were still usable. The real problems occur when you run anything that isn't GTK or QT based. Apps like VLC doesn't know how to size itself for the small screen size and becomes an unusable experience. Just because an app is based on GTK or QT doesn't make it a guarantee though. I attempted to install the GNOME Tweak Tool and it was unusable due to size issues. In general though, you'll likely have a decent experience if you're able to stick with GTK or QT based apps.

Mobian Final Thoughts

Overall I'm extremely impressed with Mobian. A majority of the experience is smooth and stable. I've been heavily leaning towards recommending that the Pinephone isn't worth anyone's time or money if you're wanting a private and usable phone today. After using Mobian for a bit, my opinion has completely changed. A Pinephone as a daily driver just might be possible. Once some small issues get fixed and non GTK / QT apps are more usable, this will become a very solid option as a mobile OS.

If you're confident that you can get calls working under Mobian, this may end up being usable. Mobian has now become my prime candidate as my daily driver. At this point of my journey, there's only one other OS that could possibly change that.

PostmarketOS

This is the last OS that I plan on looking at. After this, I will settle on an OS and begin trying to set up the phone as a daily driver.

After my pleasant experience with Mobian, I have high hopes for PostmarketOS. While Pine64 doesn't have a default OS with the Pinephone, I do believe that they consider PostmarketOS their flagship option.

PostmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux instead of Debian, which is supposed to be a more lightweight base. This will be my first time trying any Alpine based system, so let's see what happens.

Performance

To no surprise, PostmarketOS runs just as smooth as Mobian did. Phosh actually had some small animations when opening and closing the app drawer which Mobian didn't have. Otherwise there were very small differences between the two. No complaints here.

Differences with Mobian

A lot of what I said for Mobian also applies for PostmarketOS, so I'll talk about what's different instead.

Calls worked right out of the box with PMOS. This led me to find out that call quality wasn't the greatest, but it was usable, which is important.

APN options were fetched automatically, where as Mobian had to have them entered in manually. A very nice quality of life addition.

Like a most of the other systems I tried, PMOS didn't swap between the speaker and headphone jack automatically. It's possible to do it manually though.

The keyboard has a slightly different design. I wouldn't consider either keyboard better or worse. They're both usable and decent no matter the situation.

There are much fewer apps installed by default on PMOS. By default, you get Phone, Text, GNOME Web, Contacts, Calculator, Cheese (A picture taking app), Clocks, Extensions, Firefox, Settings, Software (App Store), Terminal, and a text editor. It doesn't even have a file browser installed.

The camera app has sizing issues and also didn't detect the camera.

The App Store doesn't show any apps you can install outside of the ones already installed on your system. I'm assuming this is because it needs to fetch app information from some repositories, but I didn't see a way to do that.

PostmarketOS Final Thoughts

In it's current state, PostmarketOS seems like they have the best OS when it comes to actually functioning as a phone when used with the Pinephone. Calls work out of the box and APN settings are easy to configure as well. It also provides a smooth experience on the Pinephone. This should be your number 1 option if you plan on actually using the Pinephone as a phone, regardless of your other needs. The issue with installing apps should be fixed though as installing apps through a terminal is much more of a pain than it is on a desktop.

I do want to mention that the PMOS team recommends that you build an image for your device yourself. I instead used a pre-built image which may have affected some of my issues with it.

Pinephone Conclusion

After everything is said and done, I have decided that I will stick with Mobian moving forward on my Pinephone. To me, Mobian provided the best overall experience. My biggest issue with it was that calls were still not working. While it's a major issue, it leads to my final conclusion.

Linux smartphones are the future, but they're not the present.

I am absolutely amazed at the progress that the FOSS community has made towards creating a totally open and freedom respecting smartphone experience. As a whole, we are so close to having a fairly complete system where I could realistically see myself using a Pinephone as my daily driver, albeit with a significant downgrade in my overall convenience.

I do believe even as little as a year from now, we could see the Pinephone become much more usable as a daily driver. If you're curious about the experience yourself or if you'd like to have a secondary device on hand, do yourself a favor, buy a Pinephone, and install either Mobian or PostmarketOS. If you're planning on ditching your current phone, especially if you use a lot of proprietary services, I'd wait a little bit longer. If you can't wait, consider buying a device compatible with LineageOS for a more private / freedom respecting device, even if it isn't a perfect solution.

I feel like I've written enough at this point, so I'll stop here. If you'd like a follow up of me trying to setup / customize / personalize my Mobian based Pinephone please let me know. My goal will be to fully setup and find solutions needed to make the Pinephone that much closer to daily driver status. I'll also try to comment more on the state of apps available for common services and how well they work.

Bonus Section: FreeTube Experience

I don't know how much I'll be spreading around this review, but this section is more of a bonus for the users that read this blog a bit more often.

For those of you that are new here (and you might have guessed from the review), I am the main developer for FreeTube. FreeTube is an open source YouTube client for Windows, Mac, and Linux that focuses on privacy centric features such is being able to subscribe without an account as well as not having your views tracked by YouTube. One of my main reasons for purchasing a Pinephone was so that I could keep an eye on the state of FreeTube on the device as well as debug any problems that may end up coming around in this new ecosystem.

Throughout this entire process, I tested with the upcoming rewrite and not the live release. I am in the process of rewriting the entire app from scratch to introduce better coding practices as well as better optimizations to the app compared to the live app. This rewrite also focuses on expanding the availability of FreeTube by providing a web version as well as a new UI that is able to provide a much better mobile experience.

This section will go over my experience with trying out FreeTube as is so that I can see what changes need to be made so that the experience on the PinePhone can be as pleasant as possible.

Ubuntu Touch

Because of the restrictive nature of Ubuntu Touch, I couldn't even get FreeTube installed on the device. Having said that, I am in the process of making sure that FreeTube functions as a progressive web app, so there shouldn't be any issues with it running once that effort is finished. I expect to see FreeTube in their OpenStore once I am finished with the rewrite.

PostmarketOS

I was able to get FreeTube installed on PostmarketOS, however I couldn't get it to run. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. I'm also not very familiar with Alpine Linux so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with it. If you'd like to help with debugging this and maybe figuring out what's wrong, I publish both x64 and ARM builds for Alpine Linux over at the GitHub Actions page of the FreeTube repository. Feel free to download the latest build and let me know if you were able to get it working. If you had to make some tweaks, feel free to send a PR and we can get this working upstream.

KDE Neon and Mobian

The experience on KDE Neon and Mobian were identical, so there isn't a need to separate these two.

FreeTube actually installs and works! During installation of the .deb file, I also had to do sudo apt --fix-broken install to fix some dependancy issues, but other than that every installs with no issues.

Actually running FreeTube in it's current state is very mixed though. Upon startup, the app doesn't fill the whole screen. There isn't anything that can be done as a user either. This is something that I believe I can fix by forcing the app to be full screen.

Video playback works just fine. Full screening the video also works however the video controls stay hidden and the OS UI is hidden as well so it essentially soft locks the phone unable to do anything else until the user restarts their device.

Using the keyboard is completely unusable. Key presses don't reflect what's actually registered within the app which makes it extremely difficult to try and search for anything. You can paste text from another app as a work around but this obviously isn't a real solution. I tested a different Electron app and it had the same problem, so it doesn't seem like it's something that I can fix myself.

Some of the UI elements still don't size properly and forces some horizontal scrolling. I don't consider this ideal and is something I will be looking at fixing.

FreeTube Final Thoughts

All in all, FreeTube is actually somewhat functional on the Pinephone, with no special modifications needed to make it work. There's obviously a lot of work that needs to be done in order for it to be usable but the fact that it works is pretty awesome. I will be working hard to make sure that FreeTube stays a pleasant experience on mobile just like it is on desktop.

Conclusion

That seems to be everything I wanted to talk about. I'm usually available to talk and answer any questions about the Pinephone if you'd like to reach out. I can be reached at the following platforms:

Mastodon Matrix Reddit Email (freetubeapp@protonmail.com)

You can learn more about FreeTube and the rewrite at their respective links:

Website GitHub (Live Release) GitHub (Rewrite)

I hope this review has helped someone out on their thoughts on the Pinephone. If you enjoyed this content, please let me know and I might do more of this in the future.

Take care!