• Home
• Source Code
• About

Librem 5:Order Timeline

Since the inception of smartphones (well, and a little bit before that), there has been a movement to try to create a phone that actually protects the privacy of its user and the people around it. This need has only grown more pressing over time as the companies making these phones solidify into a duopoly: iOS (Apple) and Android (Google).

For the most part, iOS is what it is, which is what Apple provides. It is very locked down and almost completely unfragmented. On the other hand, Android has massive fragmentation with Google's stock version (AOSP), Google's proprietary version for their Pixel line, Samsung's variant, LG's variant, etc., and those don't even include the cell provider-specific modifications included in the vendor-specific modification's of Google's modifications. I think with that many hands in the black box that is your smartphone, the privacy and security implications are myriad.

Many projects, such as CyanogenMod and LineageOS to name two of the biggest were started to try to address the bloatware, security, dropped vendor support, and general poor design that yielded poor battery life. But they only addressed security and privacy from a software perspective. The firmware and hardware still could not be trusted.

Even fewer organizations have attempted to tackle security from a software, a firmware, and a hardware perspective. Purism's Librem 5 does just that, for the most part.

The Librem 5 is a smark phone that runs Linux... like... true Linux. It's UI is a variant of Gnome; its default package manager is apt; it comes with a terminal and root privileges; it's software is fully open source. The hardware is also partially open source in that if you want, you can acquire some of the circutry schematics.

So, if you haven't heard of the Purism Librem 5 and you care about digital privacy, you should go check it out.

For the folks who also ordered and are wanting some details on when theirs might ship, here is my personal timeline.