[Solved] FLX1 first impressions

Thanks for the feedback! Going to address them one by one, my responses in bold:

• alarm clock does not ring when the app is not open (same for apps like “Errands” or “Reminders”)
  • This is actively being looked into and will be fixed really soon.
• when the battery saver kicks in (when the phone goes into suspend), music starts to stutter (doesn’t matter if played in firefox, podcasts, an android app,…)
  • The next release will have improvements for that. One thing that helps is to switch to another app (like calculator) before turning the screen off. This ensures the app isn't wasting CPU cycles on rendering the UI while the screen is off. This will be addressed directly in phosh in the near future.
• sound in android apps sometimes works sometimes doesn’t (currently does not for a while, so I can’t use spotify atm)
  • Haven't ever been able to reproduce this. We have some sound fixes coming in the next release, so that might help.
• no clipboard sharing with android
  • On our list. Haven't found the time yet.

less (but still) important:

• sharing of pictures/files and contacts into android container would be nice. Currently, I must add new contacts into Signal manually and in order to send a picture that I took on the native Linux side, I must move it first via the Linux file manager to the shared folder and then via the android file manager into the android pictures directory because the file chooser that opens when trying to send a picture via Signal does not show the shared “Host” folder.
  • On our list. Android integration, in general, will improve massively over time.
• when dragging from the bottom in an android app sometimes it drags up the android app and shows the android desktop instead of phosh
  • News to me! Will look into it.
• phosh: the last used window should be displayed on the right (as in android)
  • That's more of an opinion thing, but I think I agree with you. I'll look into adding it as a preference and upstreaming it into phosh.
• phosh: a gesture to switch between apps would improve things a lot
  • Fully agreed. I want to build this, but want to get it completely right (proper animation that tracks your finger movement, etc) - which is tricky. But it will happen.
• phosh: when clicking on something that opens up in another app, the switch to the other app does not happen if the app is already open (e.g. clicking a link if firefox is already open or clicking on a notification belonging to an app)
  • Yes, this sucks. I've been wanting to look into it for months.
• gtk: when scrolling, the item that’s under the finger is highlighted which is surprisingly bad for the scroll feeling (observable e.g. in settings and in tuba)
  • I've noticed this, but it hasn't gotten on my nerves too much. GTK in general still needs a bit of work for touch devices. I'll check in with the upstreams and see what they're working on & how we can help.
• performance (e.g. scrolling) in some apps is bad. I guess this will be much improved once the gpu is enabled and more apps use the new gtk4 vulkan acceleration?
  • Our GTK build has some small performance enhancements I built. Unfortunately our build isn't used when you run a Flatpak, because they bring in their own runtime. We're looking into some way to patch the Flatpak runtimes, but it hasn't been a massive priority and we're working on the biggest blockers.
• push notifications for the messenger apps would be very nice. something like unifiedpush. and a pass-through to android if that’s possible.
  • The biggest problem with this is that you also need the app backends to speak to UnifiedPush. I don't know of any "mainstream" app that does -- I don't think even Telegram does. The closest thing we have right now is the Firefox background mode I built - this allows you to receive WebPush notifications even when the browser is "closed".
  • Not sure what you mean by pass-through to Android here. Are you talking about Android notifications not showing their content when passed over to the Linux world?
• some (e.g. banking/finance) android apps keep bothering you (e.g. by constantly logging you out) if you don’t have a login pattern or password set in android because they use this to ask the pattern again from you when opening the app. But in the android settings there’s no possibility to do so.
  • We're working on fingerprint passthrough to Android. This might help. We'll also look into making Android tell apps that a password is set.
• the android apps “Organic Maps” and “teilAuto Carsharing” don’t work at all.
  • Noted and filed. Will look into it.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

Thanks for the detailled replies 🙂

Here are some more details to the points that weren't clear:

• sound in Android apps: for some time, Spotify did not have sound for me, but simply reinstalling the app fixed that. what remains is voice messages in signal not being played (but this seems to be different, as it shows no progress in the visual representation of the voice message apart from 3s being played and then it jumps back to the beginning - without any sound heard). Maybe this is a codec issue in the android container or so?
• dragging the android app up sometimes opens the android desktop: try to drag "almost" from the bottom to reproduce
• performance issues in gtk apps: that's true, the issues are mostly in flatpaks. you did not write anything about hardware (gpu) acceleration: is this likely to be enabled in the future?
• push notifications:
  • true, this is an adoption problem still, but on the android side at least some of my (former) usual apps used unifiedpush already (Element, Tusky, Molly, DavX5), on Linux there is no support yet, so the corresponding apps did not implement it (I guess)
  • pass-through is probably not the correct term that I used here. What I mean: it would be great if I could once configure my unified push provider on the linux side and it's automatically handed onto the android side so that when I e.g. install element as android app, it automatically detects the configured push service and uses it.
• non-working android apps: apparently organic maps now works again, so this solved itself

Hi there! Let's jump right in.

• sound in Android apps: for some time, Spotify did not have sound for me, but simply reinstalling the app fixed that. what remains is voice messages in signal not being played (but this seems to be different, as it shows no progress in the visual representation of the voice message apart from 3s being played and then it jumps back to the beginning – without any sound heard). Maybe this is a codec issue in the android container or so?
  • From what you describe, it does sound like a potential codec issue. I know of a couple of users who use Signal in the Android container and have asked them if they have the same issue. I'll have more to share about this soon.
• dragging the android app up sometimes opens the android desktop: try to drag “almost” from the bottom to reproduce
  • I talked to Barry about this and it turns out he did know about this issue. We'll look into it.
• performance issues in gtk apps: that’s true, the issues are mostly in flatpaks. you did not write anything about hardware (gpu) acceleration: is this likely to be enabled in the future?
  • GPU acceleration is already enabled on GTK 4, using the gl renderer. From what I've heard, the Vulkan renderer is still buggy and actually slower.
  • Furthermore, in order to improve application launch times, a shim layer is inserted between all apps and the graphics driver. The purpose of this layer is to cache compiled shaders, so subsequent startups are way faster. Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether this works for Flatpaks -- and if it does, each app has its own cache. This is a relatively minor point and only affects startup performance.
• push notifications:
  • true, this is an adoption problem still, but on the android side at least some of my (former) usual apps used unifiedpush already (Element, Tusky, Molly, DavX5), on Linux there is no support yet, so the corresponding apps did not implement it (I guess)
    • That's good to know. I'll look into it.
  • pass-through is probably not the correct term that I used here. What I mean: it would be great if I could once configure my unified push provider on the linux side and it’s automatically handed onto the android side so that when I e.g. install element as android app, it automatically detects the configured push service and uses it.
    • I see what you mean. That would indeed be great. I am not sure how UnifiedPush itself handles that (i.e. does each app need to be configured individually, is there a centralized configuration store, etc) but I will look into it as well.
• non-working android apps: apparently organic maps now works again, so this solved itself
  • It is possible that a recent update has fixed it. The Android container is being heavily worked on, with improvements coming basically every week.

Thank you for the detailed follow up! Hope you are enjoying your FuriPhone 🙂

some notes i will add here from stuff i worked on which will improve some of the issues mentioned:

"alarm clock does not ring when the app is not open": this will be fixed during the 13.0.4 release.

"when the battery saver kicks in (when the phone goes into suspend), music starts to stutter (doesn’t matter if played in firefox, podcasts, an android app,…)": i'm pretty sure this was fixed in staging, will be included in 13.0.4

"sound in android apps sometimes works sometimes doesn’t (currently does not for a while, so I can’t use spotify atm)no clipboard sharing with android": i worked a lot on this, androids sound stack is annoying. it will improve a whole lot, not a 100% fix (will be included in 13.0.4)

if everything goes smoothly, 13.0.4 will be out on the 16th (tomorrow) so you can retry after updating and give us some more feedback.

That sounds awesome. Looking forward to the update (it hasn't happened yet, correct?) and will send an update when it arrives!

@jesus: yes, I'm already now enjoying very much my well functioning Linux phone, looking forward to it becoming even better with the monthly updates 🙂

I looked into the issues again after the update. Generally, many things improved and the alarm clock issue is solved - thanks!

Unfortunately, the "battery saver stops playback" issue is not resolved, it just got a bit better (it now takes ~10 instead of ~3s until it does not play anymore) - tried both with android apps (Spotify) and linux apps (Podcasts).

Also, Android sound improved a bit but both Signal voice messages and Spotify songs sometimes play and sometimes don't (current symptom is that the UI shows that the song continues playing but no sound is played), maybe some kind of race condition somewhere?

Also, sometimes (not new, but I forgot to mention before) all android apps stop working alltogether (don't start or are not shown when selecting the app) and then only restarting the whole android container setup (via settings) helps.

Another race condition seems to be still in the mobile data code (at least for Vodafone, Germany): sometimes it works and sometimes only restarting ofono / ModemManager and/or mobile data via the settings makes it work again. But I could not identify a "restart procedure/order" that always works. When it does not work, "ip r" shows again no default route.

Addition to clocks: setting an alarm does wake up the system but unfortunately setting a timer does not.

And another addition: “battery saver stops playback”: I've seen this work today. So it did not stop today after a few seconds when playing spotify (over bluetooth) and turning off the screen. Probably it's another race thing?

Marius said
Another race condition seems to be still in the mobile data code (at least for Vodafone, Germany): sometimes it works and sometimes only restarting ofono / ModemManager and/or mobile data via the settings makes it work again. But I could not identify a "restart procedure/order" that always works. When it does not work, "ip r" shows again no default route.

  

@marius : How do I restart ofono / ModemManager? I tried systemctl restart ... , which seems to work, but no change. systemctl status ofono shows: Error 44 setting pref mode

Even with the October release 13.0.4, I still have no mobile data - endless story ... (Vodafone Germany via Lidl-Connect).

Yes, I use systemctl restart for these services and for me that then sometimes works. I provided some logs to fakeshell and I think/hope somebody will debug that soon, maybe that will also solve your problem? I also see "Error 44 setting pref mode" in the logs but it also shows that when the connection works, so that's not the main problem.

Is your APN set to a proper value (see mmcli --modem=0)? For me, when the connection is established, ofonoctl shows values for Interface/Method/Address/Gateway/DNS in ofonoctl in the row for the APN "web.vodafone.de".

Marius said
Is your APN set to a proper value (see mmcli --modem=0)?

Yes.

Marius said
For me, when the connection is established, ofonoctl shows values for Interface/Method/Address/Gateway/DNS in ofonoctl in the row for the APN "web.vodafone.de".

I have rows for web.vodafone.de ,  event.vodafone.de , ims . But only the second shows values (and these seem to be correct).

Furthermore, IMS status is show as "Not Registered".

For (banking) apps needing a set login password, i have the same need. Great to hear you will set an option for that!

Please implement this feature to make banking app work!!!