Why we built RO-OS
Phones stopped serving the people holding them. Every OS update quietly moves the buttons, breaking the mental model a parent or grandparent spent years building. Attention is engineered away by an endless grid of apps. And a perfectly capable device is declared obsolete and sent to landfill the moment its vendor loses interest.
RO-OS is our answer: a calm, consistent, private mobile Linux that you own — where the interface does not shift under you, screen time is something you control rather than something done to you, and a decade-old device stays useful for another decade.
The bet we are making
Attention you control
No infinite app grid engineered to keep you scrolling. Screen time is a choice you make, not a metric someone else optimizes.
Interfaces that stay put
No surprise redesigns that break the mental model an older parent spent years learning. The UX you know stays the UX you have.
Out of the landfill
A capable device kept alive for another decade on mainline Linux — the greenest phone is the one already in your hand.
Voice in, compute anywhere
The next phone is not a wall of apps — it is a simple front-end that takes your voice on-device (whisper.cpp) and computes elsewhere: privately over your own VPN, or with the frontier AI model of your choice.
What's cooking
Pixel C · daily-driver
Netflix & HBO Max in Firefox, on ARM — GPU-accelerated.
The story →
OnePlus 6T · daily-driver
The flagship. Full Wayland, GPU-accelerated, every sensor live.
The story →
Nexus 7 (2013) · core I/O
Booted 2026-07-22. Panel lit and now survives a blank; Wi-Fi, BT and A2DP live.
The story →
Jetson TK1 · reference board
Our CI hardware and Kepler GPU proving ground — not the destination.
The story →
Nexus 5 · in progress
Live Wayland shell + open GPU; audio and modem still blocked.
The story →
HTC Nexus 9 · in progress
Panel lit after a multi-week kernel fight; browser on glass.
The story →
Galaxy Tab S6 · in progress
Snapdragon 855 on mainline; panel lit, turnip Vulkan on hardware, video core waking.
The story →
Shield Tablet · in progress
Wayland daily driver — speakers audible, the GPU rendering. The radio is the wall.
The story →
Tegra Note 7 · display + touch
Boots, carries WiFi and keeps its own crash logs. Touch is the one dead chip.
The story →
Project Tango · regressed
Mounts root at +3 s. A regression: a build on 2026-08-09 reached sshd, none since.
The story →
Galaxy Tab 4 · early
Hardware fully mapped; kernel mid boot-loop, and still no way to read why.
The story →
A device is "supportable" when the panel lives, a private VPN joins from first boot, a real browser runs, and the battery is managed for longevity. Eleven devices, honestly graded — nothing hidden in a "done" bucket. Zero cloud accounts required.