Droidian, an Awesome Phone OS for Patient People [by The Privacy Child]

09 May, 2026

This post was last edited 2 minutes ago.

Over the past several months, one of my kids used Droidian as a daily driver on a Pixel 3AXL. Here's a report of the experience, written by The Privacy Child.

Droidian, an awesome phone for patient people.

Please read my dad’s post on this phone if you want more in-depth information. This review is from a user’s perspective. I did not set up Droidian.

I’ve actively been using Droidian on Pixel 3A (which I’ve lovingly dubbed the nerd phone) for the past couple of months now, here is a collection of my thoughts about the phone and the apps that I’ve used.

General

The operating system that this phone uses is very exciting; it’s surprisingly smooth and doesn’t cause too much bother. It is responsive and doesn’t make you wait too long. I also like that the themes and colours still feel like Linux. It’s a little silly, I know, but even the settings menu is the same style as Linux, which is pleasing to me.

Apps

The main apps I used:

Flare is a great unofficial Signal app. Even when I chatted for many hours with a friend, it held up quite well. Sometimes there would be a little bit of lag, but that could be fixed by restarting the app. It must be noted that you can’t seek out contact with a person on Flare, as you can’t ‘add’ people; you must message them on a different device to ‘activate’ the chat, or they must message you. There is no calling on Flare.

At one point the app did stop working for me. What I did to fix it was remove the Flare account from linked devices on my other phone, uninstalled Flare, restarted the nerdphone, and then reinstalled Flare and restarted again. I may have done too many restarts, but when I did it differently, then Flare would not work. A small error I encountered was that if you cleared your chat notifications while having the app open, it would cause the app to freeze and required a restart to fix.

High Tide—an awesome Tidal app that allows you to listen to music easily. I haven't noticed any problems with it so far, although it is a shame you can’t download music onto your phone for offline listening, because that is mainly what I mainly use the Tidal app for on my phone.

Firefox web browser—The browser works well here, and I like it more than the mobile browsing apps I’ve had in the past; it shows you all the tabs like it does on a laptop, rather than having to click a button to view all the tabs. Occasionally the formatting of certain websites was a little strange, but it didn’t really get in the way of my browsing.

Texting and Calling—Overall very similar to what you’re used to; however, it always took me some time to figure out how to start a text conversation or find out how to call one of my contacts.

Quirks

The biggest problem I noticed is the screenshot feature; when you take a screenshot, it also screenshots the power menu. I think this is something that needs to be fixed soon.

For some reason all my emojis were blue, but to me that is a plus, and I think that the emojis should remain blue; it’s actually a very fun feature.

When sending pictures or browsing through your files, you don't get a thumbnail 'preview' of the photos. This problem does not occur when browsing the screenshot folder (but the screenshot folder is not very diverse, because each screenshot includes the screenshot tool, as described earlier).

A small problem is that there is only one volume slider, so if you are listening to music, you also get your notifications at that volume. It’s not a huge issue, but I thought it was worth noting.

Crashes

I have experienced crashes, which tend to be annoying if you’re in the middle of something such as texting a friend or listening to music. It means you have to wait for the phone to restart and reconnect to the network. It’s not too bad, but if this happens repeatedly, it can get on your nerves.

SIM card

One quite important thing I have noticed is that occasionally after a restart it stops asking for my SIM pin, and then if you aren’t connected to the internet, the phone is rendered useless. I have had to take out and reinsert the SIM card while on a train, which is a bit frustrating, but my solution is just to carry one of those metal pins in the phone case. I am not sure whether this is the phone, or Droidian itself, or because of all the restarts.

One more quirk of the system is the 4G; for some reason the phone prefers to be in 2G. Unfortunately, 2G does not get you very far today. In order to get out of 2G, I’ve had to do this:

Settings -> Mobile network -> Network mode (swap to: '2g, 3g, 4g, (preferred)') -> Then tap in and out of “network”; this changes it to 4G.

I am not sure whether this was only an issue for my network provider or others have experienced it before, but I’ve had to do this at every restart. When traveling abroad, I did not encounter this problem.

A phone for everyday use?

Yes, I think you can use this as a main phone. Occasionally things go wrong, like opening apps can sometimes cause glitches, or you are unable to actually close them. But so far I haven’t really encountered any major problems that could not be fixed through a restart.

So as long as you have a bit of patience, this phone will work as a main phone. I haven’t had issues with calling or texting, but occasionally the 4G would act a little funny. I’m not sure if that’s the network provider or the phone itself.

It must be said that I don’t use my phone very often, which doesn’t make me a brilliant representative for phone users. At home I usually use my laptop, and I don’t always bring my phone outside with me. I have taken it traveling, so I have actively been using it, but I don’t use social media apps, and I don’t call people very often. So for me, it checks all the boxes of what a phone should do; however, I don’t have very many boxes. Someone who uses social media apps more actively, like Instagram or TikTok, would have to look around for alternative apps; however, if you are able to access your social media accounts in a browser, it should work. Although I did try using YouTube on the browser, and it was quite laggy.

Community of Nerds

What I like the most about this phone is apps like Flare and High Tide. It’s really cool to see that people are making apps for this phone. It really makes it feel like a community project with people contributing in different ways, which feels much more exciting than what you get with a regular phone, which is just a company releasing software.

It also makes me feel more patient. If a company is releasing software as a product, I expect it to be (almost) perfect, with few to no bugs. In this case, since it’s really more like a passion project, I feel much more understanding and patient. I think that’s important to keep in mind; you can’t start using Droidian expecting a perfect operating system, and it would also be unfair to compare something like Google Android, a big company with many developers behind it to a community project such as this one.

I’ve scrolled through some available apps on linuxphoneapps.org and noticed a surprising amount of calculators and AI chat apps, which is quite funny to me. How many calculators does one person need on their phone? I thought one would be enough…

In summary

Droidian is an awesome system that runs quite smoothly with occasional crashes and occasional discrepancies. The apps that I tried work well, and it’s very cool that people are actively working on this. If you are considering Droidian as a main option, patience is key. There are things that you may be used to from other systems that are not available here, and you will encounter certain issues. However, if you just need it as a phone to call and text and maybe do the occasional web search, you shouldn't encounter too many problems. For someone who more actively uses their phone, I would recommend having a look at linuxphoneapps.org and seeing if all your needs are met first.