Install GNOME OS on an Android phone

Installation

Supported phones

This has been only tested on the OnePlus 6 and the Fairphone 5. It may work on other phones that are supported by mainline linux kernel.

Downloading

Download the u-boot build for your device from the Tauchgang project. There are no stable releases yet, download the build for your device from the latest pipeline

Download the GNOME OS aarch64 ISO

Create the disk to flash with: (FIXME: update to-raw.sh)

sudo systemd-repart --empty=create --size=auto --sector-size=4096 --architecture=arm64 --definitions=utils/repart.raw.d/ --image=gnome_os-aarch64.iso userdata.img

(replace gnome_os-aarch64.iso with the actual filename)

Flashing to the phone

You first need to unlock the bootloader. The postmarketOS wiki has nice instructions on how to unlock the bootloader.

You need to clear the dtbo partition, to allow for booting non-Android systems.

fastboot erase dtbo

flash the boot image with:

fastboot flash boot boot.img

Then flash the userdata image with:

fastboot flash userdata userdata.img

Then reboot the phone:

fastboot reboot

Known bugs, workarounds

Selecting time zone in GNOME Initial Setup

Cannot choose a timezone via the textbox

Clicking on the map to select your timezone, should be working instead.

“Next” button is off-screen

Moving the window to the left, should expose the “Next” button. Alternatively, select your time zone, press “Previous”, then “Next”, then press Enter on the on-screen keyboard.

Sound does not work

Not sure why yet.

No modem

For the modem to still work after suspend without restarting ModemManager, you need to use --test-quick-suspend-resume to its command line. For this, run systemctl edit ModemManager.service and write:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/ModemManager --test-quick-suspend-resume

If the modem does not appear in other cases, maybe try to restart ModemManager.

No SIM

sudo qmicli -d qrtr://0 --uim-get-card-status

Look for the application ID. Then use it in:

sudo qmicli -d qrtr://0 --uim-change-provisioning-session='slot=1,activate=yes,session-type=primary-gw-provisioning,aid=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX'

You can create unit in /etc/systemd/system to run this command. You should probably make it start after tqftpserv.service.

For example

[Unit]
After=tqftpserv.service
Before=ModemManager.service
StartLimitBurst=10

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=qmicli -d qrtr://0 --uim-change-provisioning-session='slot=1,activate=yes,session-type=primary-gw-provisioning,aid=12:34:56:78:90:AB:CD:EF:01:23:45:67'
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=1s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

SMS and calls

Install Chats (aka Chatty) and Calls from flathub. RCS messages do not work, if you have multiple SIM on the same phone number, you might not get all messages.

(Calls were not yet tested).

No camera

Still needs patches that are not mainlined yet.

USB host

It has to be switched manually through debugfs, which is not accessible on GNOME OS due to lockdown. Thus it is not possible to switch to host mode.

Modem wants authentication when starting

Something to fix, the polkit configuration is probably wrong for ModemManager.

Device crashes when the screen turns off

Some devices periodically crash when the screen turns off (either due to inactivity or when suspending). The notification LED lights up and turns solid white. After a bit, the phone enters “QUALCOMM CrashDump” mode.

wifi connection keeps dropping

Occasionally, the wifi chipset restarts and briefly drops the current wifi connection. Actively using the connection (e.g: ssh connection, downloading sth.) seems to increase the frequency of disconnects. Bluetooth connections do not drop at all.

plymouth does not work

Plymouth tries to launch, renders incorrectly and exits (first few seconds of bootup). Does not affect the boot process.

RTC clock is incorrect

RTC clock shows current time as ‘Epoch + time since GnomeOS was installed’.

[kawaiicvnt@retard ~]$ timedatectl status
        Local time: Wed 2026-01-07 21:00:01 EET
    Universal time: Wed 2026-01-07 19:00:01 UTC # Actual date
          RTC time: Fri 1970-01-02 22:45:29     # Epoch + time since install

RTC time is not lost between reboots, but there appears to be no RTC available when trying to set the time manually.