OpenMobile Updates (USA reseller)

[rik]

I posted some time back announcing my new business, OpenMobile, which sells phones with iodéOS preinstalled to USA customers, but thought it was time for a bit of an update.

I have now added the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 and the Pixel Tablet 11, as well as listed a few of my beloved Pixel 3a XL which I just upgraded over the holidays with brand new batteries (and newly installed factory original screens as they were damaged units previously). The Pixel Tablet and Pixel 3a XL don’t have official iodéOS builds so they will be sold with my unofficial Pixel builds (which do now include OTA updates but do not have the ability to relock their bootloaders). You can see these new products (and my existing offerings) here: Store | open[mobile] Trust your phone again!

Regarding “success”, I would say it has been a good learning process and I feel I have a good business model but, honestly, sales have been fairly slow. I keep my eyes on pricing (usually I will make monthly price adjustments based on the market rates) and look for other “business to business” suppliers that could possibly keep my prices down, but honestly any other custom ROM phone resellers are significantly more costly than mine, so I don’t think this is the issue.

It may just be that I need to do more marketing but I am still at a bit of a loss where to put my efforts in that regard. I do firmly believe that my country, more than ever, really needs what iodé has to offer, but how to raise awareness?

UPDATE 19 Feb 2026: OpenMobile now offers new and used Moto G 5G (2024) models as well.

[MissPiggy]

Just a note of support. I wish you a lot of success, since you are right, there are so many people out there who really need your product!

I would buy, but since you are in the US and I am in Europe, this is not an option. But let me tell you: it is not a matter of money. Just look at how much people spend on their pixels! (I am always shocked …) How much they are willing to pay for the service to transfer their data from old to new device. For repairs.

Maybe you could try to find groups where people teach how to use smartphones. Something like “Smartphones for beginners”. You could try raising awareness there and I am sure there will be people who are against GAFAM, but have not yet heard about custom ROM or are not able/willing to flash their smartphones themselves.

I myself rejected smartphones for many years because - unlike with my computer - I had no idea how to protect myself against viruses and ensure data security (apart from that, the tiny screen and lack of a 10-finger keyboard never appealed to me for surfing the internet on the go).

When I finally decided to get a smartphone so I could contact my family via Threema while on a long trip, I spent a lot of time fumbling into the subject, as I knew that I didn’t want stock Android, having always avoided Google.

If I had someone like you living nearby, I would have loved to buy from you and save myself all the trouble! And I think there are more people like me (I’m 58, by the way) who don’t have the time or the patience to learn how to use it. They’ll be happy to become your customers.

Find them in beginners’ groups. They might even buy devices for their families, too

[rik]

Thanks a lot, Miss Piggy! For everyone, if you are in Europe and are looking for a phone with iodé pre-installed please visit https://iode.shop! OpenMobile only exists as iodé themselves currently only sell to the European market, but we would not look to compete against them for sales. I feel strongly about not biting the hand that is feeding us

Regarding “raising local awareness”, I am meeting in the coming week with a few local tech enthusiasts in my city that are interested in the privacy phone market in the US, but as you may guess, there is one big player in the privacy ROM world (hint: they only sell Pixel devices) that has taken a majority of the mindshare here. So iodé is certainly an unknown entity ('Muricans not knowing how to pronounce the name is a bit of a challenge too ).

But to this point in an effort to emphasize / differentiate what is possible with iodéOS vs. that other big privacy ROM and also to address interest for a NEW phone shipping with iodéOS preinstalled, I have just added the Moto G 5G (2024) fogo model to the OpenMobile store!!

Even though it was originally released nearly 2 years ago, there is new / unsold stock still available. That could be because the SOC with 4GB of RAM may not be acceptable to many that know how bloated stock Moto firmware is. But I think it will be quite an acceptable, albeit budget friendly, offering with iodéOS. Thoughts? Do you think there is demand for products like this?

Bootnote: it took a LOT of brain cells cross-referencing what Moto models have sufficient stock in the US with what models have official LineageOS ports. In this case, the Moto G 5G (2024) fogo doesn’t have an official iodéOS port, so I will be producing a community build (with OTA updates) and shipping the device with it. Users can request an alternative (such as LineageOS for microG) should they prefer. But the Moto G32/42/52 and Edge series that iodé has official builds for are all not (easily) available in the USA from what I can find.

[rik]

OK one more update if anyone reads this far (sorry a bit wordy when I am thinking out loud )

Summary: Americans just don’t know how to type é so I am trying some Unicode and CSS wizardry hacks

Details:

To facilitate better search results, I just did a bit of an experimental overhaul to my home page openmobile.us to change to “NFD” (“decomposed” é so U+0065 U+0301) instead of “NFC” (“composed” é so U+00e9).

Unicode boffins will know that NFC is standard and recommended (for sorting, etc) over NFD whenever NFC codepoints exist (for sorting, for backspace to treat it as a single character instead of 2, etc). However, in the case where USA customers don’t know how to make é they just write “iode phone usa” or “iodeOS phone usa”, for example.

I was testing some big bad Google anonymous searches (including … Gemini: sorry planet) with those “non accented terms” and OpenMobile wasn’t being listed at all. But when I did use the correct NFC character such as as “iodé phone usa” or “iodéOS phone usa” then I was the #2 hit right behind iode.tech at #1!! Note that iode.tech still ranks very high with “iode phone usa” because all of the web addresses and links have iode in them (such as iode.tech or community.iode.tech without the accent mark (but all the visible text is properly NFC as it should be).

Anyway, I thought a good compromise would be to move to NFD, since if you search for “iode” it will hit, as “iodé” is iode + U+0301. I wanted to still display correctly instead of just displaying “iode” even though US customers will likely on search on that because I would like “'Muricans” to be a bit more internationally minded. At the same time, I also didn’t want to remove the NFC code (only using NFD instead) because IF people do type it as iodé (NFC) I want to show up in results too!

My experiment then is to write it like this in all instances on my homepage:

iodéOS<span style='width:1px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;'>(alternately spelled iodéOS iodeOS)</span>

This then starts with the NFD iodéOS (which is displayed) with the text “(alternately spelled iodéOS [NFC] or iodeOS [unaccented])” after it, but this wordy alternate spelling comment is effectively limited to a 1px x 1px box. It isn’t “hidden” but it is so small they are effectively not seen, since I think that fully hiding them would degrade them being used in search results.

Even still I may not have any change on my search results, Google indexing is probably smart enough to know this is a bit of a game I am playing, but initial testing are showing that Google seems quite happy with this change:

Hey! Look at that! Big Bad “yuk” AI Overview knows about OpenMobile now when searching for iode phone usa!!

Note: Europeans (and nearly everyone from the non-English majority world) know best, however. Any other approaches you would use to ensure that search results on a key term that have an accented character in it are found by users without an accented character on their keyboard?

[volker01]

I understand the importance of the accent aigu in French, but indeed it might be good idea to not use it for more international compatibility? On the other side, it looks good with the accend. So the Idee with the small fontsize in websites is also pretty good!

I included “iodé” in my personal dictionary, because I don’t always have the sign present either.

[MissPiggy]

@volker01

it might be good idea to not use it for more international compatibility?

The Spaniards and the Italians would put the acute accent on the e for indicating the stressed syllable, too. I just learned that there are quite a lot of languages using it for this purpose.

For me on my German keyboard, the ´ is literally right next to the ß and the ü and very easy to type.
But I know that the British and Americans do think different of diacritics, they seem to think that they are merely ornamental (mostly in metal bands.)

[volker01]

@MissPiggy

For me on my German keyboard

For me it is not, because I have switched the heliboard to “QWERTZ” because I have a small device.
But now I have expanded the diacritics, and now have more sign’s. é.

[xseagdc]

As a guy who lives in the US, I would definitely try this out sometime in the future. I would love to see it succeed. God bless!