The Bananarchy Manifesto

(full version, by Luxferre, Oct 2026)

The past

With the 2018 release of Nokia 8110 4G, many power users of feature phones saw a glimmer of hope about possible resurrection of Firefox OS and returning open technologies and true Linux-powered keypad smartphones to the mainstream market. However, those in power decided to go another way, and eight years later, this phone, as well as other similar ones, is mostly viewed as nothing but abandonware.

It doesn't have to be like this though, and the Bananarchy project has been built from the ruins of three other essentially dead projects to prove just that.

The present...

...of KaiOS

Having had a rather unsuccessful debut with Cingular Flip 2 (Alcatel OT-4044O) and then more successful launch in India with JioPhone, KaiOS, a keypad-oriented reboot of Firefox OS, had gained its true global popularity only after releasing Nokia 8110 4G. But now, it's hard to tell whether it was popularity or infamy. Most users who tried it out were left disappointed: KaiOS wasn't even remotely mature enough to compete with Android, and wasn't fast and snappy enough to compete with MAUI (including then-current S30+ generations), Mocor and other "true" feature phone platforms. The only competitive advantage it could offer outside India was WhatsApp integration, and even that went very slowly and eventually didn't last long.

But those who were disappointed the most were us, the power users, hackers and tinkerers, those who awaited from Nokia something akin to no less than a resurrection of Symbian. Instead, we saw how the company with literally no moat decided to go the way of Apple by officially disabling all sideloading (that, for the record, had been present in the original Firefox OS) and, on top of that, employing unsolicited IMEI+IMSI pair tracking to identify all KaiStore users and decide which features to enable or disable automatically based on that information. And when the problem of sideloading had been solved by finding the famous *#*#33284#*#* (*#*#debug#*#*) MMI code, and the problem of rooting the device had been solved even before the official firehose loader for it had been found, people started putting together various solutions for debloating the system, tweaking it to make less laggy, and eventually even writing their own replacement for call log, phone book and other stock components written using the most inappropriate frameworks for such devices.

The KaiOS developers, however, didn't listen to us. The only things they did were: first they patched the vulnerability that allowed to obtain root, then made it harder to get into the debug mode and the developer menu overall. Time passed, new models appeared, rooting and sideloading became harder and harder, and the cherry on the cake was KaiOS 3.0 that was totally incompatible and ran on a drastically different hardware released almost exclusively in the US. Now (October 2026), there are some US-exclusive devices that run 4.0 which is virtually the same. For the rest of the world, the totally outdated 2.x branch is still being maintained (with the most recent version being about 2.6), but the current model list has disappeared from the official KaiOSTech website.

As a result of all this, for most of the world, KaiOS in its stock form is likely more dead than alive. And now, we're left with phones that still are working but not as functional and mostly unpleasant to use compared to what there is on the market today.

...of GerdaOS

GerdaOS (codenamed Project Pris) was the first (and most known) attempt to "bring KaiOS back to the people" in a form of a custom KaiOS system image build, targeted exclusively at Nokia 8110 4G TA-1048. Besides the traditional shell-level debloating and permanent rooting, it integrated several privacy hardening patches, additional system utils, an early form of the alternative app installer directly from the microSD card, and some custom artwork. At the time, it worked faster and generally was more reliable than the stock KaiOS firmware for the 8110 4G.

However, as the author became overwhelmed with work and then eventually switched to another phone as his daily driver, the project got abandoned and later fully archived, with the last GerdaOS build matching official v13 firmware from Nokia (the absolute last official version being v17). The community went on with adapting several solutions implemented in GerdaOS to other targets, but now all of it is just a memory and a read-only repo.

...of postmarketOS

Several community members realized early on that attempts to improve an OS whose developers actively fight back against any improvements were doomed to be unproductive, and went on to adapting postmarketOS (officially called Nura since Sep 27 2026) to the Nokia 8110 4G hardware, following up with the later models as well. Unfortunately, while pmOS was an excellent starting choice for a new, truly independent custom Linux distribution for this family of phones back then, now, as of October 2026, the situation is drastically different: not only has any porting work completely stalled with the targets marked as deprecated, but the project itself has been taken over by those who appear to pursue dubious political agendas much more than smooth user experience, enforcing various anti-freedom practices and effectively making the Nura distribution impossible to contribute to.

As such, in order to maintain the support for Nokia's feature phones as the main targets and to preserve the original spirit of freedom, hacker-friendliness and net neutrality that the early pmOS offered, a decision has been made to create a hardfork of Nura with:

the primary focus on keypad-driven devices, specifically those on Qualcomm MSM8905/MSM8909 chipsets as first-class citizens,
better hardware support for those devices than the stock pmOS/Nura offered,
more up-to-date software with sensible preinstalled defaults to achieve full on-device autonomy with least effort,
zero discrimination against any technology or its users,
hardware-specific privacy-oriented tweaks and practices, going above and beyond those started by GerdaOS and Wallace Toolbox.

The mission

Bananarchy's mission is to finally bring back full-featured keypad smartphone funcitonality into the supported devices by offering full, unlocked, unlimited, optimized and native Linux experience.

The tenets

Regardless of the target, Bananarchy does and always will operate under the following ten principles.

Absolute freedom to download, install, explore, research, fork and modify. While some underlying components, like the Alpine Linux distribution upstream or the remnants from pmOS, are guided by their own licensing terms, all Bananarchy-specific customization is fully released into the public domain.
Absolute freedom to access any component of your own device. Unlike KaiOS or even GrapheneOS, Bananarchy places no restrictions on any part of the device access, including WLAN or baseband firmware or configuration.
With absolute freedom comes absolute responsibility. The end user is the only one who can be responsible for running anything on the system, including software that can be illegal in the user's jurisdiction. Since Bananarchy essentially turns your phone into a full-featured pocket Linux PC, treat it as such and don't run anything that can get you into trouble.
No discrimination against any user by any parameter. In particular, Bananarchy, as shipped, will NOT comply with any request to include any restrictions based on user's age, location, carrier, host platform, phone vendor or model, and will NEVER collect or send any of this or other identification information that would help anyone with enforcing these restrictions.
No discrimination against contributors. While setting up a public repo on a truly uncensored platform is currently technically challenging, the author is welcoming any constructive suggestions, forks and patches, regardless of the method they were created and the platform they were published on (as long as it is accessible to the author). Conversely, if the Nura project ever decides to abolish their current anti-freedom policies and removes the keypad Nokias from its deprecation list, Bananarchy will never be against merging its own patches into Nura. A project discussion group for Bananarchy is currently under construction.
Performance matters. If a feature to be included OOTB has a single implementation that makes the phone laggy or quickly eats through its battery, it will not be included into the release until that implementation is optimized and thoroughly tested on a real device.
Autonomy matters. Bananarchy always aims to include enough pre-installed development tools to start creating your own software for it on the device itself. Additionally, it includes some easy to use shell aliases to make common tasks even simpler.
Freshness matters. Unless a new version of a package is incompatible with particular hardware or violates any of the other principles listed here, it should always be preferred over the old version. The (default) exception to this rule is the Linux kernel with proprietary model-specific firmware which can be difficult to link with the newer kernels for a particular target. Still, pmOS and by extension Bananarchy already does use a newer kernel than the one KaiOS had been shipped with.
Support quality matters. Better to support fewer targets but support them as completely as possible, than try porting the OS to everything out there and never get any target working 100%. Bananarchy is being developed iteratively, and the first target it aims to fully support is Nokia 8110 4G, with 2720 Flip, 800 Tough and 8000 4G coming after.
User experience matters. While Bananarchy is deliberately aimed at power users who want full control over their devices at the expense of some eye candy, it has been striving to be much more than just "pmOS with patches" since the very first day of development. Unique tools and more optimizations are being added regularly and the result is always being reviewed on a real device by a real human from the end user's perspective. Any UI/UX hiccups are being caught and fixed early on in the process, which is more than pmOS could offer and a total opposite of how KaiOS had been shipped on these phones.

The future

As a hobbyist project mostly developed by a single man in his free time, Bananarchy may eventually suffer the same fate as GerdaOS and cannot guarantee any particular feature or target support delivered within any timeline, however, there is indeed a clear vision of the milestones on the path to the first stable release version:

Full hardware support for Nokia 8110 4G (nokia-argon), including the hardware originally unsupported by pmOS/Nura.
A set of significant performance improvements over pmOS/Nura.
Revamped, optimized, personalizable UI for phone-specific functions like dialer, callscreen, contacts, call log and SMS.
A set of privacy-focused system utilities.
Full hardware support for Nokia 2720 Flip (beatles).
Full hardware support for Nokia 800 Tough (coconut).
Full hardware support for Nokia 8000 4G (sparkler).
A public GUI SDK to develop keypad-first, native Linux mobile applications for small screens.
Full localization and multilingual input support.
Community resources for the users to connect and share their experience, ideas, suggestions and customizations.

The verdict (aka the short version of The Manifesto)

In the trying times when:

perfectly working devices are declared obsolete and not getting any official support,
official mobile OS developers opt for further closing down instead of opening up,
any bit of common sense and technical merit gets overrun by dubious political agendas,
less and less people still remember what a usable keypad phone UI/UX looked like,
even less people remember that Nokia phones used to support installable UI themes,
and the true spirit of EZX, Qtopia, Maemo, MeeGo, Firefox OS and now, it seems, postmarketOS too has been completely lost in time, not unlike tears in rain, —

the Bananarchy Linux distribution is here to help anyone who still dares to challenge the current mobile OS world order and truly own their devices that were hopelessly written off by the manufacturer.

We start small, with the focus on the 8110 4G and other Qualcomm-based keypad Nokias originally running (now outdated) KaiOS, but then the distro may extend to support different types of phones and chipsets. The road to make keypad smartphones great again was never truly abandoned, and the most exciting section of this road starts right here.

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