Hopefully Graphene is developing a hard fork of AOSP with Motorola, so they don't have to be reliant on Google

The way i understand it, what Google did in Android is no joke, and definitely very hard to implement on a small team that basically works on just fine tuning your existing code. Birthing all this onto Linux is quite an undertaking, and it would need hardware partnership agreements.

Android is not the problem here. In fact I love Android very much. What I don't like is Google.

AOSP and Google need to be seperated. While Linux mobile would be nice, phones work differently than PCs and I don't think Linux will just "work" like it does on desktop. There's a reason why it's so far behind. Popularity and viability. I just don't think it's worth it.

Android is amazing. It's secure, great, snappy and it's still very open. However I do NOT trust Google that they will not fuck up the freedom aspect of it in the near future.

Agreed. It's time to have a truly open source OS. I didn't know that they had that opinion, but it doesn't surprise me. They seem extremely... determined is probably the nicest way I can put it.

I used to be enthusiastic about graphene, but between this and a few other things, I'm not sure pursuing using graphene is really worthy of my time, if only because of the devs' attitudes, or at least the attitude of whoever is doing their communications.

I have an even worse feeling about the LLM code in the kernel...

Considering that the big AI vendors do deals in behind the scene, Google is going to ask for same favors to try and retroactively relicense LLM slop code.

Android 3 did exist, but it was only released on tablets around 2011-12

All the Empire is rotten and its companies were left to feed on carrion, it isn't just Alphabet.

Especially Google with Android. Closing off Android is baffling. Did they not learn anything from the last 30 years?

i maintain that the most sensible thing would be to develop a minimal linux "shim" that just runs an android VM, then you no longer have to develop ROMs for every specific device and you can start slowly porting features over to the linux side of the whole shebang.

We all are, but it's going to be a long time and my concern is that it won't be soon enough. It was convenient that Windows finally crossed the enshittification Rubicon just as Linux was ready for mainstream adoption. But mobile Linux is far, far, behind anything else. Although I do think that immutability and flatpaks are a good foundation.

Need more Mighty Cats.

Once there are linux phones you won't have to root them ;).

It's entirely possible but would require a massive increase in volunteer manpower just to keep up.

In a way they already do. The trouble is that most big companies want the Google name and PlayStore.

Possible? Yes. Plausible? No, mainly due to the massive ecosystem that Google has built and the fact that maintaining compatibility with newer versions of Android without actually rebasing on top of that newer Android version would be an insane amount of work.

Yeah, I'd love to see Graphene develop their own Linux distro for both desktop and mobile, especially since they like to complain about Linux security a lot.

Almost every non-Google Android device already runs a custom fork maintained by either the manufacturer or the operator, if not a third party.