Ahem. My HTC 7 came with malware in the keyboard, baked in as an unremovable system app!

Yeah I’m eyeing that one too. Price is good OS looks good. I need to do my homework

The time to support Android was 15 years ago when you could install any OS on any device, side load anything you wanted, root, mod, replace your battery, have full control over your file system, expand your storage, etc.
Or 10 years ago, when Google was selling completely unlocked developer oriented phones, offering most of its services for free, opening sources, and actually innovating in fields like computational photography while also researching interesting concepts like modular phones.

If you feel like you can't vote with your wallet today it's because the market as a whole has abundantly shown that it really doesn't give a fuck about any of those things, and it will always give the dominant position to whoever markets more aggressively or more effectively, even if the business models of those companies go against the consumers' interests.

People in 2007 jumped at the chance to buy a ridiculously overpriced phone with no physical keyboard, a VGA camera without flash, no MMS or 3G support, no apps or customization whatsoever, no expandable storage, no battery replacement, terrible repairability, locked in to proprietary accessories and software, and so on. This, while the competition at the time was putting out cheaper phones with things like OLED screens, professional optics with xenon flashes, dual SIMs, microSD support, the latest connectivity standards, etc.

And when Apple patent trolled, took away things like the headphone jack, or normalized imposing ridiculous costs and taking huge cuts from developers, did people stop buying their products? No, they bought more.

I'm not defending Google at all. Their decline is abhorrent, but it's a corporation, and corporations will always choose profit over everything else. It's really naive to think they'll offer their customers the more ethical option just out of the goodness of their hearts, especially when the market has been taking for granted or even actively discouraging the things that positively differentiated them from the competition.

The 3GS was fine for me and much more response and useful than my previous phone, which happened to ba a Nokia N75.

I developed early web apps (and frontends for native apps) for iPhone and Android around the time the Nexus One launched. If you spent any time using both, the iPhone was a better phone even though the hardware specs didn’t suggest it, I used the 3GS until upgrading to the iPhone 5S. My wife was on an earlier schedule and went 3G, 4, 5C, and we still play old games on her 5C around Halloween with our kid now 12 years later.

AOKP gang rise

I never heard of freedom APK, but Lucky Patcher worked like a charm!

Which is buying a new/used Google Pixel which is still supporting Google. Even if we got it second-hand, the development for GrapheneOS still depends on Pixel phone device and making it support the newer model which is still in a way, support Google as you still getting their product to then jailbreak it.

You can still use AOSP to make your own phone, but you'll just have to built your own apps too, since eventually, all of google play apps aren't gonna work on degoogled Android.

to be fair they havent been making cool tech for a while anymore either.

so will linux foundation drop android using linux kernel?

yup, mostly because of capitalism

Ah yes, I too blame the overworked and underpaid population that were never given a real education besides a dysfunctional and authoritarian public school system which contains at least 50% pro-status-quo propaganda and omit real useful information, and teaches kids to obey teachers and the school admin, and subjugate their free will. /s

This is cruel, now I feel like some kind of criminal. Who knew that the most dangerous criminal is an ordinary consumer who wants freedom...

Linux is just the Kernel, Android is the OS. There's a ton of stuff on top of Linux that makes an Android device.

Making an Android device (or Android device hardware) run Linux isn't hard. In fact, you can just use Termux on pretty much any Android device to run a regular desktop Linux distro run in a container on Android. That way, the Linux distro uses the kernel from the host Android OS and just runs its own userspace parallel to Android's userspace.

But if you want to make a stand-alone Linux phone without Android, your biggest issue is that you won't have phone apps. There's close to no app support for phone-linux. So on your Linux phone you won't get any banking/authenticator/messaging/games/... apps. You can run desktop apps, but that sucks on a tiny touchscreen display. And many use cases (e.g. authenticator/two-factor/buying public transport tickets) are very cumbersome or sometimes even not possible on desktop OSes.

Now you an make your Linux phone run Android by emulating the Android userspace. That's possible, but then again you are basically running Android at that point anyway. But Android with one big caveat: It's not a Google Play Store Certified device, and it will never be if it's not running full Android.

And missing Google Play Store Certification means no google services and no apps that rely on Google Services or require Google Play Store Certification. That means e.g. no Banking/Authenticator apps and many games won't run.

Also, if you aren't actually running Android but some kind of Android emulator, you will always be outdated and buggy.

So essentially you made a phone that

• Runs Linux apps a little better than an Android phone
• Gives you more control
• Allows you to do much, much less in regards to it being an Android phone

People have done it. There are a handful of Linux phones (e.g. Librem 5, Pinephone) that are barely usable as phones due to lack of app support.

They've done the opposite as well, so running Linux on a phone originally designed for Android (e.g. PostmarketOS), also barely usable as a phone.

There's also the middle-ground with custom ROMs, some of them degoogled (like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/ and many others). They run full-fat Android, but without all the Google apps including Play Store, Google Services and of course also without Google Play Store Certification. That's more usable as a phone, but you will still be cut off from anything using Google Services. There are some hacks and workarounds that sometimes work and sometimes not. You might get stuff to work but it's a constant race.

The problem is that currently if you want to use a phone as a full phone that covers all phone usecases, it's got to be an iPhone or a Google certified Android phone.

"I get in line to buy shit phones because I'm oppressed, overworked and underpaid". Alright. Hopefully the corporate overlords will do something about it, then.

you'll just have to built your own apps too

We are well on our way.

I was confused before I made the switch. So many of the most useful kinds of apps weren't maintained anymore by anyone on the Google Play store. I had this surreal feeling that the app ecosystem was getting worse every year.

And then I installed F-Droid and figured out where all of my favorite app developers went. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Not sure how pricing/value actually compares, but it does seem like if you want a phone now for emergencies you’re going to get fleeced (also required data package).

What? You need data make calls now?

I’ll break my sons phone the day that he comes phone with a data harvested machine.

Voice over l t e is not standardized and the carriers on the I p to connect to their system. So every carrier has an encrypted blob that only works with whatever version of phone they want to sell. If you have a major phone like an iPhone or a pixel, then apple and Google work to make sure that those seemlessly download.But if you're any other brand you're kind of screwed. Even Samsung has issues since I can't use the Play Store to distribute it in their own app.Store doesn't have good support from the carriers. The carriers really push that only the phones are purchased from them work. Spokennoise, they also pushed it unsecured.Devices need to be wiped, including them voiceover Lte data.

Look at the issues with australian service right now , they are even trying to stop iphones from other countries from using it. Apple has a whole system to make sure that all phones work with the same voice over lte stuff following the bands match and auto download the blobs.