Comment by lucb1e

6 days ago

And (present tense) forces OEMs to not ship with utilities that let users access their own data

Fairphone wanted to give users full access on the Fairphone 2, but were contractually disallowed if they wanted to also ship the Android Market, Google Maps, etc., which users can't otherwise install themselves so it was essential to pre-install for a normal user experience. That's why they made two OSes for that phone: a googleful one and a free OS based on AOSP that you can install if you don't want Google (https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-op...). Nowadays they let the /e/ Foundation do that work with e/OS. They're supportive of it but apparently don't have the internal manpower to continue making and supporting an extra distribution