Comment by goldenarm
8 hours ago
I do agree, mobile OSS OSes are rough. My point is that we should help them instead of helping Google's toxic relationship. It happened with Chrome/Blink, and everyone already forgot that lesson.
About hard-forking Android, no one was brave enough (pun intended) to do that for Chrome, considering the insane complexity and engineering costs (>$1B/y). (Only Apple was able to affort it with Webkit/Safari, but they are in the ad business too.)
I kinda dont see how both of you cant be right. We need a mobile OS that google isnt involved in. Why not use pure open source android to do it. It can only be cheaper than making it from scratch, since it has alot of work already done on it
AOSP has so few of the features a full phone needs today. Google has moved too much of the Phone OS into "Google Play Services". This is already the Extend phase of the classic "embrace, extend, extinguish". Given how the next most popular AOSP implementation, Amazon's Kindle Fire isn't even trying to compete in the phone space and involves an equally large company throwing nearly as much money into an "also ran" alternative to "Google Play Services", it seems easy enough to argue Android may even already be in the extinguish phase.
(ETA: See also Microsoft's many years of trying to build its own "Google Play Services" competitor. Eventually breaking and making use of Amazon's. Then giving up entirely again on a de-Googled alternative to running Android apps.)
(Copying my reply from below)
Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
But I agree that it is a significant endeavor. But the OSS community succeeded in similar projects before, and the current state of the Linux desktop makes me hopeful.
> Building and maintainance cost are not linear, especially when you inherit legacy code. The AOSP codebase isn't great, is 4x bigger than the Linux Kernel, and full of "Ship now, patch later" mess.
And yet the GrapheneOS devs seem to be managing just fine.
> But I agree that it is a significant endeavor.
Yes, in fact it is orders of magnitude more significant an endeavor that just building upon and improving the existing AOSP stack.
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Should not the Netscape -> Mozilla example be a good inspiration in that regard?
chrome was the fork. KHTML from Konqueror became webkit became Safari and chrome.
I still use Konqueror occasionally. It no longer uses KHTML (it uses blink now iirc through Qt webengine (which just got webextension support, someone's working on adding them to falkon so I'm sure Konqueror isn't too far behind)) but it works surprisingly well. It's still a great file manager if any of you remember how good it was