Comment by klibertp

> It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony

From what I understand (based on pretty basic research into using old smartphones (which I already have a full drawer of) as home appliances), the main problem is that device manufacturers only provide binary blobs for drivers and firmware, and they are not too happy to share them with non-Google parties. And it's non-trivial to handle those blobs, even if you get them (they weren't written for your tech stack, so you need infrastructure around them to make them useful).

> Because building out AOSP and or just something forked/from scratch is... actually... accessible now in my opinion.

Starting such a project, and even getting to 0.0.1 release, is now simpler than any time in the past.

Getting from 0.0.1 to 1.0-alpha did not get any easier at all. The current AI requires both a great harness and a skilled operator to add meaningful code to a large project without going nuclear on code quality.

It'll be quite a few years until things like "make me a custom ROM with AOSP modified to do X" result in anything other than absolute tragedy.

> We are subject to the fancies of the behemoths that exist to self perpetuate. Working around them and depending on them is demoralizing and not fun.

That's true, especially the "not fun" part. However, I expect the vast majority of users don't want any fun on their devices, aside from games (and even then, only with kernel-level anti-cheat). Normally, this is solved by companies offering one product for "casuals" and another for devs or power-users. This works, but breaks down for social things: a messaging app that won't run unless you buy a Pixel and flash a custom ROM is DOA as an app (it might function as a solution in case of people who are really desperate for the features the app provides, but that's probably too small a population to keep the project afloat).