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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel

11 hours ago

There is no alternative.

Apple isn't going to let them build on top of iOS, and anything except those two is dead in the water because it'll never have users because it is missing a bunch of critical apps, and will never have those apps because it doesn't have users.

Remember when we thought IE's monopoly could never be broken? Or windows?

Anything can and will go down. Nothing is forever.

  • IE's monopoly was replaced by Chrome and Safari's, and Safari only exists because Apple gives you no choice but to use it on iOS. Firefox had a brief spot on top, but it really didn't last that long.

    Windows still has the vast majority share of desktop.

    • Chrome is the outlier there. It didn't come with any desktop OS and still got near 100% market share, even before Android contributed to that. How? It's worth studying.

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    • Yes but that's my point. Monopolies don't last. We have other ones now yes. But that's because the earlier ones died.

      And yes we still have windows as the major desktop OS but don't forget, in the 90s/early 2000s windows was equivalent to computing.

      These days the desktop OS is much less relevant than it was and many people don't even own a laptop or desktop anymore. They just do everything on their phone. And Microsoft totally and completely lost that race.

> There is no alternative.

There have been several projects like Ubuntu Touch to create an open Linux for smartphones.

That would be an open alternative.

Android is not open.

  • Android is an open source Linux distribution for smartphones. It doesn't have to be used with Google Mobile Services. AOSP is far more private, secure, usable and compatible with a far broader amount of apps. Why wouldn't we use that as the starting point even if the goal was to diverge?

  • The AOSP is fully open source. What you suggest is a significant step back in terms of privacy and security.

    • The AOSP does not run modern Android apps, since Google has been replacing the APIs those apps require with closed source versions (that only ship as part of Google Play) for over a decade.

      2 replies →

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  • That's a huge downgrade for privacy, security, usability, battery life and compatibility with apps. GrapheneOS is Linux too. Linux doesn't mean glibc and systemd. Linux is unfortunately not a great base for an OS focused on privacy and security but it's the only practical choice at this time. In the long term, it needs to be replaced as the bare metal kernel.

  • I have it. It's far too slow to be useful, and it's not the hardware's fault. GTK and Libhybris are bad separately and hot garbage together. This problem won't be going away while the hardware is relevant.