[djsumdog]

You can install stock Win 10 on any machine you buy, or most Linux distros with the same boot image thanks to UEFI and the PC spec. Android ARMs are NOT an architecture. They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels.

Oreo and the /vendor partition may help with this some. Still, it's a far cry from the Linux/PCs days of the 90s. I've written about this before:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/

[derefr]

> They're random pins soldered to random shit with little upstreamable in their hacked to hell kernels.

Sounds like arcade cabinets. Maybe we need something that does for Android ARM devices what MAME does for those: specifies each device as an abstract wiring diagram of pins to bits of patched kernel acting as ROMs. And then make that whole thing into a kernel virtualization-provider module, which uses the stock kernel for anything not masked over by ROMs.

[pjc50]

This is what devicetree is supposed to be.

However, as with the arctic machine, the incentives are misaligned - they actively don't want to be commoditized.

[djsumdog]

Windows phones did at least have UEFI + arm. You can unlock the bootloaders of many of them now. But there's still no driver support for mobile data and several other critical hardware components.

[monocasa]

But none of that matters for app developers.

(Also, Wintel machines are very much random pins soldered to random crap, they just do a better job papering over it with ACPI AML bytecode)