[dogma1138]

They can do that with many Android phones it’s not hard to find ones with a boot loader you can open including the Google Pixel.

I used Android from day one till the LG Nexus and I switched to an iPhone after having to spend yet another weekend compiling a kernel to update my phone.

Most people want a device that “just works”.

Overall I would be good money on the fact that the percentage of people that say they want to be able to hack their phone freely and will actually do so is very slim because again Android gives you 90% if not more of that freedom already and some devices even can boot other OSes.

Sure things like the blobs on the baseband are still closed but that will always be the case no one realistically is expecting a high end 100% open source phone, and if you are keep dreaming.

And yes while having a phone that just works and one that is open isn’t mutually exclusive in principal but it is in practice especially once you account for economics.

Like it or not securing an open system is harder, and companies don’t like investing time and money developing features hardly anyone will use.

[t0astbread]

Well, you're right, Android does offer more extensibility than people give it credit for: If you're okay with its heavyweight development tools you can (for example) write a custom launcher to change some of the UI and you can extend/intercept some system functionality with apps. There's also Termux which offers a Linux shell environment based on the underlying kernel combined with APIs for Android-specific functionality. It's actually quite powerful, you can run scripts or daemons in the background without a problem.

But what I mean is most of the system isn't really open like that. Configuration, application data and stuff like that is mostly managed by the system and you can't access or change that data without major hacks. Termux feels like a second-class citizen because most of the ecosystem isn't built with something like it in mind (in contrast to the "CLI-by-default" experience on other Linux systems). There's also a few (non-embedded) system components like the backup system (which, if I'm not mistaken, is provided by the Google Services Framework) which you can't easily replace.

Of course, when it comes to security this is not something you should give to anyone who doesn't know to protect themselves using it. And I assume it wouldn't be a financial success either, I just guessed this is what people mean when they say they don't like Android because it's too restrictive.

[brnt]

I've been using LineageOS for some years now, on 5 phones so far, and it has been, apart from initial installation, 'just works'. It auto updates, I never have to compile anything, I wouldn't know how to.