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by jraph 1962 days ago
And anyway, Android, even the free software part, will always do what Google wants to do. One may fork Android, but maintaining an ever diverging fork would have an ever growing cost.

And there are aspects of newer Android versions that are less than ideal. For instance, one can see how Termux is struggling to keep working: it is not possible to run binaries that are not part of an Android package (APK) anymore. This is a security feature, but it's not always relevant depending on how you use and manage your OS.

Plus, developing for Android is a pain. You need to download, setup and use a bloated SDK with a non-free license. There's Android Rebuilds [1], but it's not complete.

I trust GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, Manjaro to evolve in a direction I like. postmarketOS probably too, but I'm not familiar with it as well.

[1] https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/
2 comments
tmzt 1961 days ago
Hasn't the ios equivalent moved to emulation at this point?

Kernel support is there waiting to compiled for user namespace isolated containers. It would just require an official way to launch them as a normal user.

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kop316 1962 days ago
All good points too.

Developing for the Pinephone has been nice! I have been using Mobian for it over SSH, and I am pretty happy with how well it has been going.

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