[dlcarrier]

Twenty years ago, if you told me that by today we'd have smart phones with eight or more cores, each outperforming an average desktop computer of the time, with capacitive OLED touch screens, on a cellular network with hundreds of megabits of bandwidth, I'd find it believable, because that's where technology was headed at the time.

If you said that they'd effectively all be running either a port of OS X or a Linux distribution with a non-GNU but open source userspace, I'd consider that a somewhat unexpected success of open-source software. I would not at all expect that it would be as locked down as video game console.

The more time passes, the less I use my phone for, and the more likely I am to whip out my laptop to accomplish something, like it's 2005.

[asveikau]

The open source components in your android phone are suffering from what FSF called "tivoization" a few decades ago. They can't reasonably be replaced without breaking security measures, a pretty high barrier for most users, even sometimes for advanced users. It removes the biggest benefits of being open source.

[cenamus]

Open source userspace? Google Play Sevices?