[ux266478]

That's true, but is contingent on you running those Android apps for it to be meaningful. I have a very small number of interactive things I do with my phone. For me what matters is that writing software isn't a pain in the ass, my usual expectations on storage (eg remote filesystems) works and works well, maintaining my system works, my non-interactive system scripts work, etc. Almost all of this is broken on Android, and it doesn't really make up for it by breaking it to make it better. I find much of the design choices of the operating system to be completely tasteless.

If you say, rely on google maps, banking apps, apps for your IoT appliances, etc. it's certainly relevant. I don't have any of that though.

For me the most and truest pressing issue is that cell modems are very, very tightly coupled with Android. It's still true for the Jolla Phone that it simply is a worse phone because the modem drivers are buggy. This is a complicated issue that isn't getting better, and is mostly to do with legislation legally mandating the tivoization of cell modems, a weird line in the sand on what responsibilities fall to the hardware or to what software, as well as the modem manufacturers themselves not really caring.

[microtonal]

For me the most and truest pressing issue is that cell modems are very, very tightly coupled with Android. It's still true for the Jolla Phone that it simply is a worse phone because the modem drivers are buggy.

My impression (also for Ubuntu Touch, etc.) is that all these systems use the upstream vendors' Linux kernels trees and firmware blobs for Android.

Unfortunately, since we are not talking about Samsung or Google, but just some random Chinese ODMs, it's usually years old Linux versions and ancient firmware blobs full of known holes (e.g. the C2 is running a Linux tree from October 2022). It's only thanks to the tireless work of postmarketOS etc. that some devices boot on modern kernels.