How about another angle: Android is Open Sourced and much powerful than SailfishOS. It's much easier for their target audiences to targeting Android than their OS.
Only partially, the ASOP does not run on anything because of the vast amount of blobs and basic drivers missing and people are maintaining open-source reimplementation of the gapps to make even the most basic apps working.
Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve these issues, what chance do the others have?
Not to the same degree, Linux still has some blobs to run on modern computers but nowhere near as much as Android. Android needs blobs for absolutely anything. And you don't need an equivalent of the Gapps on Linux, it would be like something as common as systemd would be proprietary.
> Yours is an argument why all struggling OSS mobile OSes are struggling, not particularly why AOSP has problems. Surely if even AOSP is struggling to solve these issues, what chance do the others have?
Google does not care any more about open-source on Android, the current open-source bits are just there because of legacy history, they close all the open-source parts step by step. The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning. AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.
Uhh, come again? Android driver blobs are for the Linux kernel that Android uses, and OEMs don't bother mainlining their drivers so Linux is no better than Android, by definition.
> The Gapps used to be open-source at the beginning
This is flat-out wrong. GApps were never part of AOSP- or open-source.AOSP included alternative open source apps that offered similar functionality (like a mail client)
> AOSP isn't struggling, it's just there's no open-source movement.
Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-source movement.
Android has one kernel per phone people patched for their own needs, it's much worse than that. You can't take your kernel on a Samsung Phone and run it on an HTC. I can run my Linux kernel on most computers without much issues, good luck running an Android kernel on a random phone.
> Lots of projects are based off AOSP- it's not obvious because they have names like CyanogenMod, LineageOS or Copperhead. There is in fact, a vibrant open-source movement.
CyanogenMod and LineageOS is the same entity, that only makes two big communities. You don't have that many communities because maintaining an Android ROM is much much harder than maintaining a Linux Distribution. That's why the compatibility list for CopperheadOS is ridiculously small.
So you agree that there is an AOSP open-source movement? Nevermind it's harder to create a ROM than a Linux desktop distro because drivers are not mainelined by OEMs, but even this will be resolved by the HAL from Android P onwards.
Those few proprietary apps for which there are no free alternatives (spotify, duolingo) seemed to work fine without the play services.
This is not to diminish what is being done, as I do appreciate the option of a wide array of OSS items decoupled from the Google eco-system, but it's nowhere near independence from Google's eco-system. I would hardly say that it's a replacement so much as a novelty at the moment, even though there are a few absolutely golden apps to be found there. (Free advertisement for PassAndroid, the Android equivalent of Passbook from iOS, which does exactly what it advertises)
The real benefit here being that there was never any case of malware found in F-Droid. So you really can just tell someone to play around and try out what they like.
Anyway, just listing some of the definitely not student level apps:
Firefox (Fennec and Klar/Focus), OsmAnd, K9 Mail, Nextcloud + Davdroid, Newpipe, Riot, Conversations, Telegram, a bunch of good quality Hacker news, reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, Github, etc. clients.
All these with clearly marked tracking/advertising where present at all.
in general FOSS apps have horrible design/UI