AFAIK, android is open source, so why don't they just build on top of it while removing all non-free code/binary blobs from it.
Trying to build on Android is constantly following and fighting Google's changes. Purism is building on Linux, which is truly free from top to bottom.
Actually, OEMs are allowed to produce phones that fork it but they're forbidden from including gapps ( the google apps suit e.g play store, maps)
>most apps for Android won't run without Google's proprietary components
This isn't the case if you only use free software e.g. most of the apps on the fdroid main repo
F-Droid has a very tiny portion of apps, similar to as many as Purism itself will likely handle using it's own Linux-based system with an app store. Most common apps people expect require Google services on Android, as Google has let the open APIs languish and pushed everyone to use, for instance, Google Location Services, which is proprietary. Apps like Uber or Lyft, for instance, require Google. Hilariously, a lot of Microsoft's apps, such as Skype, require Google, despite being a competitor.
As long as Android's app library is primarily built on Google proprietary code, there's no point in bothering to maintain compatibility with a slow and sluggish, locked down Java-based OS.
From top of my head. Kindle fire, yandex.phone and most of phones for chinese market dont have gapps.
Google didn't allow to ship devices with gapps and without at the same time. You had to choose one or another.
I'm writing this message on a Fairphone 2 running an incompatible fork of Android that has all Google services removed. This fork is provided by the manufacturer of the phone.
> So, we’re excited to announce that nearly three years after the introduction of the Fairphone 2, we’re not releasing a new model just yet. Instead, we’re aiming to extend the life cycle of the phone as much as we can.
[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2018/05/08/keeping-your-phone-l...
how do you account for pretty much every chinese domestic version of android, which doesn't use google services or the play store, because they're blocked by the GFW? For instance the Chinese version of OnePlus' oxygenOS uses the domestic app stores.
I'm assuming you're talking about pureos, the default OS shipped with librem 5 They're not reinventing the wheel, it's a debian-based distro that has existed for quite some time and that is endorsed by the FSF If I'm not mistaken, purism made the OS specifically for their laptop lineup
>Why don't they do something more similar to what linux-libre is to linux to replace android
This project already exists, it is called Replicant[0]
>AFAIK, android is open source, so why don't they just build on top of it
There are many, many custom ROMs that do exactly that. But this doesn't hide the fact that android has severe problems like requiring huge system resources to build it (>100GB of disk space, 16GB of RAM etc.) Besides Google is working on another OS called fuchsia that's supposedly going to replace both android and chromeOS and it's not based on the Linux kernel thus it's better for the sake of choice to have some linux-based alternatives. The librem 5 isn't the first or the only effort to get non-android linux on smartphones, there's also most notably PostmarketOS[1]
For more arguments on why android sucks compared to other linux-based alternatives, check out https://postmarketos.org/static/slides/2018-akademy/#18
I'm happy they're creating an alternative OS to Android and hope that it really takes off. Even if it is never strictly better than Android, it at least gives us options.
This is almost an exact parallel to the browser industry. I think most of us techies are in the boat that the existence of Firefox as a separate browser rendering engine from Chrome is a good thing for similar reasons, regardless of which can be argued to be functionally better.