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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, the most popular mobile operating system in the world is “on life support.”

iOS must not even exist anymore because it’s closed source. I can feel my iPhone disintegrating before my eyes.

Look-but-don’t-touch source, except for how there are multiple successful alternative builds like /e/os, LineageOS, and GrapheneOS

The second largest country in the whole world gets by using Android without Google Play services even being available there, with Android commanding a 77 percent marketshare.

https://microg.org/

Sure, I fully agree that Google isn’t super enthusiastic about open source for Android beyond the ways in which it benefits them, but there’s a lot of hyperbole in your comment.

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I don't know why you are relating any of what I said to popularity or the merits of closed source. I guess you misunderstand what I mean by "on life support".

Android is unhealthy versus its former self in that it has been increasingly hostile to developers. Your examples of /e/os and lineage are representative of the "look-but-dont-touch" nature of Android.

Not to diminish the hard work of the developers of them, as they are useful, but they do not stray far from what Google provides them for better and worse. As you say, they're alternative builds, primarily to reduce the ties to Google, but they largely adhere to the same APIs, have the same menus, have the same quirks. Perhaps graphene goes above and beyond, I have not used it. I remember Cyanogenmod having more divergence in feature set and appearance from what Google provided versus what Lineage can do for you now. I miss when Android was good, but it's just become the platform I don't want to upgrade and see what I lose next.

How successful can you consider the alternatives to be when using them means you can't (easily, potentially at all in the future with hardware backed attestation) use ChatGPT, banking apps, order McDonalds, etc.?

In recent Android versions increasingly more features got moved into proprietary modules. A few years ago AOSP felt pretty much the same as proprietary Android.

Now changes in toolkits made it so that e.g. copying text from apps sometimes doesn't work. Google Android has a work around by using OCR (?) in the overview to select text. I feel like the former change is directly related to the ability of the OS to copy text anyway. This might not be a deliberate choice to limit AOSP but it shows how they design with proprietary Android in mind. Thus AOSP gets less useful as an OS as the design is not well thought out.

> Look-but-don’t-touch source, except for how there are multiple successful alternative builds like /e/os, LineageOS, and GrapheneOS

the point is that you're not going to be able to upstream any changes

I think you mean second most populous country? The second largest country is Canada and we definitely have Google Play Services, for what it’s worth.

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