At this point? Reliable emulation that can run 99% of Android apps, to provide a bridge until the platform is interesting enough for people to develop for it "natively".
I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
The problem is the critical payment and government ID apps that will never run in an Android VM because they intentionally break without hardware attestation.
Some apps don't actually check the attestation signatures, so they could be spoofed for now, but if spoofing became common, apps would just get strict about checking attestation.
Actually, if you rely on the app, you really on the Android SDK which is not open source.
Now if you could run AOSP but your own apps built with an open source SDK, that would be a different story. Some people seem to really want to do that with PWAs. I personnally tend to hate webapps, but I have to admit that they can be open source.
If you expect to be "essentially android, but a little different", containers make sense. If you want to build an entirely different mobile OS, but provide Android compatibility, I think a VM is much more likely to give you the flexibility to not defer to Android design decisions.
Sony's cameras used to have an Android userland that they used for their PlayMemories apps. No idea how exactly that one was implemented though, but it should be possible to get Android apps without going into being an Android fork.
If your answer is "don't use them", then you're not living in a country where the vast majority of communications are done on WhatsApp or Signal, good for you I guess.
It is a convenience or inconvenience you decides to have or not.
How is that an answer to someone saying that they don't see how they can stay connected without having a smartphone?
You're changing the discussion now.
The original point is this: Given that people want to be able to text with their friends in what is perceived as a normal way, how can they do it without a smartphone?
If you change the rules ("Given that people are fine being disconnected"), of course it changes everything.
The beginning was:
> what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?
To which someone answered:
> Has no one mentioned not using a smartphone as an option?
To which I answered that in a ton of situations this is just not an option.
And yet I keep getting answers that give examples of when it is an option. Sure, sometimes it is an option. Now for the majority of normal people who don't consider "not having a smartphone" as an option, I was saying that it is very, very hard to escape Apple/Google.
I am NOT saying that most people would die on the stop if they suddenly did not have access to a smartphone. I am saying that there is no solution to that that most people would consider viable.
> I don't think that 24/7 availability is universally perceived as "a normal way".
I never said 24/7 availability. I said "not having access to WhatsApp/Signal [in one's pocket, some of the time]". The part in brackets was implicit because we were talking about smartphone operating systems.
I live in the USA and use Signal for, like, 3 friends that I also can call or text, and I've never used WhatsApp in my life.
So, if you live in the USA, you can absolutely get by without those two.
But there are likely other apps that would be more difficult to do without. Not impossible, mind you, just more effort.
And your answer is to give me an example of a country that is irrelevant to my point? How does that help?
Traditional desktop OSes (Windows, MacOS, traditional Linux distros) are just at an entirely different level than modern mobile OSes (Android OSes, iOS) and ChromeOS. They also often run on less secure hardware, especially compared to a Pixel.