Remember when we thought IE's monopoly could never be broken? Or windows?
replyAnything can and will go down. Nothing is forever.
IE's monopoly was replaced by Chrome and Safari's, and Safari only exists because Apple gives you no choice but to use it on iOS. Firefox had a brief spot on top, but it really didn't last that long.
replyWindows still has the vast majority share of desktop.
Chrome is the outlier there. It didn't come with any desktop OS and still got near 100% market share, even before Android contributed to that. How? It's worth studying.
replyThe made the best browser on the planet in Google's Bell Labs era and then they used it as leverage during their "do evil" era.
replyWell, the web was already designed to be compatible with multiple browsers, so that's one element there.
replyYes but that's my point. Monopolies don't last. We have other ones now yes. But that's because the earlier ones died.
replyAnd yes we still have windows as the major desktop OS but don't forget, in the 90s/early 2000s windows was equivalent to computing.
These days the desktop OS is much less relevant than it was and many people don't even own a laptop or desktop anymore. They just do everything on their phone. And Microsoft totally and completely lost that race.
> There is no alternative.
replyThere have been several projects like Ubuntu Touch to create an open Linux for smartphones.
That would be an open alternative.
Android is not open.
Android is an open source Linux distribution for smartphones. It doesn't have to be used with Google Mobile Services. AOSP is far more private, secure, usable and compatible with a far broader amount of apps. Why wouldn't we use that as the starting point even if the goal was to diverge?
replyThe AOSP is fully open source. What you suggest is a significant step back in terms of privacy and security.
replyThe AOSP does not run modern Android apps, since Google has been replacing the APIs those apps require with closed source versions (that only ship as part of Google Play) for over a decade.
replyNo, that's a widespread misconception. Google Play services is nearly entirely APIs for using Google services. It hasn't replaced AOSP functionality and the AOSP APIs are still there. If you want to avoid Google services then there isn't much that's useful in Play services. Getting developers to not depend as much on Google services such as supporting UnifiedPush in addition to Firebase Cloud Messaging leads to those apps no longer requiring Play services for that functionality.
replyThat is not true. AOSP can run all modern android apps, and google play APIs are provided as alternatives, but not replacements, for AOSP functionality.
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replyThat's a huge downgrade for privacy, security, usability, battery life and compatibility with apps. GrapheneOS is Linux too. Linux doesn't mean glibc and systemd. Linux is unfortunately not a great base for an OS focused on privacy and security but it's the only practical choice at this time. In the long term, it needs to be replaced as the bare metal kernel.
replyI have it. It's far too slow to be useful, and it's not the hardware's fault. GTK and Libhybris are bad separately and hot garbage together. This problem won't be going away while the hardware is relevant.
replyWhich model of phone from FuriLabs?
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