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Android has been bad-faith open source for as long as I can remember. Android is look-but-dont-touch source. Its massive codebase that requires immense resource

Android has been bad-faith open source for as long as I can remember. Android is look-but-dont-touch source. Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation, its existence is to serve Google's whims. Android was already a platform on life support. Google has wielded its authority to dictate how apps should behave such that even 3rd party stores do not stray far from Google's rules. Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates.

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Let's not expand the term open source to automatically mean community driven development or free software. Neither need apply for a project to be open source. > its existence is to serve Google's whims Ah, yeah... the existence of every major project is to satisfy the companies paying for the development. Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003. Blender is funded by 35 corporations. Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.
- NegativeLatency 1y ago
  > Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003 There's a big difference between all/most of the interest coming from a large company, compared to the numerous organizations that work together to make Linux what it is.
- bitsandboots 1y ago
  I'd love to expand the term actually, because it's been misused to come to mean that something is community oriented, collaborative, even benevolent. Not even open source, but just the word "open". OpenAI for one. It's been abused for public image. You're example of Linux is a bad one. Its contributions are corporate, but they are collaborative. With Android, Google dictates and others follow. Linux is not this way.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    I don't really buy that. Samsung tears most of the UI layer off Android and installs their own look and feel. Google does the same with Pixel, Huawei does with their phones, and so on. You have to follow some of Google's rules to get Play Services, but Android varies immensely depending on vendor. Ditto for things like background tasks and battery life management. The same applies to Linux. The kernel changes significantly on vendor as well, with changes making it upstream only if the famously tribal Linux maintainers find it interesting. I am sure that the same applies for code from Samsung or Qualcomm to the Android codebase.
    - deleted 1y ago
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    - NotPractical 1y ago
      Those are very minor changes and almost everything besides superfluous things like the UI design are the same.
- crapple8430 1y ago
  I do think that Android is bad-faith open source too, but not in that sense. It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. There are a lot of proprietary components required for a functioning Android phone, usually known as Google apps, which are not open source. Android as a system is better described as open core, not open source. There are even mechanisms to prevent you from using your own fork, such as the various "integrity" APIs.
  - ChadNauseam 1y ago
    The integrity APIs are horrible. Why can you not send RCS messages from a rooted phone or use the ChatGPT app?
  - DannyBee 1y ago
    " It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. " So it's bad faith because they didn't open source as much as you wanted, and you want parts that aren't open source because you don't find it useful enough. Have you considered that maybe this is not a great bar? Your claim of bad faith is based on what you want, and not based on how any of the people involved actually operated. Perhaps you should not claim bad faith without evidence the people involved actually operated in bad faith. Thankless people for whom somebody's particular open source project is not enough and feel like they are entitled to more are one of the worst things about open source as an ecosystem overall. On top of that, i'm very curious to understand what exactly you think would be the state of the world had AOSP not been released. (Also, as an aside, open core did not exist at the time AOSP was released)
    - SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
      I mean, parent does point out that we have another term that's probably less misleading (open-core), and there does have to be _some_ point at which a project can no longer call itself Open-Source and be taken seriously or in good faith. If a project Open-Sources one 20-line header file in a 6M LOC project, calling it Open-Source would be a straight up lie. I think something like "Is it actually reasonably possible to build something usable from the parts that are Open-Source?" Is not a bad line in the sand, though it's not a very clean one. You can quibble about it generally, or talk about case-by-case specifics, but your outrage seems a bit out of proportion, it's a reasonable position to take.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  > Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship. Let's think on this statement a little. From top of my head: - VLC - Darktable - rsync - KDE as in the Desktop Environment - Clementine Music Player - MusicBrainz Picard - GIMP - Zotero - GNU Octave - Kid3 - KMail - etc, etc...
  - izacus 1y ago
    Those projects all heavily rely on libraries developed via corporate paycheck.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      Let's not move the goalposts. The original claim was "if there's no corporate sponsorship, you can't have apps". These apps are not sponsored by corporations directly. Also, your point is untenable. The moment someone patches something while being employed by a company, that thing becomes "developed via corporate paycheck". This also makes the small tools developed by oneself "developed via corporate paycheck", because while the person was at home, and it was 2AM, They also had a job paying their bills somehow.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  > Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship. Bold statement. Who is the corporate sponsor of Emacs?
- NotPractical 1y ago
  They weren't expanding any terms in the parent comment. "Android" (AOSP) is open source, but it's not good-faith open source.
dangus 1y ago
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/ 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.
- jillyboel 1y ago
  > 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
- CamJN 1y ago
  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.
- bitsandboots 1y ago
  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.
sdkfjalsdgj 1y ago
> Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago Android is actually much much better than iOS. For some older unmaintained apps I've dug out the APKs and most of them run without major issues, though a scary warning saying it's designed for older versions of Android.
- bitsandboots 1y ago
  Yeah, not all hope is lost, but good apps do get delisted for not complying with whatever Google dictates on the Play store, so you have to make good backups of content that only exists there! Which is a really great reason to use f-droid instead of course.
  - everyone 1y ago
    I, and clients of mine, have a bunch of stuff on the play stores. google is going bananas recently, aggressively trying to delist every app it seems.. Every few months they force you to upload new builds that use the latest "api level" .. This change makes zero difference to how the app functions. Its a massive pain updating them and I have let several apps lapse and be taken down cus I couldnt be bothered jumping though googles arbitrary hoops. Which I guess is google's aim, and also that they are doing this to clear as much space as they can and save a small amount of money on storage, as part of their general enshittification process.
    - borntoolate 1y ago
      It's similar to their optimization of the web for their customers. To remain indexed you have to jump through all their hoops which means you derive income and therefore are at least potentially an advertiser.
    - themacguffinman 1y ago
      > This change makes zero difference to how the app functions. That's not true, different api levels have different restrictions and defaults even if you don't change any of your app code, that's why they force you to target a new api level. For example, one Android 15 change is "Apps that target Android 15 must be the top app or running an audio-related foreground service in order to request audio focus.", or another one "For apps targeting Android 15, the `elegantTextHeight` `TextView` attribute becomes `true` by default". It's not always a no-op. There's zero chance that storage costs are the concern here, they've long struggled to fix overly permissive APIs and poorly designed legacy APIs on apps that target old api levels.
dev_l1x_be 1y ago
Why are people surprised about this? You can chose between the walled garden of iPhone where Apple wages war against its userbase with every release they do and on the other side there is Android with the surveillance platform that makes the patriot act obsolete. Chose one. :)
DannyBee 1y ago
Bad faith. Holy cow is this insane. Why don't you go back to 2006 and tell me which complete open source mobile OS you want to use. An immense amount of time was spent beating up vendors and others to be able to release, as open source, an OS that you could actually build and put on a phone. These were the days that verizon and AT&T and other controlled exactly what OS's were allowed to run on phones. Even being able to unlock a bootloader was not a thing. The only thing that has happened for "as long as i can remember" is that different factions of open source folks have never been happy with the precise contours of AOSP vs what they want, and choose to shit on the immense hard work of lots of people as a result. Yet i doubt any of them would be close to where they are, at all, had android not been released as open source. Can we please stop rewriting history because we have some disagreement with the contours. It was an immense leap forward for open source OSes on phones.
- cheeze 1y ago
  I generally agree with all of this but Google wasn't the one that stopped the vendor controlled OS. That was Apple for the most part. Apple released the iPhone and basically told all of the carriers "tough crap, you can't put your bloatware on our phones. This started with AT&T (exclusive carrier for iPhone) and by the time that agreement ended, every carrier was clamoring for the iPhone on their network. It was the next big thing after all. If you don't want us on your network you can explain to your customers why they can get an iPhone on a competitor, but not on your network." Vendors had no choice.
  - DannyBee 1y ago
    "I generally agree with all of this but Google wasn't the one that stopped the vendor controlled OS. That was Apple for the most part." I dunno, Early iphone did not have the market share to command this in the way it does now. Android did fairly quickly, knocking off Symbian and RIM much faster and getting to higher market share much faster than apple. Honestly, I think it was both in combination - and more particularly, that none of the up and comers (apple or android) were willing to accept control on the part of the carriers. Back then Google was even bidding on spectrum :) I'm unsure what would have happened if only one of android/iphone had existed.
causality0 1y ago
God I miss the days when I could plug a phone in and get a mass storage device. Imagine, I could copy a video off my phone and copy music onto it at the same time.
- KiwiJohnno 1y ago
  To be fair to Android, this is a limitation of the MTP protocol and not android. To mount your storage as a mass storage device then the host device (your computer in this case) does raw sector read/writes to the device, the host device provides the filesystem services. For this to work it has to be completely unmounted from the phone as obviously having the block mounted in two filesystems at once would corrupt everything very badly. Android used to split storage into various partitions, which is why this used to work - It was able to unmount the partition and let your PC manage it. This meant any apps using that partition needed to be stopped, etc etc. It was a pain, and I can totally understand why they moved away from this approach. Personally I prefer the new way, yes using MTP has some limitations as you've noticed but it does mean the storage can remain mounted on android while your PC accesses it.
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    I can't think of any modern operating system that lets a foreign system mount it's already mounted filesystem over USB without going through some kind of server such as MTP, NFS etc.
    - johnea 1y ago
      Again, this isn't accurrate. Please see my other comment on why the filesystem is not mounted by multiple hosts.
  - johnea 1y ago
    This isn't really accurate. In the case of plugging a "phone", as a device, into a USB host computer, the USB device (the phone) can present a filesystem endpoint to the host, and allow read/write access. The OS of the phone then passes these read/writes through to its mounted filesystem, with whatever mapping and access controls to the mounted filesystem it wishes to implement. Thus the USB connection doesn't require that the raw filesystem of the phone be mounted by 2 hosts at the same time. This already happens with every USB "stick" you plug into a host computer. The memory in the USB stick is accessed by firmware on a CPU inside the memory stick, which then presents that memory to the host as a USB storage class device. The firmware may not have a linux or iOS OS, but it does perform mapping to preserve and remap sectors to alleviate flash endurance issues, perform secure mounting, and other features. There's no technical reason android can't do this. p.s. MTP clients accessing an android device are a major PITA! Especially, ironically, for a linux OS USB host...
lurk2 1y ago
> Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates. This is also true of iOS. What alternative would you propose?
- LinuxBender 1y ago
  Not the person you are asking but I would like to deprecate all SoCs, have generic ARM hardware, a kernel module approved by Linus for using a modular LTE modem the user can replace or upgrade with option-slots for different types optional devices based on the users needs wishes and desires. I should be able to plonk down whatever desktop Linux OS that tickles my fancy and it just works. There should be hardware modules and kernel modules for any network on earth. I should also be able to plug in any peripheral device that works on my workstations.
  - syndeo 1y ago
    It should at LEAST be ARM (or perhaps RISC-V once it matures more)… but honestly it's just not going to be practical anytime too soon.
    - LinuxBender 1y ago
      Good point, will edit.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    You can write software for such hypothetical things but that’s clearly not going to map to any hardware vendors want to build / customers want to buy (and by customers I mean OEMs that pick which chips go into a product). There’s many reasons for this including price, battery life, size and typical upgrade patterns even in typical x86 land
charcircuit 1y ago
>Android is look-but-dont-touch source What do you mean by this? I have had changes upstreamed into AOSP and I'm not a Google employee. >Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation So is every other operating systems. Do you think the millions of lines of codes for Windows builds instantly? You can get by building AOSP on a normal desktop workstation.
methuselah_in 1y ago
Well agree but still google is the only thing that allowed custom ROM development and android still has some freedom left there.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

Let's not expand the term open source to automatically mean community driven development or free software. Neither need apply for a project to be open source. > its existence is to serve Google's whims Ah, yeah... the existence of every major project is to satisfy the companies paying for the development. Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003. Blender is funded by 35 corporations. Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.

NegativeLatency 1y ago
> Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003 There's a big difference between all/most of the interest coming from a large company, compared to the numerous organizations that work together to make Linux what it is.
bitsandboots 1y ago
I'd love to expand the term actually, because it's been misused to come to mean that something is community oriented, collaborative, even benevolent. Not even open source, but just the word "open". OpenAI for one. It's been abused for public image. You're example of Linux is a bad one. Its contributions are corporate, but they are collaborative. With Android, Google dictates and others follow. Linux is not this way.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I don't really buy that. Samsung tears most of the UI layer off Android and installs their own look and feel. Google does the same with Pixel, Huawei does with their phones, and so on. You have to follow some of Google's rules to get Play Services, but Android varies immensely depending on vendor. Ditto for things like background tasks and battery life management. The same applies to Linux. The kernel changes significantly on vendor as well, with changes making it upstream only if the famously tribal Linux maintainers find it interesting. I am sure that the same applies for code from Samsung or Qualcomm to the Android codebase.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - NotPractical 1y ago
    Those are very minor changes and almost everything besides superfluous things like the UI design are the same.
crapple8430 1y ago
I do think that Android is bad-faith open source too, but not in that sense. It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. There are a lot of proprietary components required for a functioning Android phone, usually known as Google apps, which are not open source. Android as a system is better described as open core, not open source. There are even mechanisms to prevent you from using your own fork, such as the various "integrity" APIs.
- ChadNauseam 1y ago
  The integrity APIs are horrible. Why can you not send RCS messages from a rooted phone or use the ChatGPT app?
- DannyBee 1y ago
  " It's bad faith open source because only AOSP is actually open source, and AOSP by itself is not that useful of an operating system. " So it's bad faith because they didn't open source as much as you wanted, and you want parts that aren't open source because you don't find it useful enough. Have you considered that maybe this is not a great bar? Your claim of bad faith is based on what you want, and not based on how any of the people involved actually operated. Perhaps you should not claim bad faith without evidence the people involved actually operated in bad faith. Thankless people for whom somebody's particular open source project is not enough and feel like they are entitled to more are one of the worst things about open source as an ecosystem overall. On top of that, i'm very curious to understand what exactly you think would be the state of the world had AOSP not been released. (Also, as an aside, open core did not exist at the time AOSP was released)
  - SuperNinKenDo 1y ago
    I mean, parent does point out that we have another term that's probably less misleading (open-core), and there does have to be _some_ point at which a project can no longer call itself Open-Source and be taken seriously or in good faith. If a project Open-Sources one 20-line header file in a 6M LOC project, calling it Open-Source would be a straight up lie. I think something like "Is it actually reasonably possible to build something usable from the parts that are Open-Source?" Is not a bad line in the sand, though it's not a very clean one. You can quibble about it generally, or talk about case-by-case specifics, but your outrage seems a bit out of proportion, it's a reasonable position to take.
bayindirh 1y ago
> Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship. Let's think on this statement a little. From top of my head: - VLC - Darktable - rsync - KDE as in the Desktop Environment - Clementine Music Player - MusicBrainz Picard - GIMP - Zotero - GNU Octave - Kid3 - KMail - etc, etc...
- izacus 1y ago
  Those projects all heavily rely on libraries developed via corporate paycheck.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Let's not move the goalposts. The original claim was "if there's no corporate sponsorship, you can't have apps". These apps are not sponsored by corporations directly. Also, your point is untenable. The moment someone patches something while being employed by a company, that thing becomes "developed via corporate paycheck". This also makes the small tools developed by oneself "developed via corporate paycheck", because while the person was at home, and it was 2AM, They also had a job paying their bills somehow.
dingnuts 1y ago
> Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship. Bold statement. Who is the corporate sponsor of Emacs?
NotPractical 1y ago
They weren't expanding any terms in the parent comment. "Android" (AOSP) is open source, but it's not good-faith open source.

dangus 1y ago

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/ 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.

jillyboel 1y ago
> 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
CamJN 1y ago
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.
bitsandboots 1y ago
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.

sdkfjalsdgj 1y ago

> Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago Android is actually much much better than iOS. For some older unmaintained apps I've dug out the APKs and most of them run without major issues, though a scary warning saying it's designed for older versions of Android.

bitsandboots 1y ago
Yeah, not all hope is lost, but good apps do get delisted for not complying with whatever Google dictates on the Play store, so you have to make good backups of content that only exists there! Which is a really great reason to use f-droid instead of course.
- everyone 1y ago
  I, and clients of mine, have a bunch of stuff on the play stores. google is going bananas recently, aggressively trying to delist every app it seems.. Every few months they force you to upload new builds that use the latest "api level" .. This change makes zero difference to how the app functions. Its a massive pain updating them and I have let several apps lapse and be taken down cus I couldnt be bothered jumping though googles arbitrary hoops. Which I guess is google's aim, and also that they are doing this to clear as much space as they can and save a small amount of money on storage, as part of their general enshittification process.
  - borntoolate 1y ago
    It's similar to their optimization of the web for their customers. To remain indexed you have to jump through all their hoops which means you derive income and therefore are at least potentially an advertiser.
  - themacguffinman 1y ago
    > This change makes zero difference to how the app functions. That's not true, different api levels have different restrictions and defaults even if you don't change any of your app code, that's why they force you to target a new api level. For example, one Android 15 change is "Apps that target Android 15 must be the top app or running an audio-related foreground service in order to request audio focus.", or another one "For apps targeting Android 15, the `elegantTextHeight` `TextView` attribute becomes `true` by default". It's not always a no-op. There's zero chance that storage costs are the concern here, they've long struggled to fix overly permissive APIs and poorly designed legacy APIs on apps that target old api levels.

dev_l1x_be 1y ago

Why are people surprised about this? You can chose between the walled garden of iPhone where Apple wages war against its userbase with every release they do and on the other side there is Android with the surveillance platform that makes the patriot act obsolete. Chose one. :)

DannyBee 1y ago

Bad faith. Holy cow is this insane. Why don't you go back to 2006 and tell me which complete open source mobile OS you want to use. An immense amount of time was spent beating up vendors and others to be able to release, as open source, an OS that you could actually build and put on a phone. These were the days that verizon and AT&T and other controlled exactly what OS's were allowed to run on phones. Even being able to unlock a bootloader was not a thing. The only thing that has happened for "as long as i can remember" is that different factions of open source folks have never been happy with the precise contours of AOSP vs what they want, and choose to shit on the immense hard work of lots of people as a result. Yet i doubt any of them would be close to where they are, at all, had android not been released as open source. Can we please stop rewriting history because we have some disagreement with the contours. It was an immense leap forward for open source OSes on phones.

cheeze 1y ago
I generally agree with all of this but Google wasn't the one that stopped the vendor controlled OS. That was Apple for the most part. Apple released the iPhone and basically told all of the carriers "tough crap, you can't put your bloatware on our phones. This started with AT&T (exclusive carrier for iPhone) and by the time that agreement ended, every carrier was clamoring for the iPhone on their network. It was the next big thing after all. If you don't want us on your network you can explain to your customers why they can get an iPhone on a competitor, but not on your network." Vendors had no choice.
- DannyBee 1y ago
  "I generally agree with all of this but Google wasn't the one that stopped the vendor controlled OS. That was Apple for the most part." I dunno, Early iphone did not have the market share to command this in the way it does now. Android did fairly quickly, knocking off Symbian and RIM much faster and getting to higher market share much faster than apple. Honestly, I think it was both in combination - and more particularly, that none of the up and comers (apple or android) were willing to accept control on the part of the carriers. Back then Google was even bidding on spectrum :) I'm unsure what would have happened if only one of android/iphone had existed.

causality0 1y ago

God I miss the days when I could plug a phone in and get a mass storage device. Imagine, I could copy a video off my phone and copy music onto it at the same time.

KiwiJohnno 1y ago
To be fair to Android, this is a limitation of the MTP protocol and not android. To mount your storage as a mass storage device then the host device (your computer in this case) does raw sector read/writes to the device, the host device provides the filesystem services. For this to work it has to be completely unmounted from the phone as obviously having the block mounted in two filesystems at once would corrupt everything very badly. Android used to split storage into various partitions, which is why this used to work - It was able to unmount the partition and let your PC manage it. This meant any apps using that partition needed to be stopped, etc etc. It was a pain, and I can totally understand why they moved away from this approach. Personally I prefer the new way, yes using MTP has some limitations as you've noticed but it does mean the storage can remain mounted on android while your PC accesses it.
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  I can't think of any modern operating system that lets a foreign system mount it's already mounted filesystem over USB without going through some kind of server such as MTP, NFS etc.
  - johnea 1y ago
    Again, this isn't accurrate. Please see my other comment on why the filesystem is not mounted by multiple hosts.
- johnea 1y ago
  This isn't really accurate. In the case of plugging a "phone", as a device, into a USB host computer, the USB device (the phone) can present a filesystem endpoint to the host, and allow read/write access. The OS of the phone then passes these read/writes through to its mounted filesystem, with whatever mapping and access controls to the mounted filesystem it wishes to implement. Thus the USB connection doesn't require that the raw filesystem of the phone be mounted by 2 hosts at the same time. This already happens with every USB "stick" you plug into a host computer. The memory in the USB stick is accessed by firmware on a CPU inside the memory stick, which then presents that memory to the host as a USB storage class device. The firmware may not have a linux or iOS OS, but it does perform mapping to preserve and remap sectors to alleviate flash endurance issues, perform secure mounting, and other features. There's no technical reason android can't do this. p.s. MTP clients accessing an android device are a major PITA! Especially, ironically, for a linux OS USB host...

lurk2 1y ago

> Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates. This is also true of iOS. What alternative would you propose?

LinuxBender 1y ago
Not the person you are asking but I would like to deprecate all SoCs, have generic ARM hardware, a kernel module approved by Linus for using a modular LTE modem the user can replace or upgrade with option-slots for different types optional devices based on the users needs wishes and desires. I should be able to plonk down whatever desktop Linux OS that tickles my fancy and it just works. There should be hardware modules and kernel modules for any network on earth. I should also be able to plug in any peripheral device that works on my workstations.
- syndeo 1y ago
  It should at LEAST be ARM (or perhaps RISC-V once it matures more)… but honestly it's just not going to be practical anytime too soon.
  - LinuxBender 1y ago
    Good point, will edit.
- vlovich123 1y ago
  You can write software for such hypothetical things but that’s clearly not going to map to any hardware vendors want to build / customers want to buy (and by customers I mean OEMs that pick which chips go into a product). There’s many reasons for this including price, battery life, size and typical upgrade patterns even in typical x86 land

charcircuit 1y ago

>Android is look-but-dont-touch source What do you mean by this? I have had changes upstreamed into AOSP and I'm not a Google employee. >Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation So is every other operating systems. Do you think the millions of lines of codes for Windows builds instantly? You can get by building AOSP on a normal desktop workstation.

methuselah_in 1y ago

Well agree but still google is the only thing that allowed custom ROM development and android still has some freedom left there.