Who else is going to maintain and develop it? It's the same issue as with Chrome, even if you force Google to give it to some other company, they're all just as bad. And it's too big and too costly to maintain for anyone else but tech giants.

The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source developers. And good luck with that.

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Balinares 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm thinking with ever increasing seriousness: let's split any company that grows past a certain size. Each side gets a copy of the codebase and half the assets, no one who's been on the board on one side can be on the other side's board, and neither side can buy off the other. They can use the existing branding for a limited time and with a qualifier (say Google Turnip vs Google Potato) but after that it's on the strength of the new brand which they're each building and for which they're competing against each other and the rest of the market.

This is not happening in my lifetime, of course it isn't. But by god does it need to happen.

	▲	troyvit 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right? We need a "You won capitalism!" award where everybody in the org gets a huge bonus and then the company is split into small pieces and then they start over. On top of it we do what you describe and enforce the split so they can't collude.

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iririririr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I welcome feature stagnation on mobile!

Every single release is a step backwards.

Android 15 cannot hold a candle to what cynogenmod did on top of android 2.3. And that's objective.

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Tharre 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And that's objective.

I don't think you understand what that word means.

Regardless, your opinion (and mine) is irrelevant. People want at least some of the features of modern android, and any alternative lacking those is not going to be adopted by most people. Just look at how many people try GrapheneOS and find the minor things to be dealbreakers for them.

And as long as that's the case you can't expect people to vote for a scenario where they'll end up with a, in their eyes, worse product.

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jajuuka 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Historical meaning is pretty worthless though. It's like saying CPU's are going backwards because the 386 was a bigger jump. Technology matures eventually and that's not a bad thing.

	▲	realusername 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Android doesn't really work on hardware changes as AOSP doesn't run on a single phone on earth anyways, not even the emulators, this is the goal of the manufacturers. For the features you can read here for example what Android 16 changed: https://www.android.com/articles/android-16-features/