> Tweaking user-hostile OSes into user-friendly ones is impressive, but not sustainable. Even worse, it slowing us down from leaving Android entirely.

I would say we need both a sustainable free mobile OS in the long term, and a "less worse Android" today in the meantime.

Initiatives like FairPhone paying someone to upstream device support in the mainline kernel / postmarketOS are interesting for both approaches at the same time (but extra effort would be needed, the FairPhone 5 almost working under postmarketOS [1] is kinda irritating, I hope it reaches full support before Lineage OS stops being updated for this device).

Ignoring hardware support, Linux mobile OSes are quite usable now.

Hardware support is the next step, and only then we can imagine the proprietary apps we are forced to use to work there (though Waydroid provides some answer to this as well).

Another way of helping the cause would be, I suppose, lobbying for laws that forbid the dependency on an stock Google or Apple mobile OS. Or, maybe we can dream a bit, mandatory open source releases for those apps and standard APIs.

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Fairphone_5_(fairphone-fp...