Why is AOSP a wrong path? Why would it be "tainted"? Any large enough entity can fork. Hundreds already did, successfully. Even China couldn't do otherwise - via Huawei they mutated it to HarmonyOS (becoming much different from its roots, and incompatible to it, structurally becoming superior in many ways). Why throw away 20 years of development and a sea of dev experience?

But even if you insist on a non-AOSP way: Supporting any other, more well regarded projects and initiatives? Random top of my head idea: motivate Fairphone (Denmark) to adopt some non-android OS like Ubuntu Touch?

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fsflover 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why is AOSP a wrong path?

Because its existence relies on a good will of Google. See:

Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android (9to5google.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

and

GrapheneOS accessed Android security patches but not allowed to publish sources (grapheneos.social)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45208925

> Any large enough entity can fork.

Only megacorps will likely be able to support a hard fork for such a large codebase.

> Hundreds already did, successfully.

Which of them are hard forks? China will not be a benevolent dictator of AOSP

> Fairphone

It's Android again.

There are indeed non-Android alternatives, but not in Europe. I use Librem 5 btw.

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent [-]

>Because its existence relies on a good will of Google

AOSP is open source. Anyone can fork it.

>Google will allow only apps from verified developers

This is done by Play Services which is not included in AOSP even.

>Only megacorps will likely be able to support a hard fork for such a large codebase.

The same can be said about any operating system. The scope of an operating system is huge.

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fsflover 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

> The same can be said about any operating system.

GNU/Linux is already supported without a (single) megacorp. So not all OSes have this problem.

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mpol 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

@charcircuit

Sailfish is more like GNU/Linux, that is the OS in this context. For Jolla that is less code to maintain themselves then what Google maintains in Android/Linux. Hard forking Android/Linux looks to be quite a big bite to chew on.

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charcircuit 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Most of Linux is written by corporations and that's just a kernel, not a full operating system like ChromeOS which took Google to be able to build.

	▲	fsflover 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I updated my comment to indicate GNU/Linux.