im just as much of a hater of this as the next guy, because i depend on custom apks for work sometimes. pushing custom apks over adb is apparently going to be fine, so if that holds true, i dont care about this. at the end of the day, buying an android phone is buying a google device. i dont get the righteousness here. wouldnt this energy be better spent on discussing how we could make a new open source os to rival that of google? why would anyone at google (company at the forefront of anti privacy measures) care about what some nerds on the internet think about privacy? its like an ant screaming in front of an approaching bulldozer.

It's a pretty dire situation. There are two major options. iOS is iOS. Android is at least somewhat open and Google free Android actually exists.

The problem is that you often need a smartphone running either Android or iOS to participate in modern life. Unfortunately when running Android many apps that one might be more or less forced to use do not just require AOSP, but expect the presence of the proprietary Google services malware.

If we want to create an independent mobile OS AOSP might actually be a good start. We're just faced with a world that is actively harmful to people having control over their device and data.