Android was never open. Its security model / the permission system is anticompetitive and the user is a third class citizen.

Google can do everything as they control the system - this gives full innovation capabilities. Then there are vendors which are restricted by Google via CDD (checked by CTS/VTS), they might add "privileged apps" but they can't touch what Google does on the system..

And only then there are regular developers/users, apps which they can install have very limited capabilities, they can't extend the system beyond a limited set of APIs that Google allows them to use.

This limits third party innovation already, but Google constantly makes it worse by restricting third party app capabilities even further under the guise of "security"..

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drnick1 3 days ago | parent [-]

It depends on what you mean by "Android." FOSS distributions such as Lineage or Graphene are unaffected by developer verification or other restrictions, and are truly open in the sense that they are controlled by the user.

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zb3 3 days ago | parent [-]

> and are truly open in the sense that they are controlled by the user.

I don't see them altering the permission model, you probably meant the possibility of modifying the system by tools such as Magisk, which indeed make it possible to install software much less restricted..

.. but you can do that on any device with an unlockable bootloader. Graphene/Lineage only remove some Google spyware.

Try to install a Lineage phone app on GrapheneOS to understand what I mean :)

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drnick1 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Try to install a Lineage phone app on GrapheneOS to understand what I mean

I am not sure what you mean here. Any Android app should work on both Lineage and Graphene, it's the same base system. Graphene's debloating also goes far beyond removing some Google spyware. By default, there are no Google libraries, Play Store and Google apps.

	▲	zb3 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can't install the LineageOS phone app (with more modern looks) on GrapheneOS, because: - the package name is already taken and to replace app with the same name the package needs to be signed with the same key which you don't have - even if you modify package name, it's a system privileged app, privileged apps may only be installed by Google/vendors (unless you're recompiling the OS [64GiB RAM needed]) - if you strip all the privileges, functions like call recording won't work. Same for contacts and so on..