Linux on phones have been around since the late 00s (e.g. through Nokia's efforts). Why would this suddenly change? Heck, even after decades, the battery life of most laptops running Linux is still much worse than Windows, let alone macOS.

I have had several generations of ThinkPads and to this day, battery life is typically ~50-60% of that of Windows, even with all battery optimizations applied. And Windows is terrible compared to Mac or Android/iOS phones.

And I say this as a long-time Linux user (used Linux in some form since 1994). It's just a very hard nut to crack if you miss a certain amount of vertical of integration and coordination across the ecosystem.

We are _not allowed_ to make it good. Without hardware documentation, you're looking at decades of reverse engineering effort just to get somewhere half as far as an engineer with hardware documentation can get in a weekend.

Look at Asahi. Almost a decade in and we can use the GPU at like 30% of its ability on 6 year old hardware.

That a project with major interest. No one cares about spending a decade reverse engineering the hardware on a Google Pixel or Samsung Galaxy.

If they gave us proper full hardware documentation, we could create high quality alternatives. Again, we can't so you don't see it.

Competition is good. We should always advocate for things that enable competition.

> Why would this suddenly change?

I see three aspects there.

The first is that google is currently rugpulling via various means and _really_ playing those anticompetetiveness-cards. That wasn't the case previously. So there wasn't much motivation to care, because android was "open enough".

The second is that the world is getting less geopolitically stable. So the whole ecosystem lockdowns are not just a personal preference thing but might be actually vital.

The third is that LLMs are kinda good at these optimization loops if you hand them a framework in which they can sample good data.

I also had a fourth thought but it left my mind :(