Yes, let's throw away a fully mature smartphone OS (AOSP) and replace it by something that does not even have proper app sandboxing. /s

The alternative are other AOSP-based OSes like GrapheneOS and Lineage. Once they are used widely enough and funded enough, they could fork AOSP when needed. In some sense they have already soft-forked in that they use major and QPR2 releases, but put a lot of patches on top to fix issues, improve security, etc.

GrapheneOS has an estimated 500,000 active installs now, apparently LineageOS has 1.4M active installs. Probably around two orders of magnitude more than traditional Linux desktop-based phones, which have been trying since, checking notes, Maemo in 2005?

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flaburgan 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Btw /e/ OS people have already shared that they were getting ready for a hard fork of AOSP looking at how Google is acting. But to be fair the challenge is more around the hardware support than the OS itself, so in the end it will be the chip makers which will decide which OS can run or not. If they go the AMD way then great, if they go the old nvidia way where even basic reclocking is impossible then we are screwed.

	▲	microtonal 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I would be surprised if they have the expertise and manpower to do that. They are mostly relying on LineageOS now and putting their own cloud, microG, and App Store app and branding on top of Lineage. Even now they are not able to roll out Android releases and WebView updates timely. Them maintaining an AOSP fork would probably end up in an outdated, broken mess. My money is on GrapheneOS and maybe LineageOS to do it when needed.