Assuming that there will be phones with unlockable bootloaders sold in the US in the future. There are precious few of them now. Importing’s always an option (and quite easy these days), but then you run into the problem of band support.
Burning a new ROM is just as hard fora regular user as jailbreaking an iPhone, so practically it doesn’t make a difference if android is open-source or not.
Also, even though core android is OSS, what you and i run on our phones heavily depends on the play framework which is Google proprietary. Amazon has tried and failed to fork android before with its fire devices and that hasn’t worked.
FYI GrapheneOS is trivial to install (you don’t need to do all that exploit and root nonsense you used to have to!) and runs entirely without Google Play Services (unless you want to install them in a less-invasive way, which is also officially supported)
This also applies to most custom ROMs such as Pixel Experience, LineageOS or ArrowOS. Lineage can be installed with or without Google services on most phones
Trivial to install if you have a pixel phone. As far as I can tell on their website, no other devices are officially supported, and building your own rom for your phone is out of reach for most (even advanced) users
Correct, they say that pixels are the only phones that are secure enough for their needs (and the fact that they’re pretty developer-friendly I imagine is a big plus)
Android is open source, and there are many forks of it already. If they were to try this, those of us who care would just run a fork of Android.
Assuming that there will be phones with unlockable bootloaders sold in the US in the future. There are precious few of them now. Importing’s always an option (and quite easy these days), but then you run into the problem of band support.
Burning a new ROM is just as hard fora regular user as jailbreaking an iPhone, so practically it doesn’t make a difference if android is open-source or not.
Also, even though core android is OSS, what you and i run on our phones heavily depends on the play framework which is Google proprietary. Amazon has tried and failed to fork android before with its fire devices and that hasn’t worked.
FYI GrapheneOS is trivial to install (you don’t need to do all that exploit and root nonsense you used to have to!) and runs entirely without Google Play Services (unless you want to install them in a less-invasive way, which is also officially supported)
This also applies to most custom ROMs such as Pixel Experience, LineageOS or ArrowOS. Lineage can be installed with or without Google services on most phones
Trivial to install if you have a pixel phone. As far as I can tell on their website, no other devices are officially supported, and building your own rom for your phone is out of reach for most (even advanced) users
Correct, they say that pixels are the only phones that are secure enough for their needs (and the fact that they’re pretty developer-friendly I imagine is a big plus)
But the vast majority won’t, and that’s an issue.