alt Hacker News> I'm not knowledgeable enough -- what would it take to escape the Apple/Google duopoly?
At this point? Reliable emulation that can run 99% of Android apps, to provide a bridge until the platform is interesting enough for people to develop for it "natively".
I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
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Well if you rely on running Android apps, you still rely on Android.
Actually, if you rely on the app, you really on the Android SDK which is not open source.
Now if you could run AOSP but your own apps built with an open source SDK, that would be a different story. Some people seem to really want to do that with PWAs. I personnally tend to hate webapps, but I have to admit that they can be open source.
You can go the waydroid style with namespacing, or native containers if using the linux kernel. No need to do a full vm
Has no one mentioned not using a smartphone as an option?
Similar to how Valve is managing the transition from Windows to Linux.
> I think the easiest way to do that would be to run Android in a VM.
Sony's cameras used to have an Android userland that they used for their PlayMemories apps. No idea how exactly that one was implemented though, but it should be possible to get Android apps without going into being an Android fork.
Why not run Android directly, such as using Graphene OS. It's decades ahead in both OS architecture, developer tools, and developers compared to non Android based Linux operating systems.