Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.

I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed.

However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.

I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.

I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:

- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption

This is one of the most naive things I see people repeat.

The reality is that we're lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.

Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.

Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that's mostly-good, they'll finally get something that's even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else's).

In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.

Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html/css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.

If only there weren't Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else's.

> death of Android

death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?

A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.