alt Hacker NewsThe lack of polish is a function of the inability to use the hardware. The hardware is tightly gatekept so competition _cannot_ exist. Regulators are the only ones who can force vendors to distribute documentation for and unlock their hardware.
Once we can actually target the hardware, open source alternatives will be much better than first party options.
You can already see the potential in the open source world.
Linux has Waydroid so Android apps can be run on Linux at full speed without emulation. That means, if you had a Linux phone, you have the entire Android library - the only thing lacking is the launcher. How hard is a launcher to program? It's just Steam's big picture mode.
Other examples of the nice things we can't have; FEX lets you run Steam games on phone hardware. Open source drivers can unlock displayport over USBC. Instantly your phone becomes a thin client / laptop replacement that can play PC games (poorly, but 1080p games are possible).
We are _not allowed_ to do these things. I love OS development and, if I was allowed, I'd make iOS look like janky trash.
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What's the viability of regulators requiring such documentation out of vendors? Feel free to extend the scope out to up to 5 years if it does not look viable right now.
One could do just like everyone else and buy the specs from OEMs, instead of trying to reverse engineer.
Yes it won't be pure religious FOSS with 100% open, so what.
Also this is the future for laptops as well, for those that keep repeating the mantra of ARM/RISC-V replacing x86/x64 architectures.
I have a genuine, but maybe stupid/trivial sounding question. Does anyone successfully run cloud instances of Waydroid so that their physical phone is a dumb client?
I've been thinking about it for a long time, but it seems like such a privacy risk even when self-hosted. The massive upside is that the phone is just a VM. The idea makes the entire phone debate irrelevant since you can access your "phone" from any other computer that has internet access. If the connection is lost, the local device can always sync later or at least provide basic call/text functionality.
> The lack of polish is a function of the inability to use the hardware
Must be why Desktop Linux has great usability right? Oh wait
So, where are the super-polished Linux systems for the Fairphone? I know they use proprietary firmware blobs and that the hardware support is Android-oriented. But they publish device trees, driver sources, and firmware. Most AOSP-based projects support Fairphone, as well as PostmarketOS and ubports.
The problem is not only hardware support, the problem is also that the stack on top of it is very immature compared to AOSP and not something you could give to a daily phone user.
It’s funny that you mention Waydroid. It throws most of Android’s strong security model out of the window.