I know, I’ve played with postmarket os before on an old Pixel. The issue is that the usability gap between even AOSP (which is barely usable) and the latest and greatest mobile linux distro is enormous. The issues that exist right now may or may not bother you and I, but they are showstoppers for normal people.

I just don’t see what there is to be gained (for end users) from creating another Linux mobile OS instead of just building on top of AOSP. In theory, having a community-driven OS is a great idea because even a GPL fork of Android wouldn’t survive long due to divergence/fragmentation. If a truly community-driven OS can achieve a sustainable development process, that’d be nice. However, in practice the evil stuff Google does is on the business side, not the code side. For example, if you port Phosh to Android as a custom launcher, you’d end up with a similar user experience, except with the added benefit of a phone that actually works and a massive ecosystem of working apps. Sure, you can’t apt install blender, but nobody actually wants to run desktop apps on a smartphone.

And another thing is that a lot of the freedom-restricting bullshit on Android today is the fault of device manufacturers who lock the bootloader and make it difficult/impossible to run custom operating systems. Even if you build a feature-complete alternative to Android, you’re still going to be struggling hard to get it running on real devices without buy-in from OEMs. How will you convince OEMs to ship your OS over Android? Answer: you won’t.

So IMO, Postmarket OS and similar projects will only ever be toys for nerds like us who want to play with e-waste devices abandoned by the manufacturer.

Want to break Google’s stranglehold on Android? Write to your representatives and start voting in more than just the presidential election (If you’re American). We live in a democracy, and Google is obviously breaking antitrust laws. It’s just that current politicians are corrupt and incompetent boomers who don’t understand tech, and are more likely to listen to the billionaire’s lobbyists than us internet nerds.