this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 day ago by themachinestops@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] dual_pyramid_reality@lemmings.world 12 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

Where are all the open source phone OSes? Where are the OS agnostic capable hardware phones? Technically some do exist, but I don't think they have any significant market share. Hope I'm wrong though.

[–] sommerset@thelemmy.club 9 points 6 hours ago

Google slowly suffocated all the 3rd party rom vendors.

[–] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 11 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Essentially every browser that's not Firefox or Safari is reskinned Google chrome for a reason. Because it's insanely expensive to build and maintain browsers. Mobile operating systems aren't much different in this regard.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago

That's not exactly true. There are several FOSS mobile OSes, such as PostmarketOS, Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, and the various Android ROMs. Once it's compatible, keeping that OS updated is relatively simple.

The issues with mobile OSes are:

  • many phones lock their bootloadersl, and every phone mfg seems to do things a little differently
  • so many different phone models with different hardware includes, none of which has manufacturer support in Linux
  • closed firmware for cell modems, which have their own little OS that needs to work with the main OS; trying to touch this runs into regulatory issues

Basically, supporting a new phone has a lot of upfront work with very little ongoing work.

Web browsers, on the other hand, need to stay updated with constantly shifting web standards, they're a huge malware target so they need to keep up on CVEs, and pages are getting more complex causing performance and rendering issues, and everyone blames the browser. Supporting a new platform is generally trivial, but the ongoing work is immense.

They're very different beasts.