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I think (free / libre) Android is still alive today (although it is endangered now with Google not yet having released Android 16 QPR1. I would still hope with enough contributors we could fork it). Forks like LineageOS/GrapheneOS exist, which further improve allow you to use Android completely without proprietary Google Spyware. There is also a quite big ecosystem of free open source apps (on FDroid and other repos)


The problem isn't that there's no free/libre Android, it's that it's not the core ethos.

15-20 years ago, someone at Google thought, "Jeeze, these little smartphones are great, but they could be better, and imagine all of the data we could get off of users if they did everything in their lives with one?", so they bought into Android, which was a completely independent startup until 2005. That is the platform's raison d'être. They wanted to compete with PalmOS, Windows Mobile, and later iPhoneOS, for the data that people were entering into smartphones, so they introduced a software product that was open source so that OEMs would buy in. And it worked.

Android would not have had a use to Google as a GNU/Linux-style project where there is no gatekeeper. If I can easily tear out Google's proprietary software, and replace it with something else without losing access to things like the Play Store, then Google just lost out on the value proposition on their purchase of Android in 2005 when it came to my use of it. They did it to make money off of my use, not to graciously support a FLOSS project.

And now we're seeing that playing out as all of the FLOSS projects you mention are under direct threat from Google's handling of the project.




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