It would be nice if they did that, or something similar involving Linux on phones.
I don't think they have anywhere near the resources, unfortunately.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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As long as Google is doing a better job maintaining AOSP than a nonprofit would, what's the point?
If they ever stop doing so, then this might be an option.
yeah, people forget AOSP is actually foss and it's pretty good by itself.
google play services is where the proprietary crud is at.
Could that happen? No. A massive amount of android development comes from employees paid by google to do it. What amount of resources should be siphoned away from linux/gnu stuff to support android developers? None.
Is it possible though? No. Android is a proprietary binary blob core (idr if kernel is the right term) with a bunch of open source stuff wrapped around it. For gnu, that part would have to be rewritten and that’s too big a job to take on.
Should it happen? Again, no. There are already plenty of alternatives to google branded android. Just use those.
Even if you were to wave a wand and make the android custodians according to your will, play services, the thing google is restricting, is still googles thing.
The second paragraph isn't accurate - Android uses the Linux kernel. Hardware manufacturers typically ship their own proprietary modules, but in principle there's nothing stopping you from running a mainline kernel image as long as support for the specific device or SoC is present. Granted, this isn't the case for the majority of phones, but this isn't a limitation of Android itself and you'd run into the same issue trying to run postmarketOS or really anything else on an unsupported device.
I also want to point out that there really aren't any good alternatives to Android (and its derivatives) at the moment. Mobile Linux distributions are getting better, but at least in my personal experience and from what I've heard from others it's still a pretty janky experience in comparison and arguably is only suitable for enthusiasts.
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Thanks for the correction, it was early and I’m not very smart.
The same hardware support problems exist for many SBCs in addition to the majority of phones like you pointed out. It’s a big pain in the butt.
The linux phone alternatives aren’t very mature, you’re right. I’d argue that to the extent that working on a free/libre/whatever phone system is a smart thing to do it’s probably best to focus on those alternatives as opposed to trying to reform android.
Tbh it seems beyond saving.
Even assuming that happens (very unlikely), the real issue is convincing OEMs to ship this new version instead of Google's
I'm not sure what GNU is going to do. A while back they announced that they wanted to make sure free software phones were going to be a thing, but i don't think they're forking android to do it.
Yeah I think many members of the community would like to see android get forked but not many are willing to do it. I don't blame them.
Their are already Linux phone options. I'm talking about full-fat installations and even distro-hopping.
Iirc, there was talk of getting the android core to sync back to Linux and send plenty of code upstream. The project was supposed to take plenty of time as android had strayed very far away from its Linux origin. I have no idea what happened and when the project stopped.
Android uses mainline Linux kernel for several years already. Whatever drivers OEMs are using are provided as separate binaries.
I fuzzily remember that it had happened