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@fdroidorg @fionen This is reason enough to summarily ditch Google & OEM Android versions and replace them with versions that respect FOSS.

I'm also curious why there is nothing like F-Droid on iOS, nor is it common to find libre apps in Apple's app store. Even large FOSS brands that have an app store presence, like Mozilla, have had their product lobotomized by Apple.

@tasket @fdroidorg @fionen the problem with FOSS roms is that they are very limited to a few selected devices. Majority of the people who cares about their privacy have phones not supported by FOSS roms. I am also one of them. I hate google and all big tech. But I am like prisoned here with android. I cannot install any foss rom as none of them.support the hardware I have. so.is the case for others. I still however use apps from F-Droid.

@Aliyan True, but then that highlights a pitfall of the current FOSS mentality... the idea that one simply does not prescribe the form/function of hardware, that its for the distro managers or users to shoehorn software into existing hardware.

IOW, hardware is a 'given' and FOSS people are just there to hack at it.

FOSS should have a stronger, wider bridge to open source hardware. There should be groups willing to push a particular set of hw + sw features as something users will love..

Its no surprise that the phones which make assertions about 'good for you' hw features (like Fairphone does) also happen to be some of the most FOSS-ready. They tend to make choices that are FOSS-friendly. Google also has ideas about open systems, some would say a true commitment despite recent betrayals... but their phone brand also exists to set the bar for what an Android phone should be; these factors contribute to Google phones being more FOSS-ready than most.

"The hardware I have" is a nice idea for us techies, but even as a techie myself I would never follow it. I bought this laptop because it would run QubesOS, and I bough a Fairphone 4 partly because I wanted an AOSP derivative. I bought my Belkin RT3200 router because the chipset mfg publishes open source drivers and so OpenWRT just works right on it.

"The hardware I have" means you tinker and make compromises and your choices will rarely translate into a FOSS reality for the non-techies you assist. It means you use more drivers produced via reverse engineering guesswork.. and boy am I sick of trying to fix that stuff. I recognized that stuff as hostile and will not go back.