Linux

My anger is that the decision of an upgrade is made FOR me when the functionality of my phone should be limited by the physical limits of the hardware, and not the development limits of the phone vendor. A company should NEVER tell me "We don't think this is going to give you a good user experience so we're disabling it for you." That is MY decision. If I want to suffer through running your app more slowly, that's up to me, and I don't need the decision made on my behalf, especially when the end result is costing me money. I'm sorry, but that is absolutely unacceptable. EU legislation is nice - I'm particularly looking forward to replaceable batteries making a comeback - but legislation forcing vendor updates doesn't fix the fundamental problem that it shouldn't even be their responsibility. I know the only real differentiating factor between vendors is their particular ROMs and whatever custom bloatware they ship with, but unlocked boot loaders and an operating system with a kernel that is not so inextricably linked to particular hardware that it can be installed and run on ANY Android phone is the real solution. Desktop operating systems don't have 47 different installation images for 47 different special pieces of hardware, and there's absolutely no reason that Android should need that either. Maybe there was an argument that ARM CPUs weren't powerful enough, or space was at a premium for a kernel to have unnecessary hardware support 10 years ago, but the hardware is certainly powerful enough now, and all of those CPU cycles get wasted on crap like app scanning when the system starts, services I can't identify and probably don't need, assistants that are constantly listening to my microphone... I won't say those things are all well and good - I loathe them - but if we're going to have them that should come AFTER development of a generic Android image with a kernel that supports a wide variety of hardware. At this point, vendors can't NOT conform - what are they going to do, develop their own mobile OSs again? Android has become the defacto standard and has no competition. You can force vendors to build hardware that conforms to standards and support generic OS installation now.

Google have decoupled everything they could from the hardware abstraction layer. These changes started coming in around Android 8 and 9 (5-6 years ago at the earliest) and have only been extending the following versions. Entire subsystems like the Bluetooth system can receive updates through Google. You can boot standard OS images and all the important hardware will Just Work. If you’re stuck on an Android version that’s being dropped by app developers (Android 7, I’m guessing?) you probably won’t reap the benefits, but it’s been a few years since then.

If this is true, I haven't seen it. I've got Android 10 phones and as far as I know, I sure can't download a generic Android 12 ROM and just install it. I'm stuck waiting for system updates.

If you’re not paying, you’re the product, or you’ll be left with shovelware. Companies that won’t make any money from you aren’t going to give you anything out of the goodness of their hearts.

It's surprising that I'm STILL hearing this when I'm running 6 PCs with free operating systems that work, aren't bloated, and are loaded to the brim with world class software that is all free and reliable, some of which was written 20 years ago and barely been touched since because it STILL works.

What you're saying is perfectly valid for SERVICES, which involve ongoing costs, but not everything needs to be a service. In fact, I'd argue most things SHOULDN'T be services. And if I write an app TODAY that works PERFECTLY for some task, I can't just leave it there and rely on it to keep being used in the future. Because of the architecture of the Android system, I have to continually put in work to make it conform to new standards, which of course, keeps reliable, functional FOSS from getting ANY kind of long term usage in the mobile space.

My favorite dictionary app was written for Android Kitkat. Completely offline and functional and did everything it needed to PERFECTLY. I upgraded my daily driver phone to a Android 12 and with there being NO changes to the dictionary app that did EVERYTHING that was necessary for free, that app was broken, because it didn't conform to some new standard. Another app let me remotely mount my SSHFS folders and use my personal server, but THAT broke when Android removed the modules from the kernel. The entire history of the platform is LITTERED with this garbage where developers are FORCED to continually put in work on things that should be "develop once and it's done", and that's INTENTIONAL.

It's a scam of squeezing money out all the way down.

not really no. I mean, sure you could add a fancy gui on top of it. but 90% of android emulators are some kind of android x86 + libhoudini/ndk + vmm. some modify surfaceflinger so that each application will render to it's own window, but usually it's just disabling launcher, and sending some kind of command to open the app from a gui (IE. sending adb launch commands)