> I am afraid it does not matter any more, at least not for practical software freedom. The reason Google appears to be doing this is not software freedom, bu

> I am afraid it does not matter any more, at least not for practical software freedom. The reason Google appears to be doing this is not software freedom, but enabling longer software updates. Google themselves cannot provide anything remotely competitive to iOS updates if Qualcomm or other SoC vendors effectively keep their proprietary Android builds hostage. Getting stuff mainlined and unshackling Android kernels from vendor shenanigans is a very, very important step. The Google Pixel 6 is the first time in a long while an Android phone excites me, just by virtue of Google's credible 5 years of update promise. To your point: practical software freedom has been very, very hard on Android from the start. Smartphones are complex devices, and the custom kernels they run have barely been successfully reproduced anywhere else. You can find a small handful of old devices that you can get up and running in a somewhat acceptable state, but you have to restrict yourself to hard to use old stuff to get anything workable at all. While more software freedom is not really a goal of this project, this does potentially have side effects of more software freedom down the line. Similarly, Google's Project Treble has not delivered everything people wanted, but does allow people to run say (a buggy version of) Ubuntu Touch on a fair number of Android phones [0]. In the Android ecosystem, you have to count your blessings. (And hey, it's not iOS or Windows Phone either!) [0]: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/gsi-arm64-a-ab-ubuntu-touch-ubports.4110581/ https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/gsi-arm64-a-ab-ubuntu-tou...