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> My take on why a third mobile OS is hard is that phones don't have a standard BIOS type system that gets all basic I/O working on it. So having an OS that ca
by phh 4y ago
> My take on why a third mobile OS is hard is that phones don't have a standard BIOS type system that gets all basic I/O working on it. So having an OS that can install on existing phones is a bunch of work.
You can have AOSP-based OS (nowadays "smartphone OS" covers a whole bunch of stuff that isn't in AOSP so I don't consider that it's the same OS) that re-uses original Android OEM drivers. You can take pretty much any Android smartphone (assuming it doesn't prevent you from running your own software) and run an AOSP-based OS on it with literally 0 effort. That's called Project Treble, or GSI. You'll find dozens of ROMs (both Google Android, and Google-less) that will work on pretty much any modern (less than 4 yr old) Android smartphone.
Even better, it is possible to use those drivers meant for Android on GNU/Linux through Halium. There are even tech demos where you don't need original kernel source or anything, you just flash it, and it mostly works on any modern-ish Android smartphone that lets you flash your own software.
Really, the drivers and hardware support has no reason to be a blocker in the 2020s (I'm not saying it's totally free though) to make a new mobile OS, except that you're stuck to support a wide range of rather old vendor Linux kernels.
PS: The future is brighter, and in few years you'll probably be able to make a really brand new OS, that will run in a VM with drivers running in another VM alongside yours
- palata 4y ago> You can have AOSP-based OS I call those Android flavours. Those are not separate OSes. Windows Mobile was a third mobile OS. /e/ OS is not. Just like there are not tens of different browsers out there: all the Chromium-based are essentially Chrome with small changes (that people care about, but still small changes).
- phh 4y agoI don't believe that in 2023 something without: - a SMS app - a Maps app or API - a location API - a web browser - an alarm app - Remote notification system - app store (and there are many many other examples) can be called a smartphone OS. Yet AOSP doesn't contain (Google/)Android version of those. So yes, I dare say AOSP-based OS can be non-Android.
- palata 4y agoSo if Microsoft shipped Windows without a web browser, you would say that "Microsoft Windows is not an OS anymore"? No offense, but you should re-think your definition of "OS"
- kyrra 4y agoGood to know that AOSP lets you just build ontop of it now. To me this means not really a different OS, but closer to something like a different window-manager (this is more akin to Gnome vs KDE, not Linux vs FreeBSD).