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I see the walled gardens and restrictions as fairly separate from Android itself. Most of the worst of it isn't Android at all, it's all just Play Store relate

I see the walled gardens and restrictions as fairly separate from Android itself. Most of the worst of it isn't Android at all, it's all just Play Store related, but other app stores don't need those restrictions. I could see something like F-Droid, but with a cloud or local portal to be able to install things remotely on headless servers. I'm not sure what the extra administrative burden is, Android is designed for as little administration as possible, I'm not sure if it's explicitly documented anywhere, but they seem to have a philosophy of "You should never have to configure one thing to get some other thing to work, everything should either be one size fits all or automatic".

_8j50 3y ago
Admin burden is lack of docs and tooling to maintain stuff. You need to introspect and debug things and measure performance, manage logs, networking,etc... and there needs to be a pool of potential people that can do that job of maintaining it. If you have an ngnix apk, it might need to talk to a php and mysql apk and a bunch of other apks and each of them have configs and require management. Essentially, my problem is that you would need to port everything servers now are doing to it but to what benefit? It makes more sense to import features you like in android/dalvik to gnu/linux. Less work/burden.
- eternityforest 3y ago
  Well, if you were really doing things in a fully "Androidish" way, you wouldn't just be straight porting PHP into an APK. You'd probably have a DatabaseProvider interface that your MySQL would implement, that would have all the stuff to auto-configure that interaction, and the SQL app would probably include its own backups and related admin stuff. If you were really going all the way, PHP and nginx probably wouldn't be a thing, you'd just be writing apps in straight Dart and putting your content as markdown files or something, to stay consistent and not add any extra layers of frameworks that aren't closely managed by the OS. But yeah, I agree, if you just straight ported existing architecture to Android you probably wouldn't get much benefit.

_8j50 3y ago

Admin burden is lack of docs and tooling to maintain stuff. You need to introspect and debug things and measure performance, manage logs, networking,etc... and there needs to be a pool of potential people that can do that job of maintaining it. If you have an ngnix apk, it might need to talk to a php and mysql apk and a bunch of other apks and each of them have configs and require management. Essentially, my problem is that you would need to port everything servers now are doing to it but to what benefit? It makes more sense to import features you like in android/dalvik to gnu/linux. Less work/burden.

eternityforest 3y ago
Well, if you were really doing things in a fully "Androidish" way, you wouldn't just be straight porting PHP into an APK. You'd probably have a DatabaseProvider interface that your MySQL would implement, that would have all the stuff to auto-configure that interaction, and the SQL app would probably include its own backups and related admin stuff. If you were really going all the way, PHP and nginx probably wouldn't be a thing, you'd just be writing apps in straight Dart and putting your content as markdown files or something, to stay consistent and not add any extra layers of frameworks that aren't closely managed by the OS. But yeah, I agree, if you just straight ported existing architecture to Android you probably wouldn't get much benefit.