Android is open source, but your phone isn't—here's why Google locked it down
"Android has come to dominate the global smartphone marketplace, and a large part of why this has happened is thanks to its open-source nature. Any phone maker can put Android on its phones with no licensing fees, and its adoption has also spawned a massive app ecosystem, so unless you're a trillion-dollar company like Apple, going a different way isn't sensible. But is the Android operating system on your phone really open source? The short answer is, technically, "yes." However, the phone in your hand is less open-source than proprietary."
The way bigger issue for me though is that some essential apps, especially like banking app, dig into that proprietary API, for "security" reasons. This is why you find with some rooted phones, or those running pure open source, that the banking apps won't work. The problem with that is, it is getting difficult to bank with a phone app when they use it for authentication changes made in the browser to banking services, creation/editing of virtual cards, etc.
So more and more now I'm finding it is not about the choice of just installing a googled Android, but it is about some apps I really need to use which just do not run without the Google API. For that I also hold the service providers responsible, but I get that they need to ensure the app is not hacked etc.
It's basically forcing the world into two Big Tech dominated devices. Whilst we have options for Android, that may break apps, the iOS world is even worse as there is basically no choice for a de-Appled iPhone.
Just interesting, and very sad, to see how the world has changed in the last 10 years. The same pattern repeated with the Internet itself, that as more of Big Tech and corporations became involved, the freedoms we had got eroded. I don't mean the freedom to install something open source, because yes I can still do that, I mean to install it and it is still all fully functional. In the early years of LineageOS I could still install and use my banking app just fine. Later I had to use RootCloak, but eventually that also no longer worked.
I may have to one day just say to the bank, like I deleted WhatsApp, and just say sorry I don't have a mobile phone so no SMS, no WhatsApp, no biometric authentication.
See
Android is open source, but your phone isn't—here's why Google locked it down
Android is open in theory, but very closed in practice.
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