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Everything New In the Android 8.1 Oreo Developer Preview (theverge.com)
On Wednesday, Google launched the Android 8.1 Developer Preview. The new version of Android is available for Pixel and Nexus devices, and features a number of under-the-hood changes. The new version tests another change to notifications in which apps can only make a notification sound alert once per second. It also contains an Easter egg: the Android Oreo logo now looks like an actual cookie. The Verge reports that 8.1 is eventually supposed to activate the hidden Pixel Visual Core system-on-a-chip, which aims to make image processing smoother and HDR+ available to third-party developers.
How about:
- Proper GNU utilities instead of whatever *box flavour they've used in the past
- Collaboration with the xposed team
- Package pinning
- Official Magisk/SuperSU support
- Toggle switch for Doze
- Safetynet override
- Proper SD/local storage volume management
- Renewed committment to community development
- Proper OS-level package management and forced integrator acceptance of Google security patches for continued access to the Play Store
- Outlawing (forced) locked bootloaders on new devices in exchange for access to the Play Store
These changes would ensure their continued dominance as a platform, as us powerusers/developers would have little desire to seek alternatives.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
For my next phone I'm gonna pony up and buy one with a pure full GNU Linux distro.
The problem is that there aren't many thing on the market yet.
Best contenders are :
Now they are making Sailfish OS which is a continuation of the same development (but have now renamed the core from Meego to mer).
They used to have some inhouse hardware (Jolla 1 Phone) then some manufacturer failure (Jolla Tablet), then some third party partner ship (Jolla C / Intex Aquasih). Their latest product is Sailfish X, done in partnership with Sony Open Devices, to Install Sailfish X on Sony Xperia X (single SIM version [the dual sim version isn't officially supported, but according to forum it works too), *not SIM-locked only* [SIM-locked phone cannot have their bootloader unlocked]). It's still an early beta, but if you're patient and willing to through the first few months of bugs, it might be worth giving it a try
it's a full blown GNU/Linux under the hood, using modern features like Wayland, Systemd, etc. using RPM repositories for software distribution and significative developper community.
Darbacks for your specific target is that to make deployment on smartphone easier, it does rely on same (closed source) drivers that the chipset manufacturer provide for smartphone (using an adaptation layer called libhybris), so you still have manufacturer blobs, and some bits of the infeface still aren't under a copy-left license yet (but Jolla plans to, and in the main time the source is visible any way, as the interface is mostly QML and Javascript anyway. With lots of patches available in the communities too)
Good news is that they plan to develop a 100% pure Linux opensource phone with no blobs (partly by selecting chip with 100% opensource support, and partly by isolating problematic chips like baseband modem into separate chips that only communicate with the main chipset over a standard protocole - there's no "baseband modem actually serving as the chipset's northbridge" as in Qualcomm)
the drawbacks are that it's still in development (obviously), and that it uses a chipset that is either completely antique (currently their test are done on Freescale i.MX6, because that the only one with 100% opensource drivers supported by upstream kernel) or might be less exciting than other phone (they hope to be able to shift to FreeScale i.MX 8 as opensource support improves).
they plan pure linux interfaces, mostly gnome and KDE Plasma Active (yet another QML-based interface).
And I think that's about all currently active project of GNU/Linux phones, now that Ubuntu Touch has dropped the ball.
(Also, not interesting for you, but Sailfish OS, on their official commercial product support a proprietary compatibility layer - Alien-Dalvik by Myriad - that enables Android Apps (though currently only at 4.4 KitKat level).
Purism has promised to consider some container based solution (andbox -based, perhaps ?) to bring compatibility to Android Apps.
Tizen can download from their application store OpenMobile's Application Compatibility Layer.
So none of these will suffer from "not part of a big app ecosystem" networking effect)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
10 years ago when Apple released the iPhone, it really had shaken the market up.
Well, depends on your point of reference.
By comparison of common feature phone of the era : Yes it was revolutionary.
By comparison of what PDAs have been doing for the past few decades, starting from Psion, PalmOS, etc.. : The iPhone was just "meh..."
It was just a bit more modern than the then current iterations of PalmOS that started to show their age. And it was just a little bit less sucky then Microsoft's usual Windows bullshit. On the hand iOS completely lacked any 3rd party apps support, whereas the main competitors back then had vibrant communities of 3rd party developers and apps markets.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I always found it comical after driving into the outback for a week without WiFi or mobile reception, when coming back to the real world I would suddenly hit a tower and my phone would go mental giving the Facebook notification sound over and over again in such rapid succession that each sound cut off the previous one.
When I first thought about this I figured there should be a priority based system where each app only triggers a notification sound once per priority level and not at all if the same or a higher priority message comes through.