From the pure technical standpoint, AOSP is better in every way. Fully managed runtime gives better control over resources scheduling, better app sandboxing. Battery life. Uniform hardware support.
All obstacles for it to be open were artificially made by lawyers.
Like Jolla runs Android emulation layer. Same Android but without its benefits.
I made a full comment in this thread. The bottomline is
It all takes years.
Linux phones are around for enthusiasts since Nokia N900 (which was/is a masterpiece) — yet nothing is remotely close to a mainstream phone.
Flatpack is only a piece of the puzzle. I remember in early Android version, an app could increas gyroscope query frequency (i.e. a racing game demanding precise phone tilt), then crash and the gyroscope would drain battery within hours. And again — this is only one example.
The ecosystem must grow — to this day, I cannot set Immich as my default gallery app on LineageOS. So I take a photo, and can't immediatelly look at it. And Android is already mature. There must be a standard and secure way of exchanging calendar events, notes, photos. Developers must adopt this new ecosystem — it takes years.
The best option we have right now is to pressure Google to allow alternative to Play Services and also sponsor AOSP development outside of Google. There are numerous Linux distros, including commercial ones, I don't see why we can't have numerous Android flavors.
It took 6-10 years for Android to take shape.
On Linux, every app has full access to your browsing history, clipboard (passwords), photos with geo-tags, music, list of other installed apps, contacts. Unrestricted battery and network access -- it's a tracking paradise. And all it takes is one supply chain attack on npm install with typical 4000K dependency packages
I missed that part
The time from opening the browser to having a fully loaded site is minutes.
I think it depends on the region. To me, full browser restart with reconnect is maybe 10 seconds tops, usually less. I use Tor Browser as a default one on my phone, and it opens random links quite okay.
For me, the main issue is exit node blocking, then I need to restart the browser 1-2 times.
This question is unironically very deep. As it's privacy we're talking, you decide what to trust on your own.
My understanding is that Tor provides anonymity for my threat model (ad-tech corporations).
But trust need to be placed somewhere. Do we trust Mozilla? All their emploees? Do we trust OSS? Does anybody actually review open-source code? What about supply chain attacks?
I am, a nobody, was personally invited to a Contagious Interview (a person, pretending to be a client for consulting was trying to place a rootkit on my machine via GitHub repo).
What about AI-assistet coding that actively tries to eliminate security gates?
It worth okay for me.
Why not? If more people use onion router the network only becomes better.
You are correct that Tor is not as convenient. I use Tor Regularly but I use another browsers if I need to login. Sometimes I have to restart Tor Browser because of blocks.
The NSA wasn't able to break Tor fundamentally, even with spanning numerous exit nodes to intercept traffic, and high-scale traffic correlation between enter and exit nodes
"We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time." It continues: "With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users," and says the agency has had "no success de-anonymizing a user in response" to a specific request.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nsa-gchq-attack-tor-network-encryption
I'm surprised to read the whole thread and nobody mentioned that TorBrowser is the goat for daily anonymous browsing.
Mainstream phone as in "I don't need to debug it via terminal"
The issue I'm pointing at: safe, long battery life, snappy maps while driving is what took AOSP more than 5 years.
It would be very unfortunate to discard all that work and start from scratch.