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0 pointsbad_user10y ago0 comments

The stock Android on my Nexus 6 does a pretty good job actually. In a sense FirefoxOS is more limited than Android. You can't run an alternative browser on it for example.

On Android you can install a custom launcher to get rid of that annoying Google Search bar, you can replace Google Search with DuckDuckGo's app, you can install Firefox for Android on it and completely replace Chrome, you can install apps from third party sources like F-Droid or Amazon's Appstore. In Marshmallow the previously broken permissions system has been finally redesigned. Chrome for Android is pretty cool lately, as it also does push notifications, the app manifest and it does a much better job for making web apps first class citizens than Safari on iOS or Firefox on Android or whatever Opera is doing. You can actually run Facebook in your Android browser now and pretend that it's a native app.

And Android is also open source, I mean yes, while it's dependent on Google's Play services, like for push notifications or its location services, those can be replaced and Android is very much fork-able. Hey, Amazon did it.

Ubuntu was doomed from the start and Android is light years away from its competition imho. I mean, experiments are cool, but if your mobile OS is less usable than Android from 5 years ago, that's a failed experiment.

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_nedR10y ago

Android seems to be getting better with each new release from a security & privacy perspective, but still has a long ways to go. As a long time rose-tinted-glasses-wearing FOSS fan and android user, i have to say that iOS is still far ahead of Android in terms of security and privacy. Furthermore Apple seems to keep innovating in that regard.

You could go with custom launcher/mod/rom/ route but that brings its own possible set of problems - performance, battery life, broken functionality (some banking apps wont run on rooted phones), more spyware(from launchers), etc. It is not an acceptable solution for the masses.

Amazon - well they are just another company trying to ransom/loot you. Cyanogen mod is promising if they can overcome challenges (how many apps work without google play services?).

Furthermore Google play services is deeply embedded into android, whose key purpose is to ransom you to the highest bidder. Android is fundamentally compromised by the conflicting business interests of its primary developer (Google).

edit: I wouldn't say that Ubuntu was doomed from the start, but they certainly missed the boat.

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