In some facets, AOSP is not a complete and working OS as is. In particular, I have personally had many issues with GPS location for the past fews years. Out-of-the-box, GPS simply does not work without additional non-free software to help it out. Additionally, many (that is, 95%) of all Android apps that you would find on the Google Play store do not function properly without Google services (which AOSP does not have). Applications that are built to run on stock AOSP are not the 'Snapchats' or 'Instagrams' of the world. They are typically FOSS projects that are built out of passion, but recieve little funding or corporate support.
These shortcomings often carry over to third-party ROMs, such as Lineage.
So in my experience, as someone who used to flash a new Android ROM every week, it is not about freedom - its about basic functionality. One could also argue that, since the world operates on all kinds of propietary platforms that aren't available on stock AOSP, so do we also lack the freedom to use AOSP as our daily driver - simply because it often does not interface properly with these propietary platforms.
Edits: grammer and clarifications
The big contribution of Purism phones is that more open hardware. After that, the real question we should ask is, "What software platform can offer us the greatest values in the multi-dimensional optimization problem we face?"
It's true though that you wouldn't just flash AOSP. But it's also true that dismissing Graphene BECAUSE it is based on AOSP is unfair.
I am not meaning to paint those who work on AOSP or third-party ROMs in a bad light. The work they do is terrific and great for the community. I also do not mean to dismiss any of the fantastic work that Graphene brings to the Android community.
I am simply stating that the biggest difference between Librem and Android is that there are more hurdles to jump through to provide a completely usable and free AOSP phone to an end-user in 2019. Android has been made to host a Google ecosystem, where the Librem 5 is being created to host an open ecosystem.
It sounds like the Purism team identified this issue ahead of time and decided to provide that open hardeware platform for us.
Yes, a significant fraction of Android apps do not work on AOSP without Play Services. And 100% of Android apps do not work on PureOS. F-Droid alone has ~1800 apps. I do not see PureOS or PostmarketOS catching up to that level anytime soon.
FOSS projects that are built out of passion, but recieve little funding or corporate support? Exact same situation on PureOS.
Are the Snapchats and Instagrams of the world going to port their apps over to this entirely new platform when they can't even be bothered to make versions of their Android apps that work without Google's services?
This is a fair point. It's not a huge argument for me because I'm only interested in maybe 20 categories of app and I've never been thrilled with the 30 contenders in each category. For instance, if it has only one browser and that one is Firefox, that will be ok with me to begin with. It won't bother me if there are five other choices in F-Droid. But in general, more choice is good, so I grant that this is an important consideration.
> Are the Snapchats and Instagrams of the world going to port their apps over to this entirely new platform when they can't even be bothered to make versions of their Android apps that work without Google's services?
Android without Google's services is a tiny fraction of Android and a smaller fraction of the whole market. PureOS or anything else with even smaller share can expect to be similarly ignored. But Android sans G seems even less likely to go viral than something else.
For one thing, it's too fractured. There is no AOSP brand. There's a bunch of little no-names that happen to offer AOSP under some name that isn't "AOSP" and has no recognition at all. If two or three lower-tier makers offer "Brand C" phones, it could spark. Maybe not in your neighborhood. But if it catches on in India or Malaysia or Brazil, it might be enough to attract Instagram or Twitter. Remember that those companies don't want to depend on Google. They very much want Google out of the picture.
So a handful of apps can legitimize a new platform that is attracting a million or ten users anyway. Then it becomes perilous not to be on that platform. WhatsApp can't afford to let some up and comer get a foothold just because WhatsApp wasn't available on the viral new platform.
Ahhhhhh. Ok I'm going to quit dreaming for now and get back to work. I'm not holding my breath, but I do think it can happen. It just takes the right lucky timing. There have been so many helps lately that I think if there was something ready to take advantage of these incidents, the timing is right.
That lack of awareness seems to be your own.
> In particular, I have personally had many issues with GPS location for the past fews years. Out-of-the-box, GPS simply does not work without additional non-free software to help it out.
GPS doesn't require Play Services, etc. Play Services provides supplementary network-based location services for providing a coarse, inaccurate location estimate without waiting for a while for a GPS lock. The infrastructure for this is open source and part of AOSP. It has generic, provider-agnostic support for services like supplementary location providers, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, geocoding, etc. Play Services is what provides these on phones with Google Play, but there are alternative implementations used by Amazon and in China.
> Applications that are built to run on stock AOSP are not the 'Snapchats' or 'Instagrams' of the world.
Yet apps like WhatsApp, Facebook's apps, Microsoft's apps, etc. do work without Play Services... despite what you claim. A lot of these mainstream apps do work fine, and there's a large ecosystem of open source apps that are mostly designed to run without Play Services. Providing the Play Services APIs with an alternate implementation and is also certainly possible, although I would prefer a different approach than microG.
How is any of this resolved by moving to a completely different OS with far less privacy and security, none of these mainstream applications you talk about and barely any open source application ecosystem by comparison? I don't get it.
Microsoft's apps are specifically an example I've given of how closed Android truly is: Even Google's competitors, which have all of the same service capabilities, are essentially forced to use Google Play Services. Especially when you consider the other top HN item today about how Google now essentially requires all apps use a closed source Firebase library for push notifications.
And while yes, Google Location Services is a location provider that slots into Android, you are missing that Google has convinced app developers to call it directly, rather than using the Android location provider. This means that no alternate location provider will do: Google Location Services is hard coded into almost every location-based Android app today.
In short, of the apps I tried that weren't distributed via F-Droid, most of them suffered from varying degrees of brokenness without Google Play Services (and these same apps work fine on my HTC One M8 and my current-daily-driver OnePlus 5T, both of which run LineageOS w/ GApps).
You're right, though, that "some Android apps work fine" is a better situation than "no Android apps work at all". Hopefully GrapheneOS can leverage that advantage well. It'd just be useful to acknowledge that it ain't all sunshine and rainbows just because it's AOSP-based; whether it's microG or something that ain't a security landmine waiting to blow off someone's leg, addressing that issue with an alternative service provider would be a game-changer, and would readily address the one issue I ever had with CopperheadOS (and - it seems - likely would still have with GrapheneOS).
My worry with Librem and all those initiatives is that rebuilding an ecosystem like F-Droid takes a lot of effort and time.
I tried many of the well-known ROMs: Lineage, Paranoid, Ressurection.
I also tried many of the OnePlus-specific ROMs, that were typically maintained by only one or two devs each.
Most of the features worked perfectly fine on both phones. But the deal-breakers were often the simple things: GPS (w/o downloading extra geolocation database services) and Bluetooth were the kickers for me. These services were consistently spotty across every ROM I tried.
My experience is as of a couple years ago. I have since moved away from the ROM scene, simply because I do not have the time to deal with this sort of stuff anymore.
The reality is that Librem is unnecessary because we have F-droid. There's nothing wrong with F-droid and as time goes on more mainstream apps will continue being brought over.
GrapheneOS is sadly only available on Pixel devices.
The microg project has been fantastic in providing an open mechanism to interface with Google's services. When I first tried it, I believe they did not yet have a working implementation of all the Google services. Some apps complained about Google services, some did not. You still needed to sign into Google though, which might turn some people away.
For those who want to interface with Google on an open-source ROM, microg's image is probably the way for you.
