I guess the main problem is when universities, employers, etc. require that you install an app for access to some essential part of your business with them. That's the kind of application that cannot easily be replaced with an open source equivalent, and will unfortunately probably tie many to proprietary versions of Android in the near future.

Some of the time using these apps can be avoided, but I'd imagine this is only temporary, and either way it adds significant inconvenience a lot of the time to try to go without them.

When my Pixel 7a decided to become a bomb (battery leakage), I was doing some research on good phones and looked into a few of those. As far as I'm aware, there is no Linux phone that is currently developed enough for daily use, for various reasons including battery life only lasting an hour or two.

I ended up going with a Fairphone, which I think was a great choice and will hopefully last me many years. At the same time, it ultimately relies on Android, which is why at least for now it's not a real alternative on the software/OS side..

Am I the only one who starts hearing Death Note BGM every time I have a little chest pain? 😅

I would hope this does something, since Android has been the only free major mobile OS for a long time and I’ve relied on it via custom ROMs (e.g. GrapheneOS) for years. However, I think it’s become clear that we can’t trust corporations to manage technology well, and anything belonging to a corporation will eventually become corrupt under current economic and legal structure.

I think our best bet is to develop a decent Linux-based OS for mobile devices that can actually compete with Android and Apple, and pool our efforts as a community into maintaining it. Maybe a fork of the original open source Android that is maintained and patched for security would be a good idea. I’m not a mobile dev, so I don’t really know what it would entail, but it seems like we need a mobile OS ecosystem like the GNU/Linux ecosystem for desktops.