Android
DROID DOES
Welcome to the droidymcdroidface-iest, Lemmyest (Lemmiest), test, bestest, phoniest, pluckiest, snarkiest, and spiciest Android community on Lemmy (Do not respond)! Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.
2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.
4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.
5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.
6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.
7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.
8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.
Community Resources:
We are Android girls*,
In our Lemmy.world.
The back is plastic,
It's fantastic.
*Well, not just girls: people of all gender identities are welcomed here.
Our Partner Communities:
view the rest of the comments
Can you elaborate on why? Like, I'm not surprised, I just am not involved in this space enough to know why.
Proprietary drivers/firmware. Basically makes it impossible/very hard to develop custom ROMs/operating systems (the lack of openness makes it super hard to extend/modify/verify the software running on these chips).
The drivers are well separated via HAL so you can absolutely make custom ROMs/OSes without changing those. The Android OS has way more code above the HAL layer than below. You can't however arbitrarily update the Linux kernel, modify the drivers or fix security issues found, beyond the security support window provided by Qualcomm.
So you can't make free software OSes.
Are there any better alternatives? The only ones I'm aware of off the top of my head would be Samsung's Exynos, Kirin, and MediaTek. From the little experience I have in the space it always struck me as Qualcomm being the least shitty option, not necessarily the best.
Rockchip RK3399(S) is the best you can get in terms of freedom. The rest are much of a muchness.