> There's no way this isn't intentional hostility towards forks.

Of course it is. But it isn't new. This was declared in March last year. We discussed it a lot here. It's only now that it's going into effect.

You guys are getting bugfixes?

Ofc to the root kit installed by "them", better battery life and WiFi stability.

/s

The security fixes will be published normally.

Security fixes are hardly the only software problems Android has.

The writing was on the wall the day they shipped Doze with GPS as an OS feature.

All those years back I started calling it, since I built software for (long-lived) HMI devices that ran on Android

We were doomed when they stopped shipping a dialer or SMS app in AOSP.

“Phone by Google” is disgusting.

And then Signal removed SMS support so we're stuck with Gogole's crap.

There are several SMS clients on F-Droid.

Yea, SMS and phone apps are quite numerous. I don't think it's a problem, the subsystems all the apps use is open enough and not hard to build against.

Except for RCS, that's completely locked down and is pretty solidly becoming literally just Google. Fuck RCS.

Not just Google is the problem, the entire industry is the problem. Almost all of the cell-based standards are locked away and purely depend on the operators, major infrastructure companies like Motorola, Ericsson and Huawei and modem implementors like Qualcomm, Apple or Broadcom.

Implementing them independently is extremely difficult and even if you manage to do it you cannot have them commercially available due to radio regulation and patents. Even academic research can only be done with collaboration of those huge companies.

It is impossible to make a phone that is LTE capable completely independently (or even without nation state support). You cannot implement VoLTE or RCS without support from the carriers. They all have their own proprietary protocol on top of the standards.

Google has basically infinite money and their own patents and industry relationships and government support so they can figure out RCS. An indie company, even with infinitely motivated engineers and good funding do not have any of it.

It is not completely impossible, if you do it in a clever way, e.g., make the modem removable, https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/

For purely data, sure, that works. I have actually done it for multiple projects but for industrial purposes. It is slower than what a phone can achieve with an integrated baseband and SoC but would be good enough

For VoLTE, it is possible to get very basics with external modules but it is also very time and operator dependent. You need to have the profiles of each and every single operator you may support. If the phone would be globally available, this means thousands of profiles. Your module needs to be configurable after deployment. You still carry the risk of operator changing their profile or switching to a different encoding that your module doesn't support.

RCS is completely proprietary to the specific operator. There are currently no external modules that supports it, nor I beleive will be due to the complete proprietary nature. Google and Apple internally handle their pairing with the ones that support it.

On top of these two, you have actually a significantly bigger problem. The reason companies like Qualcomm integrate baseband chips with the main SoC die is the power efficiency. With external modules you will never reach an integrated circuit efficiency. Moreover you are sacrificing valuable battery space to the extenal module.

This is all true, and my phone (from the link) is not very energy efficient and doesn't support all mobile bands. But it exists and is usable. Calls work for me, too.

> You still carry the risk of operator changing their profile or switching to a different encoding that your module doesn't support.

Do you change your module accordingly.