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Besides high quality hardware support and device availability. The fact of the matter is the core of Android is OPEN SOURCE. I can and have built every last bit of software on my Moto X4 thanks to LineageOS, which is based on AOSP.

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wow. even the drivers? say, for the radio?

The drivers for the radio are generally open, it's the radio firmware that isn't.

ah right. the point still stands, though. i was also under the impression that many of the device drivers that ship with with modern android phones are closed source. see the step in building lineage "Extract proprietary blobs"[0]

[0] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/payton/build#extract-prop...

Those are the firmware pieces running on the cores that aren't even running Android as their OS for the most part, so it's not really applicable to the root discussion.

Not the parent commenter that you are replying to, but yes LineageOS even gets the radios working. Its a full mobile android distribution that works great

i know, it's what i use daily :) i'm fairly confident they have no builds that are "blobless" though - part of the build process is to extract proprietary code blobs from manufacturer images which are not open source, see [0]

[0] https://wiki.lineageos.org/proprietary_blobs.html

Yes thats true, unfortunately GSM radios are all proprietary still

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