You can use Android completely without any proprietary Google stuff. You can't do the same with iOS.
Apple is the antithesis of this. One company shows up and makes all decisions for you, and you have no recourse, and that's it. If you don't like it, sucks to be you, go buy something else (I did).
They never said anything about forced to use iPhone.
Apple is about image and status. A walled ecosystem to maintain that image.
https://projectsandcastle.org/
But it’s a mobile device — swapping OS is not a trivial feat, not even on the android side. Especially if you care about security (pinephones for example don’t care at all).
Their macs on the other hand allows safe booting of other OSs, see the Asahi project.
This is completely false. Care to provide any proofs?
Microsoft has all the expertise in partnering with vendors and getting them to ship their operating systems, they have a rough idea about how to run an app store and they have access to developer. A de-Google, privacy focused Microsoft Android, with a Microsoft store, the ability to run native Android apps and perhaps .Net application, pushed by Microsoft sales and vendor channel seems pretty interesting to me.
But Microsoft doesn't care about neither privacy, nor mobile and practically no phone manufacturers really care to ship anything but Android at this point.
I sure as shit can't blame them - for a decade, Google tied Google Mobile Services (including things like Google Maps and the Play Store) to shipping Google's Android exclusively. If OEMs wanted to fork Android and drop Google for Microsoft, they'd (up until at least 2018) lose their license to GMS for all handsets sold. That changed in 2018 [0], when Google were told by the EU they would "... also need to stop preventing phone makers from using forked versions of Android" (from [0]).
I'm sure Google wouldn't pull any other licensing tricks to keep Microsoft or Huawei from making a competitive fork of Android now though! /s
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-e...
Respectfully, I'm not sure it was entirely Huawei (the company)'s decision. Being a major multi-national from mainland China, calling them "an arm of the CCP" isn't really fair, but neither is it entirely false.
More to the point - I tried to avoid being misleading; the arm-twisting (we know of) ended in 2018. But between the precedent, and the dozen other proprietary Google frameworks and legal agreements that could be serviced to this end in confidential OEM deals, I'm completely unsurprised nobody else has really stepped up.
Amazon's Fire phones and Fire tablets were certainly another example at forking Android (and providing replacement versions of the services), but Amazon had to find a hardware OEM that didn't already make Android devices for anyone else, due to Google's anticompetitive licensing requirements.
Yup, the lack of a YouTube app (and Google actively blocking MS's attempt to create one) was a large factor in the death of Windows Phone.
The one exception is a waiting room or long train ride but really if I have any bigger screen available I'd go for that.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1173543/youtube-viewing-....
Consoles I don't use either, but I mainly use my PCs for watching it. I find it so extremely inconvenient to watch it on my phone that I never do that at home.
> Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR (in some versions, Russia), just like in the USA?" Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House and yell, “Down with Reagan!”, and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in the Red Square in Moscow and yell, “Down with Reagan!”, and you will not be punished."
"America is so free, that I piss in front of Bush as he's passing by me."
"It's the same in Russia. I also piss when Putin passes by me. Except I don't take it out of my pants."