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Comment by protoman3000 | Hacker News Reader

Why is it not possible to compile and install a complete clean Android directly from the sources on your phone? What are the things that prevent that?

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In general it is possible to do that (assuming the phone has an unlockable bootloader), but you can't do that for the exact same image from the manufacturer, because they don't provide the source for a lot of it.

You might be able to install a third-party, community-maintained OS, like LineageOS, though, if your hardware is supported. The downside is that I believe apps like Google Pay won't work anymore, since they require Google's SafetyNet attestation system to pass. Sometimes there are ways around that, but they always seemed like unreliable hacks to me.

Since when play has been unusable with Lineage? It worked 3 months ago. I cant check that because i got new phone.

One and only problem i see with Lineage is that VoLTE wont work and as we dont have 3G anymore it is must have.

Google Pay, not Google Play.

Closed source device drivers. The mobile phone market is like the desktop market in the 90s

Didn't use to be that way. Android phones with Qualcomm SoCs used to be incredibly easy to modify with alternative versions of Android. That changed around 2014-15, can't remember why.

Now it seems only Google's own Pixel phone is the only one that's hackable enough to run LineageOS or /e/ or other de-Googled distros.

LineageOS has active support for 200 devices, and many more if you're up for some hacking, and download the ROM from the XDA forums. /e/ sells phones preinstalled with /e/OS, Pixels, Samsungs, and the Fairphone [0]. CalyxOS can also go on a bunch of phones.

[0] https://murena.com/products/smartphones/

That works on x86 PC platform because boot process and hardware discovery are well standardized, and Kernel is overwritable while the OS is running. Those are not guaranteed on non-PC computers.

AFAIK you can just do that with Google Pixel phones. I'm not saying its easy but the source code is all there.

Hardware support.

Lazy vendors single handedly keeping windows and android going with their lack of cross platform drivers, so frustrating....

True if you replace “lazy” with “ROI-driven”

Eh, depends on the time frame for ROI. Long term I think it's better ROI to go Linux native, but short term it's not, hence my labelling of 'lazy'.

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