It's true that Google plays a big role in Android development, but that doesn't mean there's something inherently wrong with Android. It's a good operating system, it's free and open source, and its huge ecosystem and existing userbase (to whom something like LineageOS or Replicant will be immediately familiar) is the reason I stuck to it.

Because it's open source, Google can't put their objectionable code directly into Android - that's what their proprietary apps and services are for, and those are where you begin to lose your freedom and control.

This: Because android has a larger general ecosystem, the open source ecosystem is larger, too.

Also, building independent operating systems that reach as many devices as android or android based distros like LineageOS do is next to impossible because of driver issues. In fact, it's only thanks to standardization pushes by Microsoft that you can build a single ISO and run it on different IBM PC's. There is no such standardization push by Google. They are okay with each vendor forking stuff, changing source code, and then providing their own version of Android instead of requiring one google-built binary for all devices. This has detrimental effects on anyone wanting to build an alternative to android because they need to maintain a large number of kernels sometimes with millions of lines of diff to torvalds mainline. There are some meek pushes by Google and other parties to mainline more stuff to Linux and implement ARM GPU drivers in Mesa, but I doubt that we'll get a situation that's equally nice to the IBM PC situation any time soon.

the worst part about android apps is that they are android apps...

but the same is true for most proprietary formats... which is why I was hoping for web apps to catch ON more

> By the way PureOS seems a good shot.

PureOS is not yet ready for prime time, but it will be very interesting to see how it performs compared to AOSP when it's released. And pmOS will most likely manage to support many PureOS components on existing hardware, although obviously at some cost in reliability and privacy compared to running PureOS on Librem's supported platform.