Of course. But killing the business model of pretending to give away stuff for free when you're actually making money by selling the 'customer's data does guarantee that this business model will not show up again.

Android is not a "business model". It does not need to make money by itself to be justifiable. All Android needs to do for Google is to help them to commoditize their complements*

Killing Android is not going to stop Google from collecting data much like Facebook still collects data from people who install Instagram/FB on their oh-so-pricy iPhones.

If what you really want is to ask for regulation to stop data collection from the companies, be my guest. But advocating the destruction of one of the largest software ecosystems which is (mostly still) based on F/OSS is cutting off the noise to spite the face.

* https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Google's business model is to sell consumers to advertisers as efficiently as possible. Android makes money for Google by achieving that (plus a little extra from the app store). If Google were somehow forced to stop collecting data from Android devices, they would have no reason to continue developing Android (and the same will be true of Fuchsia).

Apple on the other hand makes its money from sales of its hardware and from their 30% cut of the much more profitable App Store. They are likely also collecting data and probably extracting value from that as well, and they are certainly allowing other companies (such as Google and Facebook) to release their data-collecting apps on their platform; but if data collection was entirely prohibited starting tomorrow, Apple would still be selling and developing iOS.

F/OSS is not a good in itself. Technology is technology. A F/OSS data collection program is exactly as bad as a proprietary data collection program - the purpose is much, much more relevant than the development model, in the grand scheme.

So sure, I have nothing against Android itself (I prefer it to iOS personally). But if attacking the data collection model had to cause the end of Android, I would accept that in a heartbeat, and I think most privacy advocates would as well.

> Google's business model is to sell consumers to advertisers as efficiently as possible.

The problem of oversimplifying some concepts is that we end up with absurd statements like this accepted as fact.

> Android makes money for Google by achieving that.

You are confusing tactics with strategy. Android is not a tactic, it is strategy. (Please do read the link I posted before)

> F/OSS is not a good in itself

Yeah, well, that is just, like, your opinion, man. For plenty of people there is a lot of inherit value associated with Software being Libre. The mere fact that I can take a fork of Android, remove the G-Services part that I don't like and install it on a rootable device, while not being able to do the same with iOS, is an concrete example of that.

> A F/OSS data collection program is exactly as bad as a proprietary data collection program.

Your issue here is not with Android, rather with the myriad of other Google Services that come in the OS. I am failing to understand why you keep conflating the two. Are you also going to start asking for Google to stop contributing to the Linux kernel because they use it on Android and their servers?

I did read the article, I know it for a long time. But I do not believe it applies in this case. Google is not selling hardware, it is not selling software, it is not even selling services. Google sells advertising, and mobile phones serve a dual role: they are (1) a platform for advertising, and (2) a means to improve their advertising products by data collection.

The biggest risk for Google is that someone else controls the mobile platform, and chooses not to give them space on this platform, or chooses not to allow them to collect the data that they need to improve their advertising.

Both are the same reasons why Google chose to build Chrome. Browsers were already a commodity, Microsoft and Netscape had seen to that long before Chrome started. So Google's strategy with Chrome can't have been commoditizing their complements. Rather, their strategy is about control of their platform, and it proved very successful. And now they are applying the same strategy with Android and the Google Play services.

And yes, my issue is not with the core open source Android code, my issue is with the final OS on my phone, which includes the Linux kernel, the Android OS, and a lot of Google tracking that I can't scrutinize or disable.

However, if Google were to start losing control of Androideither through laws or through competition (say the Amazon Android phone had taken off and squeezed Google Play out of the market) I can guarantee you that Google investment in Android would slow to a crawl. Google doesn't need a commodity OS on mobile. Google needs to control as much as possible of the mobile phone platform.

I disagree with your first paragraph, especially the conclusion. Case in point: Facebook is still doing just fine at their data collection even though they are (yet) only at the application layer. But I don't want to keep beating this bush.

In the end, all I can say is "if you are so worried about Google's Android, go ahead fight the good fight, get a Fairphone with a custom ROM without g-services, or with any other OS. Asking for Android as a whole to be killed is short-sighted and will not achieve anything"