Power users and developers have always had the ability to circumvent the Android sandbox on their own devices.
Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems.
N900s were pretty rad little toys, but anything you could do with them you could also always do on Android. The base Android OS doesn't have a built in package manager, but you can easily run a more classic Linux distro in a chroot or something.
Linux Deploy has been around for almost a decade now.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linu...
I'm just describing the way things happened to be back in that era.
> "Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems."
Yes, and? That's just as true of early PalmOS and the other early mobile OSes. Security against malicious apps just wasn't a consideration at that time on smartphones/PDAs precisely because there was no app store and no significant quantity of malicious apps.
The topic is the control that the user has over a phone they purchased, not source code availability for the OS, so yes, I am. Windows CE smartphones provided access about the same as Windows 98/NT in terms of the freedom to run apps and providing apps unfettered access to OS level APIs. The same can't be said for Android and Apple's sandbox + walled garden model.
The only Linux smartphone I can think of from that era that offered similar access and control was the (I think?) Nokia N900 and interest in those was IIRC negligible.