Comment Hasn't it always? (Score 4, Insightful) 179
Hasn't the future of 'open' android always looked bleak, more or less by design? At the bottom of the stack, we have SoC vendors who don't give a damn, handset OEMs who don't give a damn and/or actively prefer that older handsets remain as outdated as possible so you'll buy something new, and carriers who have largely the same incentives as handset vendors; but with their own crapware. This ensures that hardware support is spotty and typically weak for anything except whatever the device shipped with(and it's a moot point on the cryptographically locked devices). Markedly worse than the PC world in terms of vendor helpfullness or ability to do much of anything without a BSP or cobbling blobs together from vendors with slightly longer update support windows.
From the top of the stack, the 'free' parts of android are basically Google's hardware abstraction layer for google play services, and getting steadily more so.
From the top of the stack, the 'free' parts of android are basically Google's hardware abstraction layer for google play services, and getting steadily more so.