They do. What I meant to say was now that Android is locked down there is no point in accepting its shoddiness anymore. If I must be in a walled garden, I'm choosing the best kept garden.
Ah, I understand now. For me, iPhone doesn't have table-stakes until I can install apps off GitHub. Maybe come October with the regulation and a new USB-C iPhone, my mind will change.
I really didn't want to switch. I don't know how to live without Termux anymore. Google's screwing up even that, now vital system calls like execve are no longer usable by apps so Termux won't even be able to spawn programs anymore. They worked around that by moving to F-Droid but who knows what Google is gonna screw up in the future. What's the point?
My plan is to buy an iPhone soon and then try to port postmarketOS to my current phone.
Knowing that when things go to shit, you can at least have a cell phone?
I get your fatalist approach here, I really do. But if you think authoritarian companies are going to eventually ruin everything, I don't see why you'd go all-in on Apple. If you feel shorted by the Play Store's removal process, you won't like the App Store any better. If you're mad about first-world features like hardware attestation existing and being used, that's less Android's fault and more the modern development culture moving forwards.
Do whatever makes you happy in the end. Long-term though, I cannot imagine myself switching back to iOS. Apple has nothing like the AOSP, which love-it-or-lump-it is the best thing Android has going for it today.
> Is it like, base android without hardware drivers? Does this make it easier to maintain 3rd party android roms?
More or less. The AOSP is the free portion of the Android codebase (licensed in Apache) and actually accounts for the vast majority of Android code you run. Google then adds their services to the OS and preinstalls it on most phones. Most people derive custom roms from a combination of AOSP code and official (albeit proprietary) drivers.
