Please explain to me how android is not linux, because android is open source.
I'm guessing it's the exact same problem that happened with microsoft: drivers are restricted and not open source, which prevents users to really have control over the mainstream devices they bought. It's the same loophole all over again: we don't own the thing we bought.
So in the end, the problem comes with hardware vendors, but most consumers really don't understand and don't care.
So why not just make an open phone, but with the same android OS everybody knows? Without the google play store? Why make a new OS, with worse hardware support?
I guess what people mean by a Linux phone is a GNU/Linux phone.
The term isn't that accurate because the userspace might not be glibc and GNU coreutils etc. But I guess that's what people mean: a phone running X11 or Wayland, and the entire stack that comes with it, as opposed to the Android userspace (which does not use X11, and has a pretty different userspace structure).
For the higher layers, Linux is an implementation detail of Android. If you write an app for Android, you write it against Android APIs and get little-to-no access to the Linux part, the graphics stack is quite different, ...
I'm guessing it's the exact same problem that happened with microsoft: drivers are restricted and not open source, which prevents users to really have control over the mainstream devices they bought. It's the same loophole all over again: we don't own the thing we bought.
So in the end, the problem comes with hardware vendors, but most consumers really don't understand and don't care.
So why not just make an open phone, but with the same android OS everybody knows? Without the google play store? Why make a new OS, with worse hardware support?