Android is a much more modular OS than Windows, whose source I can audit, and whom I can make derivatives of like Cyanogenmod.
On the desktop, I can have interpreters and sandboxes. The modern web app is its own desktop app store sandbox. You could even argue the JVM and .net / Mono runtimes are their own sandboxes, if you want them to be.
Meanwhile, Linux distros have had the curated software distribution problem solved for years. You will never find fraudulent or unapproved software in the official Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch repos, yet you can install whatever you want.. if you want to.
And you could make an app platform on top of it, no problem. ChromeOS is freaking Gentoo. It was built with portage and now its app store is the Chrome app store.
But arguing software freedom has been a losing battle for years. Even when consumers can see the consequences - the evolution of fenced off playgrounds with no room to innovate - they just don't care.
I mean, hell, we still don't own our hardware. How many of us are running open source firmware? Even if our mainboards are free, our hard drives run proprietary microcode and our graphics cards run binary blob initialization code. Our cellular data radios are proprietary black boxes by design. The evolution of the app store is obvious in hind sight considering it all.
On the desktop, I can have interpreters and sandboxes. The modern web app is its own desktop app store sandbox. You could even argue the JVM and .net / Mono runtimes are their own sandboxes, if you want them to be.
Meanwhile, Linux distros have had the curated software distribution problem solved for years. You will never find fraudulent or unapproved software in the official Ubuntu, Fedora, or Arch repos, yet you can install whatever you want.. if you want to.
And you could make an app platform on top of it, no problem. ChromeOS is freaking Gentoo. It was built with portage and now its app store is the Chrome app store.
But arguing software freedom has been a losing battle for years. Even when consumers can see the consequences - the evolution of fenced off playgrounds with no room to innovate - they just don't care.
I mean, hell, we still don't own our hardware. How many of us are running open source firmware? Even if our mainboards are free, our hard drives run proprietary microcode and our graphics cards run binary blob initialization code. Our cellular data radios are proprietary black boxes by design. The evolution of the app store is obvious in hind sight considering it all.