Half-way through writing this i saw we’d had part of this discussion before… i really hope you are not trolling.
That depends on what you want. I can see plenty of problems with it, so the distinction definitely should be made clear, and they should not get away with simply calling themselves “”“OS”“” with no mention of Android.
It is not as bad as with browsers where the fact that basically everything except Firefox now is a Chrome clone. And if there was only those left, all standards would go out the window, much like the IE era of the late 90s and early 2000s. I don’t think the Internet could be saved again if that was to take hold.
No, for mobile OSes we are in fact already there. When was the last time you saw an app by some major service that was not for Android or iOS? Quite possibly never. Add to this the gazillion of apps that are unnecessary and should have been nothing more than webpages, but that at the same time are essential for some physical thing you bought. That might not sounds so bad for the individual user… but it does mean we (as a society) can really never leave the duopoly. I don’t want that. Competition and open standards are healthy! AAS and WayDroid are valiant efforts, but i’m sure you have seen the flood of complaints about how they are not good enough (Bluetooth, NFC, WiFI, VPNs…).
Add to this that the UI is pretty terrible, apps ridiculously huge, the general inefficiency of the OS, the fact that the security model is based on locking you out of your own device, and no meaningful shell access just to name a few.
I have little interest of hiding from google. I want a good OS and a sustainable future for tech.
Yes, yes it is.
But by nature Linux distributions are so much more diverse. They differ in core system libraries, package management, security philosophy, and perhaps most relevant to this point, desktop environment.
For the Android clones they don’t just share a kernel and happened to agree on an aspect of the other things - no, they share the entire stack. And that stack is single-source, not a huge community of independent projects.