Of course those would be good things. It still doesn’t sound like priority #1 when it comes to software freedom alone especially in a world where smartphones are mostly not open systems designed for installation of any new operating systems.
Are they planning to license it as free software?
Linux is already the most common kernel in phones in 2026. In this case we really have to distinguish between Linux (incl. Android) and GNU/Linux.
And given that AOSP is already FOSS, it doesn’t exactly sound like a priority to reinvent the wheel of a FOSS smartphone OS.
That is not new. They’ve been doing that since the 2000s.
The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:
Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.
exposing small children to AI-generated things? I seriously wonder about the effects of that on their brains…
You could spend an entire lifetime reading existing bedtime stories from your local library.
or even from the Internet, fwiw, there are plenty of public domain fairy tales available there…
Depends on what kind of editing, really. Brightening, cropping, rotating, etc. an image is part of the art creation process; adding or removing objects is falsifying reality. Doesn’t matter if AI is involved or not.
No, that’s not, or at least shouldn’t be and used to not be, “how you do things”. Blocking websites because they aren’t complying with national laws used to be the domain of authoritarian countries like the PRC or Thailand or Russia. Now it’s “how you do things” in so called liberal democracies? Has that really become so normalized?
We had a solution to this problem in the 2000s and early 2010s when we were on topic-specific forums where each (broad) topic was a separate website where you needed a separate account.
But that had its disadvantages too…
So people will be able to fork it and add ActivityPub integration? :D
They do pretty much the same thing. If there are nuances, I do not know about them.
Doesn’t Android require a Google account anyway?
If that is so, which I do not know, the only logical explanation is that people who are already unhappy, for unrelated reasons, are more likely to need to find at least some happiness in their lives by participating in online communities.
I would never have believed it possible that almost all politicians of ostensibly democratic countries almost simultaneously agree to prevent young people from having fun, being happy and finding meaning and fulfillment in their lives. How do these people think of themselves as the good guys?
You can do whatever you want; the thing is that if you’re not an EU citizen, you can’t vote in elections to the European Parliament, so MEPs don’t have an incentive to take your positions into consideration; you can’t vote them out after all.
I honestly do not get why “touch grass” became a common phrase/meme around a decade after many people got mobile Internet access (through smartphones).
Before that, it would have made sense because you’d usually only be posting on the Internet when you’re somewhere inside where there’s a computer; but now that we can literally be posting online while lying on grass?! How did this happen?
Me too (whether Linux is an OS depends on how you define the term) and that’s why it’s such a silly post to make. If there weren’t anyone who thought KDE was better than GNOME, why would KDE still exist?
The first two depend on centralized services and nonfree software, which are things I don’t like. The third doesn’t. The fourth doesn’t have to.
So by those metrics I like cryptocurrency the most. In fact I have invested a bit of my savings in Bitcoin. I have never used Uber or AirBnB meanwhile.
Can’t I just ask it for the seahorse emoji once in a while and achieve the same result or something…
Finding restaurants can be done with the same OpenStreetMap-based apps as navigation. I use OsmAnd all the time to find out where restaurants are.
But OpenStreetMap doesn’t have a review functionality, nor is it trivial to add one from an external site to one. Apparently there have been efforts in this direction, but I don’t know a lot about them: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Reviews
So I don’t have an answer for reviews. But the review databases that currently exist are a manipulation battleground which people should take with a grain of salt anyway.