i am once again asking you to free me from the necessity to compile android from source to have a phone i'm comfortable using
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You and me both. With android 11 and beyond working to move as much of AOSP as possible into proprietary modules, the ship on being able to have free and fully user controllable privacy respecting android devices is sailing.
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AOSP doesn't have blobs itself. Devices have a mix of open and closed source components as part of their Treble implementation. AOSP sits on top of a Treble implementation. There are open source Treble implementations The typical Qualcomm-derived one has many proprietary bits.
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Treble has made things much easier if you only want to change AOSP rather than doing device-specific work. We haven't been able to take advantage of the main benefits for GrapheneOS since we have to do device-specific hardening work. It hasn't gotten any harder in recent years.
Making production builds of AOSP for Nexus and Pixel devices isn't nearly as easy as it should be due to Google not dedicating the necessary resources to including the open source Qualcomm device support code in AOSP along with build integration for closed source libraries, etc.
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The issue is that Qualcomm makes the sources available to their partners, so Google's internal tree builds these things from source. They haven't dedicated resources to providing as much of that as possible publicly with build integration for firmware/libraries that are blobs.
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