Android is the leading OS for mobile phones and tablets. It is also quite popular in embedded for devices that have a screen, mostly as a side-effect of its dominance in mobile. It can often be easier to get graphics and touch drivers/support for Android compared to Linux. It is also easier to find developers who can write a custom Android app for the UI than any of the typical embedded/Linux UI frameworks, and the tooling is better.
Besides high quality hardware support and device availability. The fact of the matter is the core of Android is OPEN SOURCE. I can and have built every last bit of software on my Moto X4 thanks to LineageOS, which is based on AOSP.
ah right. the point still stands, though. i was also under the impression that many of the device drivers that ship with with modern android phones are closed source. see the step in building lineage "Extract proprietary blobs"[0]
Those are the firmware pieces running on the cores that aren't even running Android as their OS for the most part, so it's not really applicable to the root discussion.
Not the parent commenter that you are replying to, but yes LineageOS even gets the radios working. Its a full mobile android distribution that works great
i know, it's what i use daily :)
i'm fairly confident they have no builds that are "blobless" though - part of the build process is to extract proprietary code blobs from manufacturer images which are not open source, see [0]
