Cydia requires a jailbreak to begin with, which won't be available on newer devices. Sandcastle project is just Android for iPhones which wouldn't be an alternative to Android and it looks abandoned, too.
Android is the better choice not due to Android specifically, but rather due to Android as a platform which includes the hardware that the Android OS can run on, and all the forks of Android.
Just leave the US until the American Dream comes back to life; European companies need more forces and their pay is actually good, because the cost of living is not so high - in most places and countries.
Not in my experience. I have always been able to access the file system, sideload apps, install other app stores (yes they're a bit limited), run any browser, run command line programs, etc. It's also easy to run Android in emulators and on a variety of hardware. iOS is absurdly locked down in comparison.
Your claim that versions of Android are completely proprietary is obviously false: every version of Android uses a lot of other open source software, and runs on Linux, which is GPL.
If we are talking about any type of android phone outside of very specific/obscure models, this is misleading. Although android is technically free software, real world phones are compromised by both carriers (e.g. Verizon) and manufacturers (e.g. Samsung).
You may be able to sideload apps, but you're still limited to the few APIs that they allow you to use, while these corporations still have the keys to the root account. Even if you own the phone, you can't get around these controls.
even if the low-level bare-bones distribution of android is free software, the vendors almost always tack on garbage that makes it completely compromised. It's like "I may be in a prison but the fair-trade handcuffs are made by a B corporation so I'm happy"
That is bullshit. You always need the hardware, most need a server. There is a difference between programs and applications - ffmpeg for example is not an app, but a program.
Of course you do - but it's not a development cost per platform for any other platform except apple. If you already have a PC (which even for hobbyist devs can be taken for granted), then developing for any additional platform will not incur additional costs - except for apple.
Emulation won’t tell me there’s a performance issue on a 3060, or let me modify lighting in realtime in unreal editor. You wanna build seriously for pc, you need a PC.
What's "seriously"? If you just want to get a basic game running on pc, you can easily do so on a vm. Sure, if at some point you need some high-performance benchmarking or specialized tests, you need that hardware. But that's for specific types of games and even then at the end if the dev pipeline.
Whereas, if you target macs or iOS, you can't even start development before you have bought a mac.
They should. The only way to make these platform disappear is to ignore them for open source project.
To me the mistake of open source software is to make programs compatible with proprietary operating systems, this way people that use these OS benefit from the open software, while people that use open operating systems cannot benefit from proprietary software that usually is exclusively for Windows or macOS.
Beside that, this adds a lot of work to the open source community, work that could have been better invested focusing on open source and not wasting time ensuring compatibility with the latest Windows or macOS release working around crap and restrictions that these companies impose to distribute the programs in their platform (e.g. all the signing requirements, paying fees in case of Apple app store, etc.)
Not that the user of open source software cannot run it on iOS or Windows, he can, but it has to port it there themself, no official support from the developers shall be ensured. Just distribute binaries for Linux and Android.
Android and most of its binaries are in some way or another proprietary. Things like drivers and google play won‘t go away. It is the wrong approach, grow up.
Since I cannot install stuff from a third party on my iPhone without paying Apple (unless Apple says I can), it is clear that I don't own my phone. So it seems fair that Apple then is the one paying for the efforts of getting FOSS support on their device.
Thankfully, you and Apple aren’t the only two choices here. That’s the thing about open source, isn’t it? Someone else is free to go and do it. And they are. The system is working as it should.
I think it would be the best if everyone was forced to live in a flat, which size is determined by the number of people living in that Appartement. It is cool for you that your house is valued at 1 million; that proves my point even more. A house shouldn‘t be an Investment, but your education.
