I gushed over them when Android Open Source Project, Chromium, and the Google summer of code were new. I still think the free and open source projects they maintain are positive things, but I’m disgusted with just about everything else they do.

What changed you?

Me too. I really thought that one day my dad would say “You were right. I’m sorry.” There is nothing that can change their minds, and I don’t know what the solution is.

I agree. As it stands, there is no immediate problem with buying a vendor unlockable phone for LineageOS or GrapheneOS. It does seem like Google is slowly closing the doors to FOSS, so the future could require an AOSP fork. But it also might not. We don’t really know for sure. As long as LineageOS and GrapheneOS exist and have developers, we have nothing to sorry about.

If, in the future, all hardware manufacturers fail us, I have used Waydroid on an old Thinkpad, and it is fantastic. And, more in the Linux ecosystem is Android Translation Layer which translates Android syscalls into Linux syscalls. It is buggy, but I could see it getting better in the future.

Anyway, I’m not really worried. There are still a lot of paths forward, and FOSS advocates are persistent.