They haven't released Android 16 QPR1 to AOSP yet, even though it came out on Pixels at the beginning of September. Normally the gap is ~1-2 days.

So yeah, a lot of custom rom devs are pretty bleak right now and honestly their concerns are pretty warranted given that it's Google we're talking about.

Bleak, maybe, or maybe it will finally be the tipping point that starts pushing people away from the "Big Two" phone OS/platforms in pursuit of something truly open and free that isn't completely controlled by a privacy-invading tech giant.

Windows 11 has apparently finally triggered the seemingly never-to-be "Year of Linux on the Desktop" as people refuse to submit to Windows 11's telemetry and other misfeatures and repurpose old (and new) machines with Linux instead of letting Microsoft decide they're obsolete.

Maybe soon we'll have the year of the Linux phone too. Or at least be able to promote AOSP into a first-class citizen with its own phone support and designs and features and future, instead of simply being relegated to the role of a stagnant fork of de-Googled Android. It's time to go from soft fork to hard fork. Fuck Google, stop playing their games, and leave them behind.

They've been working towards killing it for 10+ years.

It does seem like we're nearing the completion of their goals

I buy the phone for the os these days. It does mean getting a used phone from back a few years.

I think newer phones seem to make it harder maybe even impossible to unlock the bootloader. I use a sony xa2 (2018) and it's only possible because sony still has a service to issue unlock codes for it. I think if sony turns that service off, then no more lineage os unless you already unlocked it.

Yapp... I keep my blackberry key2....

And maybe unihertz will come with a titan slim 2, but still no lineageos

Can you even unlock the bootloader on s24 series devices?

Looks like my Oneplus 6T is also about to lose support :(