I am greatly displeased at the smartphone industry. I think it's time for a heavy handed crackdown about all the spying they're doing. The smartphone industry and in particular the company qualcomm I find an intolerable company in their practice, I believe they should be smashed, their equiment liquidated and their intellectual property destroyed.
The smartphone industry is a festering cancer on general computing, a persistent and pernicious assault on human rights. An invasion of our private spaces. A colonization of our lives.
I think it is past the point of reform, not that there are any regulator with to intelligence figure out what is wrong let alone the wherewithal to do anything about.
For those reasons, I think global thermonuclear war is our only realistic option for setting back the clock on this travesty.
I am willing to hear your alternative, I don't believe anything short of that has a snowball's chance in hell to change anything about this.
That answer is at best only partially right.
The real answer is that Pixels were, until very recently, Google's officially supported reference hardware in AOSP while everything else is a community port of some GPL compliance source code dump.
Community ROMs are Pixel first because Pixels just work.
It'll change now that Google decided to no longer release Pixel adaptions directly as AOSP and the community will have to port that the same way as for any other vendor, especially if a vendor decides to maintain their adaptions in LineageOS.
Hey, that makes total sense. And thanks for filling in what I missed! Really too bad about those changes, too. Google set out to create an open mobile ecosystem in opposition to Apple (and, at the time, and to a lesser extent, M$oft). It was such an incredible success at the start. Lately though, it seems they want to run in the opposite direction by tightening their grip - not the best thing for the community of Android users at all.
Of course, the minority group of nerdy, early adopting users who are a dedicated bunch will bear the brunt of it (as always). It's no surprise they'll be facing backlash from those groups, which in part explains the surges in demand for better (yet somewhat adjacent) alternatives. I was all in when Google said "don't be evil". Now they seem to have abandoned that ethos. I'm still stuck in their ecosystem, have started looking for the exits and I'm definitely not alone in feeling that way.