> you're stuck on Android 17, which is centuries of work ahead of literally anything else in the open source community.
It's far ahead, but at the same time, I think we shouldn't over-emphasise how much. Functionality at the beginning of a project's lifetime is way more important than incremental improvements (or just changes) made later, and thus while much more effort has been invested into Android, new projects primarily need to catch up when it comes to e.g. phone call support and stability, and won't have to redo a lot of the effort of e.g. implementing Material You 3 or whatever.
Which is to say that we're still years out from a viable competitor, but at the same time, there could be one five years from now, which is also not that long.
Material 3 is mostly not part of the AOSP tree (aside from some very, very deep code like shadows) and is just UI libraries. I actually wonder if M3 has View implementations, or if everything has been migrated to Compose.
You're also underestimating the amount of fundamental work that goes in Android. The vast majority is hardware integration. It's not all fancy little bells and whistles. It would have the added benefit of not having to relearn the security mistakes like LIST_ALL_PACKAGES or READ_SMS permissions being open to all, at least.
I'm not saying it won't be a lot of work, and I'm not saying it'll be at feature parity in five years. But I'm saying that we shouldn't assume it'll take as much work/as long as it got Android to get to the current point, to get to the point where it's viable for some use. For example, when a usability baseline for some common usage patterns is achieved, it could be at the point where some external event could push a hardware vendor to start experimenting with specific support.
(I'll also note that there has been a lot of non-"fancy little bells and whistles" work that has been going on in the Linux world, specifically with lots of lessons learned from mobile. Think atomic distros, and sandboxing, for example.)
It's far ahead, but at the same time, I think we shouldn't over-emphasise how much. Functionality at the beginning of a project's lifetime is way more important than incremental improvements (or just changes) made later, and thus while much more effort has been invested into Android, new projects primarily need to catch up when it comes to e.g. phone call support and stability, and won't have to redo a lot of the effort of e.g. implementing Material You 3 or whatever.
Which is to say that we're still years out from a viable competitor, but at the same time, there could be one five years from now, which is also not that long.