Google will cut off independent developers to Android if they do not register with Google first. This will kill independent platforms like @fdroidorg@floss.social and severely impede FLOSS devs from creating apps for Android.
Many KDE apps are deployed for Android: KDE Connect, Itinerary, Tokodon, and there’s even a test version of Krita for Android.
KDE calls on Google to reverse course and Keep Android Free!
Time to accelerate Linux phone ecosystems. The best you can do with such open letters is buying some time until they redo it again and redoing it even worse. Smartphones were never designed to be your devices and this consequence is nothing really unexpected for that reason. We need pocketcomputers to stay/become independent from vendors dictator-like behaviors. We need devices as Librem 5, the upcoming Liberux Nexx (if they really manage to provide FOSS drivers) and similar projects. They are just not ready for the average person, yet.
Krita on a tablet is a match made in heaven. I currently use Procreate because I have an iPad and Krita isn’t there. If Krita is gone from Android tablets too, it’d be so sad. Other apps aren’t as good. In fact, if I were to buy a new tablet, being able to run Krita would be a dealbreaker for me. I’d buy an Android device just for that.
One of, if not THE major problem, is that the same type of people who are rogue enough to use, maintain, or even develop minority-share systems are ALSO rogue enough not to work with each other enough to PERFECT anything for the masses. Yes it’s great to have diversity… until it means diluting the intended effect so much that the cumulative effect is simply no longer enough to accomplish the goal.
For example, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and maybe a handful of others, could have really disrupted the bankster control of our global “money”. But instead, the crypto-related investment and energy got spread out all over into thousands of teams and projects, all with limited penetration and effect. The entire intent of financial freedom has now has been bought and hijacked by the very banksters needing to be overtaken in the first place.
And so, just as we don’t need thousands of blockchain projects all amounting to wasted redundant work and effect… We also don’t need 1000 different distros, with thousands of devs all redundantly wasting resources solving the same challenges with software and hardware. All the major players IDEALLY would team up into much larger focused thinktanks and efficiently managed teams that can produce, refine, and iterate very quickly, accurately, and massively. Tailor everything to only a few lines of hardware that have such a huge marketshare demand that if any one or two manufacturers don’t want to adapt to the demands of the Linux side (NOT the Linux side trying to adapt to a hundred manufacturers), then there is enough pooling of resources from thousands of participants, each spending and donating to just a few directions, or even to have our own hardware product line from scratch.
Phones should be exactly the same.
And OS’s on them too.
It could literally mean saving humanity.
Blockchain is a technology that is not made for privacy and freedom (at least not anymore). Every transaction is recorded, energy-costs are much higher and at the end it is a system that is perfectly aligned with capitalism where people with a lot of money can earn even more money (mining) or criminal people can earn more money (java script mining in browsers or bot networks that hijacked smart devices and private PCs entirely).
But we also have GNU-Taler, something “nobody” speaks about and so it has no market-share. But this has non of these downsides - costs not much energy, fully private on the consumer side, but not on the company side (so taxes will be paid) and so on.
You may know more than the average person, but that does not mean you are fully true. And that is especially true for the Linux side of the discussion. There are many good reasons why we have 1000 different distros. Some begin as hobby project to learn how things are working (devs bring value some time later to FOSS with new earned skills), others have specific use cases or approaches and in general many distros are working together, such as Ubuntu that also works on Debian.
On the mobile side it is not much different. We have PureOS, a Debian based distro that is FSF certified, we have Mobian that is Debian plus some mobile packages, trying to fully integrate mobile into Debian, wie have Drodian that is Mobian plus Halium to support smartphones, we have PostmarketOS (Alpine Linux) that was in first hand designed to be light weight and installed on as many phone devices as possible (that includes smartphones) . But work on PostmarketOS even contributes to PureOS and wise versa.
The issue is not the split into different distros, but the lack of money and the time when it all started. Linux phones are 20 years behind desktops and need to catch up (and already did a lot in this direction). And sure, it loses a bit of efficiency, but it wouldn’t be a game changer if all would work on the same project. The current success of Linux phones comes from the wider ecosystem. And success does not mean to have a huge market share, but a stable ground to build up. GNOME and KDE are part of it, which means a lot. The time of Linux phones will come, just as it came for desktop Linux.
You said a lot, and made many true and good points that i agree with individually. But in composite, your few counterpoints simply do not come close to nullifying my composite point that, simply put: “freedom” work is largely too diluted and wasted on inefficient redundant projects, and thus the potential cumulative strength and impact of which is likely diminished.
So i guess we just disagree on that concept. I think it’s obvious, but the “freedom fighters” clearly do not think so, and probably would agree with your few examples as somehow being “enough” too. Nothing more to say about it.
Let me ask you in another way: do you really think that so many people would still work on these projects if they all could just contribute to a single one? Look at previous attempts as Ubuntu Touch where communities are shrinking. We require the wider ecosystem to grow, otherwise many people will not find a spot where they want or can improve things. Not everyone has the required set of skills to work on a specific project, but probably some for other projects.
I agree that the development could be accelerated in the short run. But I guarantee that it will slow down on the long run. The diversity of many projects bringing more people to work on these, which is the reason the development is accelerating overall.
>>Smartphones were never designed to be your devices and this consequence is nothing really unexpected for that reason.<<
Yes too true. 
We carry around corporate life digitizers with surveillance backdoors. Better Linux phones would be great. An important next step is to put the cellular cpu under the user’s control. Someone correct me if im wrong, but in 2026 a cell phone carrier can still push any code they want onto that system at any time.
And then the next step is we grow our own chips at home 
I can dream can’t I!
On Librem 5 the modem has no physical access to memory (unlike other phone devices), so it is at least somehow isolated. But I would definitely wish to get a reverse-engineered 5G modem with M.2 connector. Sadly FSF decided to reverse engineer a common smartphone instead of a 5G modem that Librem 5 and new Linux phones could use. But who knows, maybe someone catches up such work some day. Hardware killswitches is also a thing some Linux companies are copying (to physically turn off sensors as modems).
At least people have an eye on these issues. 
Our “own chip” is already reality with RISC V instruction-set. But for some good performance we still rely on companies (which we also have in open hardware space). And since Debian 13 we also have a first distro packaging all software for this new type of CPUs. Linux is really amazing these days, even if a lot of stuff is not average consumer ready yet.
Anyway, we are a way too much offtopic, since it has nothing to do any longer with the open letter.
I never said a single one.
my original points all stand exactly as first stated.
Looking forward to using GrapheneOS! 