*Gosh*, I wish Android were actually open source.

The Android evil-genie promise: You may have an open source phone OS. But if you actually compile it from source yourself, you will be banned from running any software. Or at least, they'll try as hard as they can to ban you from running software. Also, if you decide you want to build or even *download* the source, you're going to need to purchase a dedicated 1 TB SSD to check out the repo, and also download our forked version of git to check it out with

Note: You may argue I'm being unfair to Android by saying you need a dedicated 1TB drive to check out the source tree with, when in fact, the AOSP instructions https://source.android.com/docs/setup/start/requirements say only *400 GB* is required to check out and build the repo. However IMO, for any serious project you'll eventually want 2 live checkouts, in case you want to compare 2 branches side by side. Also you'll need space for Android Studio, which on every computer I've ever installed it on took up "all the space I had"

The most frustrating thing about these problems I'm having is they ultimately come down to "Android lets userland have *some* freedom, but you're not allowed to replace the nav bar". & it's infuriating because *Android used to allow this*. There used to be an entire ecosystem of "hide nav bar then add a custom nav bar replacement/gesture system". Around Android 10 Google summarily blocked this. And now I'm maybe gonna return a perfectly good tablet just because Lenovo botched their navbar tweaks

(Also, for the record, the feature they killed that allowed navbars to exist was *also* the same feature that would have allowed me to escape my most hated thing about modern phones: Rounded screen corners. Used to you could shrink the screen and add black bars at the edges, which would have allowed me to shrink the screen past the curves and have what I want, have a rectangular screen. Google finds this entirely unacceptable.)

(I *think* the reason Google did this is because they realized that if people were able to customize or replace the nav bar, they might wind up disabling Google Assistant or— horror of horrors!— replacing Google Assistant with an alternative made by a competitor. That had to be stopped, so the alt-navbar economy had to be executed, and the way they did this was killing `wm overscan`, so this meant also taking away my ability to hack my screen to be rectangular. Infuriating.)

@mcc I mean, I have assistant disabled as much as I can on my phone anyway.

But as much as I would love to fix the android ecosystem too, T&M is already way more than I can do solo...

@azonenberg Me too, but WOW does Google make it difficult.

And even if I disable it, I can't remove the "activate assistant" button (which does nothing but pop up an offer to activate Assistant) from my home screen, and I can't stop any accidentally-too-long presses on the home screen from activating an offer to activate Assistant.