Hi, related to previous post about LineageOS, but the generic consensus seems to be that you cannot easily run custom Androids on Astro (or Cosmo, or Gemini) because mediatek does not have open source drivers.
Since I'm still worried that Planet does not really guarantee that they will provide timely updates, I'd like to somehow prepare for that eventuality.
However, I recently learned that there's this concept of GSI, and apparently that's a thing where the Android gets updated and drivers can remain so you do not need to rebuild them for every time the OS gets an update.
Can someone who knows a bit more about things that could this be used for ensuring software availability on an Astro for the foreseeable future? You'd of course lose all the Planet-specific stuff (Airmail etc), and possibly some event handling for when you open the keyboard and similar, but other than that, is this feasible?
https://source.android.com/setup/build/gsi#gsi-configuration-and-variances says
"Treble. The GSI includes full support for the AIDL/HIDL-based architectural changes (also known as Treble), including support for the AIDL interfaces and HIDL interfaces. You can use the GSI on any Android device that uses AIDL/HIDL vendor interfaces. (For more details, see Architecture resources.)".
Some thread on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/m3pppd/now_that_gsi_roms_are_widespread_is_mediatek_lack/ included caveats like "you need to be able to unlock bootloader". Well, that's not a problem on Planet products.
And I also found this build of AOSP,
https://github.com/phhusson/treble_experimentations/releases - any thoughts?
I really wouldn't have this in mind at all if Planet's commitment to device support would be more transparent...but I'd like to be prepared.
