Hi everybody,
I've the feeling times are hard on the Mobile Open Source scene. MeeGo is dead and the activity of SFOS itself is pretty low, and Nemo...well, I never saw anything.

By reading and participating to those forums, one can see there are some issues:
- developing a mobile OS is as long and difficult as making the same for the desktop...maybe even more difficult
- creating an applications eco-system is HUGE, and, let's be honest, even Microsoft fails in this regard
- one of the core issue (and still for a long time) is the hardware support when most drivers are closed source

And we can see that even with libhybris, having SFOS up and running on a significant part of the mobile markets is almost impossible with reasonable resources (financial and human). We're a lot here who not love Android at all. And day after day, Google appears more and more "...Evil".

BUT, Android is Open Source through AOSP (Android Open Source Project). This means that for almost nothing, we get a whole, working, mobile operating system, something that can be used as a solid code base to build something more interesting...and without Google "evil" parts which are not in AOSP.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but developing a good Android launcher, with all the features we all loves (gestures, etc), seems to be a far more easiest thing than coding a whole OS. And starting with such fundation would give support of Android applications "from scratch", without having to rely on tweaks like Alien Dalvik, sfdroid, etc. Packaging such Android distro would also be far easier and support of various phones would not be a problem anymore.

Of course, things would not be as tightly integrated as they are with a whole OS (applications should be designed to be used with gestures, etc). But, it's just a question of tradeoff whatever the chosen solution.

Building something based on the AOSP fundation would also help to fix one of the SFOS issue: the lack of resources to really optimize the OS. The Nexus 5 port is pretty significant in this regard, where performances seem far from being the ones one can expect from such computing power.

One of the thing I'm not sure about is if the internals of Android allow to code a launcher which can heavily behave in a different way as the standard launcher.