Android is open source, but your phone isn’t—here’s why Google locked it down

“Android has come to dominate the global smartphone marketplace, and a large part of why this has happened is thanks to its open-source nature. Any phone maker can put Android on its phones with no licensing fees, and its adoption has also spawned a massive app ecosystem, so unless you’re a trillion-dollar company like Apple, going a different way isn’t sensible. But is the Android operating system on your phone really open source? The short answer is, technically, “yes.” However, the phone in your hand is less open-source than proprietary.” The way bigger issue for me though is that some essential apps, especially like banking app, dig into that proprietary API, for “security” reasons. This is why you find with some rooted phones, or those running pure open source, that the banking apps won’t work. The problem with that is, it is getting difficult to bank with a phone app when they use it for authentication changes made in the browser to banking services, creation/editing of virtual…