Obviously we all want to avoid enshittified (aggressively monetized) software or at least get our money’s worth. I’m looking at self-hosting software right now and one I’m looking has a pricing page but only for cloud (no other paywalled features) and is open source. I tried looking up future plans and didn’t find much, so it doesn’t seem like it will enshittify. (not related) I had thought about switching to Omnivore for a long time but then they merged with ElevenLabs and the rest is history.
See, I disagree on that. If I know something I could (help to) build will only ever be used by a few folks and can never help most people, then my motivation is significantly lowered. Well, unless I’m truly just scratching my own itch, but even then I might choose to not scratch my itch, because I’d rather quit using the platform, if possible.
And then, yeah, what the other person said about financing.
For Android, there are various small efforts in terms of forks, with the biggest being LineageOS. There are even some commercial efforts, like /e/OS. I think, Huawei also wanted to do a fork or something. No idea what happened with that.
But yeah, none of these efforts are hard forks, which can change more than superficial stuff. And it’s not for a lack of desire, but because it’s just such a ridiculous uphill battle to try to get anything noteworthy changed. Many times, LineageOS (and its predecessor CyanogenMod) had some cool features, which they later had to scrap, because they needed to follow what Google was doing and their features wouldn’t work with that anymore. If they would’ve seen any chance of a hard fork working out, they probably would’ve tried to go that route.