Zach was an Author at Android Police from January 2022 to June 2025. He specialized in Chromebooks, Android smartphones, Android apps, smart home devices, and Android services. Zach loves unique and ...

Developers talk a lot about “immutability.” Outside the technical world, it usually means something negative: unmoving, inflexible, and entrenched. However, in the technical field, these features ...

When we talk about computers -- PCs, smartphones, cars -- we generally assume that there's just one operating system: A single, monolithic piece of software that manages each individual piece of ...

Google's Android mobile operating system is open source, which means anyone can, in theory, build their own mobile operating system based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Why, then, are ...

The smartphone market is, for the most part, dominated by one decision: Android vs. iOS. In the past, it was possible to have a Windows phone, and today you can have a Linux phone, but Android and iOS ...

Although Linux is the king of open-source OSes, there are options. Here you'll find a few open-source OSes to toy around with. Don't expect any of these to be viable options for daily use. When you ...

Want Google out of your life? It's pretty easy to find alternative search, email, and photo storage providers, but it's much harder to come up with a mobile operating system that's free of Google. The ...