Android's goals seem to be:

1. Make the UI play well with touch screens

2. Restrict the user's freedom

And I just don't see how either of those goals necessitated reinventing so much from scratch, including its own graphical server (instead of the existing X11), a GUI framework (and a laughably complicated one at that https://developer.android.com/topic/libraries/architecture/livedata ), its own init system, the entire fs layout, or, well, mandating the use of and reimlpementing an entire language with its own quirks (Java where you can't even reuse the code from the desktop because e.g. jdbc isn't availble etc).

It all would be somewhat understandable if Android consumed a lot less resources that the desktop-oriented linux (like you would expect from a mobile OS), but quite the opposite seems is the case (e.g. Debian requires mere 256MB of RAM compared to 2GB for Android, and even with 2GB Android will barely crawl). On a side note, it somehow requires 400GB (!!!) of disk space on your computer to build, not even comparable to e.g. Gentoo.

What all this reinventing of the wheel results in is the lack of so many good programs: the only browser on Android that so much as supports extensions is Firefox and even that one is buggy as hell on this platform, virtually all programs are very limited in functionality and buggy, etc.

So why would any company put so much effort into something seemingly that useless, making such an outright bad product? I understand Google is a monopolist so they can basically sell any piece of shit, but I don't understand why take so much effort to make it a piece of shit.