This blog post is already quite long, so it will omit changes merged for Plasma 6.5 (releasing in October, to be announced in a future post).
With the Plasma 6.2 release, we moved Plasma Dialer and Spacebar to the Plasma release cycle, allowing us to have consistent releases of the two apps. This completes our year long move to having all Plasma Mobile related projects released as part of wider KDE releases, streamlining the work for distributions and taking a load off us on having to maintain a separate release cycle!
In other news, a Fedora spin for Plasma Mobile was released! It will only be targeting devices that can currently boot Fedora (i.e. not ARM phones), but is very exciting nonetheless!
The base for Android is also Linux. But there is another layer. That is AOSP, which is comparable to your distro, then there’s another layer of your UI (ie: MIUI, One UI, Nothing UI, Pixel UI, etc) which is comparable to your DE on Linux.
That second layer is what they’re referring to. Currently everyone is just playing with the third layer (the DE), to my knowledge.
Isn’t that the UI layer they was referring to? I would think that the AOSP layer as summarized by balsoft is the solid base, which in Plasma mobile is GNU/Linux plus some basic stuff in the DE.
AOSP is more than your distro, it’s like the combination of all the gubbins that make your desktop computer work - rendering layer, compositor, unified device interfaces (like bluetooth or the battery), network management, audio, etc; whereas a typical Linux distro is simply a combination of all these already existing things.
It’s just an analogy to get the point across. These details aren’t really important.