zlacker

>>tripdo+(OP)
GrapheneOS made an unforced error by exaggerating the situation. ("Boy who cried wolf"). When you're generic and obviously false in your criticism, it makes it easy for the company to counter it. "Google is killing AOSP" catches eye, but it is sooo easy for the company to counter.

What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.

To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.

>>bitpus+v4
How is he exaggerating the situation? What is false about the criticism? Are you referring to a previous time where they cried wolf? I read through the Twitter thread and GrapheneOS seemed pretty even keeled and above board about it to me (even if that is uncharacteristic)

>>oharap+r6
Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.

> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/android-16...

This was posted 2 days back.

>>bitpus+q8
If you want to define "AOSP is not dead" as "there exists a source-available AOSP repo that is not ground-up buildable for any real world device without losing major features like SecureBoot", that's fine, but that's not the definition being discussed.

Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.

If the Linux Foundation sold itself to Microsoft, ceased publishing kernel sources or binaries, and declared henceforth Linux would exist as WSL and nowhere else, it would be reasonable to say "Linux is dead" even if something with a subset of that functionality, named "Linux", still existed.

>>margal+4C
> Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.

There are a million devices out there that build on AOSP that are not Google Pixel. This is a Pixel news, not AOSP news.

>>tgma+l61
And every single one of those devices is missing features of AOSP, notably secure boot.

Google pixels were until recently the only phones able to run AOSP with 1:1 feature parity. And now there are none.