> This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.
I'll believe it when I see it. These days, words are basically meaningless from these large tech companies. Actions are what matter.
at the very least, I'm not convinced this internal branch and AOSP will be close to feature parity if they do throw some stuff out.
Well, more like the 5th step really. They already moved a ton of functionality into Google Play Services, and discontinued a load of the open source stock apps like Calendar.
> We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time
In the case of Open Solaris, the code never came out from that point onwards. For Android, the likely end goal is to do the bare minimum of distributing only copyleft code that they don't own copyright to. Until those get replaced with a closed alternative.
Kindle Fire is based on AOSP, that was my mistake. I will say Amazon is a rare OEM in this regard; they're tablet-only, and happy with AOSP because they have their own app store that don't need Play Services integration.
Isn't ART Apache 2-licensed? They don't have to provide the source. I don't see why they would completely close it though. It would lead to forks, plus they have a lot of control through Google Play Services etc. already.
And here's where we need to apply antitrust pressure.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...
Huawei maintains their Android fork that runs without the Play store.
Google will not be able to close Android/AOSP without triggering a well-funded fork.
And think about all the merge conflicts you have to resolve after 3 months of code changes.
However, Google might have planned to slowly make Android proprietary, which means death to 3rd party forks.
For instance some parking meters / train ticketing machines / payment terminals run Android. source: I work for company that makes some of them though we are moving away from Android to more classical embedded Linux.
Google play services doesn't matter in these contexts.
The more I learn about Android, the more I think the whole thing is a waste of time.
Code is turned proprietary by huge corporate with massive development resources. No one could have predicted this.
The big problem is that aaaaaalll these forks are still just a tiny tiny tiny drop in the bug mobile phone OS bucket.
If the forks want to be sustainable they need to cater to the market a bit. (Of course that's much harder said than done, but we see - for example with Nothing Tech - that there are new successful upstarts from time to time.)
Whatever investment they had made in them literally evaporated in a week as mariadb and galera showed up. OpenIndiana basically made continued solaris development at Oracle a moot point, not that it wasnt already with Linux on the scene.
RedHat has tried something similar with CentOS, Encumbering it to try and drive sales, which backfired just as predictably. Rocky is a treat to run.
Rolling up Android into a proprietary walled garden would be a disaster. This isnt apple. What you could expect is a massive developer exodus from the open community to other friendlier projects. If your interest is western security/hegemony in technology then it would be a shame to see all that intellectual capital suddenly captured by a FOSS project from a marxist leninist country thats all too happy to give it away for free (DeepSeek anyone?)
Two years of full time engineering man hours
> Just create a really great mobile interface on top of that.
Probably another 3 years of full time engineering man hours
It's always noise to people that don't care, but matters to people who rely on AOSP, including third-party ROM developers.
I've wondered if android and pixel breaking off Google would be a good thing or not honestly since there is talk about cutting chrome off.
In the past 2 years I've encountered a total of 3 apps that wouldn't run without Google.
In my country one bank had a 2fa app. Then they backtracked on security, but kept policy: they included the 2fa in the regular bank app. Now you don't have to use 2fa if you are using the bank app, because the bank app generates its own authorization, in the same device (app) without user interaction!
Fake admiration off. We also don't have to use any 2fa when we access banking through the website. (works on FF on Android)
postmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux: https://postmarketos.org/
Maybe longer still... I could see Google fully jettisoning the "other" phone makers and going all in on its own hardware to boost profits further. The iPhone is highly profitable, wouldn't you as a Google share holder want them to maximize the value there?
Personally I gave up on Android years ago. It was never great, but the endless poor support of software updates (mostly stemming from Qualcomm blobs as I understand it) was enough to drive me away. Apple really does support iPhone's for a very long time, and their sole goal isn't to sell more eyeballs. Good enough reason for me.
Sure, the Pixel 8a camera is not bad for the price but it's still noticeably worse. The kind of difference you notice when someone with an iPhone shares photos with you.
Apps and the whole phone experience are a sh*tshow on both sides and I hate both with a passion. I'm still waiting for a decent linux experience on a phone - possibly with stupid banking apps support.
https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...
You act as if anyone to a first approximation cares about indie developers. Most of the popular apps on Android and iOS are from the big corporations and pay to win games. They could care less about ideology.
Samsung would rather not - they threated this card once before, while negotiating for Google to get rid of Motorola, and their bluff got called. Samsung tried to prop up Tizen as an Android alternative. Samsung since closed a number of its US OS offices - why sacrifice profits when they have a cozy arrangement: Samsung & other Android partners will continue to get the Android previews before anyone else: open source or not.
Nope. And accessing the website/online banking portal is not allowed without going through the smartphone app 2fa too.
but you could walk to a phone shop and buy a Linux phone, for example FirefoxOS.
There's nobody at Google who knows what to do with that kind of market leadership, so they're just folding up shop?
Then they decided that Fuchsia was going to be the way forward - https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/android/117587/google-allege...
Now the latest is that they're once again merging Android & Chrome - https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-...
But Fuchsia is still being actively developed, not sure to what end - https://fuchsia-review.googlesource.com/q/status:open+-is:wi...
WhatsApp has an estimated active userbase of approximately 3 billion. [2] The number of iMessage users is estimated to be about 1 billion. [3]
[1] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/iphone-android-users#iphone...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306022/whatsapp-global-...
[3] https://usesignhouse.com/blog/imessage-stats/#:~:text=iMessa...
Seriously, if you haven't upgraded your desktop PC to a higher refresh rate screen yet: It's the biggest "feels like a new computer!" upgrade since we swapped HDDs for SSDs and the days when your new CPU was 2.5x as fast as the old one. There is no turning back after having experienced the buttery smoothness, and the impact is IMHO higher during regular usage than during games.
Tasker used to be in a class of its own but I believe shortcuts is now as powerful and it even has a user experience that isn't hostile! That might be a net benefit...
I hate the iOS keyboard and method of text selection but I could adopt.
I'll have to re buy some apps or find alternatives but that's not an impossible hill to climb.
The biggest pain points are file management and notifications. Having spent a decade plus on a blackberry before going Android full-time, neither dominant platform is even close to good with respect to notifications but Android is far less crappy than iOS.
File management is probably a deal breaker. Every time I have to download a file on my iPad and try to use it in another app or even just get it off the damn thing, I spend 5 minutes swearing before I just give up and attach the file to an email and then go to a PC to pull the file out of the draft folder...
Apple's hardware is just so much sleeker, faster, and better than Google's
This is such a ridiculously incorrect over-generalisation. China, Japan & Russia are obvious counter-examples, plus many others.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! This might give them more credibility.
Anyway, I think we're a half decade past where android source has been worth stealing: China now has strong domestic competition.
Last week I went to 240 hz and while it's noticeably even smoother, it wasn't nearly the upgrade, so there's certainly diminishing returns. Though I did go from IPS to OLED and THAT is really nice.
This is usually the point where someone will chime in and say something dumb like "The human eye can't see more than X frames per second" which is just hogwash. It's not about individual frames, but the fluidity of motion. At 60 fps, an object moving across the screen is moving 4x as many pixels per frame as 240 fps. When you get used to 240 fps, 60 fps feels like it's strobing.
Still quite frustrating that the display industry did it again in specifying a standard that makes most of what's interesting about it optional, so everyone can print it on their boxes without delivering the expected value.
I'm trying to think of a mobile OS feature addition that has made me say "I need to upgrade my phone" and it just hasn't happened recently. It's more like, damn it, the dastardly thing stopped receiving security updates and now I have to replace it for no good reason.
Isn't Android done yet? What further development is required that couldn't be done by the community?
I think it's OK if they do the dev internally, but if they just release source snapshots and we lose visibility of the dev process that occurred to get there, that will be a big loss.
Why is it OK for corporations to make self-interested sociopathic decisions that harm consumers then slap a post-hoc rationalization that is basically a lie to appease the public? It's so common that almost every corporation does it, and most people don't even take note.
Yet people ignore him and then realize that was one of those too late types
This has really stood the test of time...
How naive we were. We never realized that "Don't be evil" was not a choice, it something that natural happens to a public company. Today it would feel so much of quixotism for a company were to to come out and say "Don't be evil".
As others say, it breaks contributions and any chance that other forks will keep up.
I suppose lineageOS is the closest thing for Android tho from what I understand it is built upon AOSP
This whole situation also reminds me of the Manifest V3 drama with Chromium. They might be planning something similar and want to avoid the early headaches of public criticism.
Or maybe they're doing a bigger overhaul of Android's core, changing how apps can communicate and control each other (e.g., computer-user, Operator)!
Idk, I dnt want to be cynical fingers crossed.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the problem is there is yet to be a single device that has every hardware feature working %100...see https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices#Main
https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/iphone/iph0b691d3ed/io...
There are quite a few AOSP forks, like LineageOS and GrapheneOS to cite the most famous ones, but with this change in process by Google, they will have to wait a year of no changes, then scramble when the next release of Android drops.
I'm currently on iOS and as many other commenters said, I'm still waiting for a truly open and privacy-respecting OS that we can install on open hardware. It worked for Unix in the computer world.
Lol nice pipe dream. The source isn't even fully released today.
One good thing Google could do is demand upstream open drivers from hardware makers.
I sincerely hope there is some alternative option in your country. In mine, I can still perform banking activity by going to a physical branch, by calling in, or by using the website with a physical 2FA token (i.e. not my phone). The bank keeps trying to get me to switch over to their app but I will continue to protest this until it's no longer possible to not use an app at which point I will likely switch banks.
Give you an example: Recently the Open Source Initiative held board elections. Three of the candidates were disqualified. Two were disqualified for refusing to use proprietary software with Stallman-like stubbornness after explicitly being told that use of proprietary software was non-negotiable for board participation. Lunduke tried to weave it into his neo-Nazi narrative of cultural bolsheviks infesting open source, but the reality is the proprietary software in question is DocuSign -- and there is no alternative in the open source world that does what DocuSign does.
So if the steward organization of open source cannot function without proprietary software, what hope do the rest of us have? Especially with online services using remote attestation and refusing to function unless you're using a known, approved stack from boot to UI layer. May as well buy a Mac and an iPhone and be done with it. Save you lots of hassle and you'll look less like a dweeb.
IIRC you needed to be like in the region like every 30 days, else it updates to your current location (but don't quote me on it, I might be really misremembering the company/product)
It's an impactful and noticeable upgrade in addition to everything else being awesome, but for me it doesn't come close to being the the most important. If all else was equal or better, and I had to pick between 6k resolution or high refresh rate, I'd have a hard time picking refresh rate, but I'd prefer both.
They've got a billion-strong userbase and yet the Android app still dumped literally every attachment I received into my camera roll until I manually added '.nomedia' files in the right places.
And, oh man, the API for businesses is a Kafkaesque nightmare. Maybe it was good before it got Zucked, but I had to fight with their support for over a week to get an automated ban-hammer overturned... only for it to get auto-banned again two days later. We hadn't even deployed the damn thing yet!
Why I think I (over) reacted is that it was, to me, an example of only partial escape from US American insularity. They understood that ppl outside the USA don't use SMS much, but only suggested a US American messaging platform as what was used instead.
GrapheneOS actually explicitly pushes for services to switch away from Play Integrity API or SafetyNet API towards the Android Attestation API for that reason.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
And notably, long term if Google becomes an unreliable maintainer for Android, the other major Android providers are likely to coordinate a list of "approved signing keys" so that apps can use those with the standard Android HW Attestation API.
WhatsApp seems only to be used by the elderly/old in my circle of friends lately.
The transition has been gradual; started during the pandemic, I'd say.
No it wouldn't. Google as an org is bad at product and the fact AOSP exists is not why.
I've built AOSP based products multiple times over the years, and closed source Google Play Services has spent years picking off ever increasing swaths of the user-facing functionality covered by AOSP. I mean the writing was on the wall with Doze, but we don't even have a calculator anymore last I checked.
Google just can't make good products like Apple can.
Apple's worst products come from moments where they act like Google (becoming developer driven with weak top down direction), and vice versa. Fortunately for iOS users, neither org defaults to acting like the other.
My comment was in part addressing the higher up comments in the thread stating OEMs couldn't do a hard fork. My thoughts are that they have the marketshare that if Google's terms were bad enough, they could. They'd love to take some of the Play Store revenue, but currently dropping the Play Store would tank hardware sales as competitors would keep it. But if Google's terms were to get bad enough that multiple OEMs wanted to hard fork, that calculation could change. I don't foresee Google ever putting forth that bad of terms though, in part because of the option to hard fork.
Pixel 7, or any android in that era would definitely be slower than iPhone. ( Google Pixel itself uses mediocre SoC ) But the recent ones are catching up fast and latest Samsung is Snapdragon Elite is actually faster than iOS.
I think that is partly because Google had to optimise the hell out of its software due to slower CPU performance. And partly just Apple's iOS has fallen a lot in quality.
When you consider Africa + ASEAN + India has 3.5B population and has very low iPhone market share that sort of Skew the figures.
That's what Google has been strongly pushing to developers.
I have impression that WhatsApp team just dont do anything for years.
So yeah, if open source orgs can keep going, there's no reason to think government can't do the same. It's about public goods.
The obligation is specifically to provide the source code (without certain usage restrictions) for binary releases when requested, and no more.
Note that the demand for secrecy is primarily driven by device manufacturers, not Google. Manufacturers want to keep their "secret sauce" from their competitors.
So no google, but still works. I think this is worth a try, considering how many adds you have to see on Android running full Google (which I have just one to be able to use Android Auto inside my car).
> not much will change overall. It's a major step in the wrong direction but without a large direct impact on us
If they were to stop, the demand for someone to do it would still be there, and that demand wouldn't be getting met anymore, which creates the incentive for others to do it.
Meanwhile the point is that most of "it" doesn't actually need to be done anyway. You don't need to do everything Google is currently doing. Adding support for new hardware is important, but that has an obvious source of someone to do it because the hardware vendors want their new hardware to be widely supported so they can sell more of it. So all you really need is security updates, and a community can handle that as evidenced by the many instances of it actually happening for other code.
What stops the thing that makes Debian work from making this work?
My experience from few european countries is that middle class - tech/business/law people have iOS. Go to tech or business conference and its all iphones.
So its really easy to be in such circles. I live in EU country and its all iMessage or Signal. Nobody uses WhatsApp if something its Facebook Messenger or Instagram messages.
There's a global setting for this: media visibility: off.
Then you can enable that per chat.
I have all chat images contained to only Whatsapp by default. Then I only enable some chats (family, friends) to expose images/videos to the phone.
Google Photos scoops those and backsup all family pictures shared to whatsapp to my Google Photos.
I'm the family's reliable source of truth when it comes to family photos.
And since iMessages are seamless they are used very often between iOS users.
He usually is, no matter how many times people write him off.
Sure, but in reality they have a legal monopoly on the use of violence, which is a very big deal and makes them qualitatively different from any other collective of people.
You're right, if Google steps away from Android completely then there would be incentive for others to do it, another megacorp will step in. Maybe Facebook or Microsoft or Samsung.
That works fine (and is in fact easier than remembering the exact album) when I get to pick and choose exactly what I photograph/save, but it became borderline unusable once WhatsApp started vomiting hundreds of stupid GIFs and throwaway screenshots into it.
" For a while now, Google has been developing most parts of Android behind closed doors in its “internal branches,” with the “AOSP branch” only having certain other aspects of Android’s framework (including Bluetooth, kernel, and some other core components). As such, it’s been quite a while since the current state of AOSP is at the same level as Google’s internal builds, leaving developers and others to wait on Google to make a public release to get all of the new changes.
With this change to move everything to its internal, private development branch, Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branch"
In comparison Apple (and the very very latest QC chipsets) use custom ARM cores. Google has yet to do this.
Meanwhile there are hardly any devices that come with it, because Macs come with macOS and Microsoft exerts pressure on PC OEMs, so all of the people running it are people who explicitly did want Debian over anything else, as opposed to many millions of Windows users who have no real preference or an active dislike of their operating system but got it by default with the hardware and may not even realize that anything else is available.
If Google stopped developing Android, it would still be one of the two major incumbent platforms and people would continue to use it. It might even get better because third party apps would have to stop depending on proprietary Google APIs/services and then the community could strip out the Google spying code without worrying about losing access to those APIs. So then the question isn't how to get a critical mass of users -- that's already there -- you just need basic maintenance of a stable code base, which is a thing the community can demonstrably do.
Anyway in the world we both live in, if Google abandoned Android then most people would instantly switch to a megacorp fork of Android with that megacorp's own proprietary APIs and services because people will follow the proprietary things they care about like for eg fast & battery-efficient centralized notifications, an out-of-the-box app store with popular apps like Instagram, and tap to pay.
But I didn't have to explain this to you, you already know this. You know this because "millions of people" is derived from you knowing that the peak Linux desktop marketshare is like 4% out of billions of people. You know this because you said users are "worrying about losing access to those [proprietary, spying] APIs" which is why megacorps who provide these proprietary spying APIs will actually win over users. You know this because you know friends or family or colleagues who are aware of Debian and still don't choose it because they rely on some proprietary service or API that Debian's community developers have never given a rat's ass about.
They progressively replaced all the default apps with the Google alternatives.
A Chrome-Chromium type split was only a matter of time.
In relative terms, Linux market share is increasing and Windows market share is declining.
> Good to know that Debian could have a fighting chance in a world where everyone had zero marketing budget and there weren't any rich corporate backers that used anti-competitive practices.
We could enforce the antitrust laws, yes.
> Anyway in the world we both live in, if Google abandoned Android then most people would instantly switch to a megacorp fork of Android with that megacorp's own proprietary APIs and services because people will follow the proprietary things they care about like for eg fast & battery-efficient centralized notifications, an out-of-the-box app store with popular apps like Instagram, and tap to pay.
None of that requires anything proprietary in the operating system.
Centralized notifications are implemented as a lock-in mechanism. Idle TCP connections don't consume battery unless they need keepalives, and in the latter case you provide applications with a non-proprietary API to have the OS handle keepalives by sending them together for any open connections that need them. Then the radio only has to wake up the same number of times it does with a single connection and there is no real advantage to centralization.
App stores are likewise only glued to operating systems for anti-competitive reasons. Spending 30 seconds once to install one that didn't come with the OS is such a low barrier that it can't be the thing preventing anyone from choosing an OS, and apps can be listed in more than one store, so there is no reason to expect any one store to dominate the market in the absence of anti-competitive practices.
The way tap to pay ought to work is you tap to get a payment request from the merchant which is then passed to your bank app using a standard protocol to make the payment, and then money is transferred from your bank to the merchant's bank with no intermediaries leeching a percentage. In the absence of sane regulations allowing this, you could also use any existing payment processors, but this is still something that an app does and not something that the OS does and the app doesn't have to be from the same entity as the OS.
> You know this because "millions of people" is derived from you knowing that the peak Linux desktop marketshare is like 4% out of billions of people.
Once again, Debian isn't what came with their computer. "Most people keep the defaults" works the other way when the default is Android.
> You know this because you said users are "worrying about losing access to those [proprietary, spying] APIs" which is why megacorps who provide these proprietary spying APIs will actually win over users.
The proprietary APIs don't provide anything good, they exist for the purpose of lock-in, because then third party developers use them without realizing or caring that it creates a dependency on proprietary code or services, since the existing installed base of phones that don't provide them is negligible.
Linux often does provide implementations of these things (e.g. wine), and certainly provides its own non-proprietary alternatives to them, but because the purpose of those things is lock-in the incumbent takes measures to prevent interoperability.
If there was no one providing proprietary APIs to begin with, or the antitrust laws were being enforced as they ought to be, that wouldn't be an issue. As it is, Linux market share keeps going up, but slowly, because the incumbents fight tooth and nail to keep the users in their cages.
The basic argument is we all either benefit or struggle more when the work of the people, for the people, is locked up in proprietary closed tools and data formats.
When open tools and data are employed, anyone can step up to improve those tools, and the State can fund the creation and maintenance of necessary tools and when that is done the savings over longer dpans of time.
A simple example:
PDX needed water billing. A 40 million bid was tendered and a private company created a system that they own and the State Basically pays them to use. And the State pays for fixes etc too.
What happens when a 40 million dollar investment is made in people using open code to do the same thing?
Well, the State owns the tool, and the data is open meaning anyone needing access can use open tools for that purpose.
When it matures, the org that got it done can fade away, leaving a small crew to maintain
, or
Maybe that org approaches other municipalities interested in similar savings. Over time, that problem is solved and most of the nation is enjoying a great savings and developers make a fine living, etc..
Wash rinse and repeat to reduce the cost of government and the work of the people is lean, mean, effective.
Everyone enjoys the benefit of a lower cost environment too.
This had broad bipartisan support and who pushed it away?
Big companies paid lobby shut the effort down hard.
They could very easily see the popular appeal and chose to spend huge now to shit it down, paying the house speaker to block it all from having a vote.
It was going to pass easily.
I think many governments can see how to think this way.
Big companies do not want it.