And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit more work to publish those binaries and make sure they work. But they still kind of have to do that, for themselves. So I think it's fair to assume why they did it. Because they made a choice to take a small loss on the devices they would sell for the few GrapheneOS users, and cash in on the walled garden, data mining, ads serving, yada yada, whatever brings the extra money after the initial phone sale.
This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
The only judgement is a positive one. I thought this is what one does now that we all understand just how broad and deep the tracking is at nearly every level. Buying a Pixel and immediately flashing GrapheneOS has been my default mode of operation for years now on all cellphones in my home (wife and myself). No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I'd rather my life not be turned into an open book for targeted advertisements and whatever other purposes every detail of my existence is used for now or in the future. It's mind boggling to me how many seem to simply not care.
Their support of Pixels with AOSP has been well documented! This has always been one of their selling points, as a sort of reference device. I've exclusively bought Pixel phones in recent years and this is one of the primary reasons.
Of course Google never made any guarantees, and a rug pull was always possible, but it's absolutely still disappointing and well worth commenting upon.
Just the name change is telling. "Pixel" suggest a focus on pictures, whereas "Nexus" suggests a focus on Android itself (inspired by Nexus-6 androids in Blade Runner).
Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.
A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.
> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.
What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".
AOSP recipes themselves list reference devices and they could have updated this with their announcement in March if they didn't want external developers procuring these things as bricks for their gardens. GrapheneOS is just a community of a AOSP derivative there are any number of AOSP derived things people may have been doing with these devices.
Or, how about Hackintosh (from yesteryear). Apple gave 0 support for it all those years when folks made it work, and one day it went away - and I dont remember saying Apple, please support Hackintosh.
They made related announcements in March and certainly saw interpretations of their announcement by interested AOSP derivative maintainers.
That's not remotely the same as I figured how to boot X against so and so's wishes and now it stopped working.
I applaud your ability to do this (seriously, genuinely, I do), but if you truly believe what you do is normal, just "what one does now", I must inform you that you live in a very small bubble.
I would like to run GrapheneOS on my phone, but I like being able to use Google Wallet, among other things. If I look at what I use my phone for, way too much of it relies on Play Services, and (critically) the SafetyNet (or whatever Google is calling it now) checks passing.
This situation blows. I really don't like these trade offs, and iOS's trade offs are different but no better.
Also, fwiw, you can install Play Services after installing GrapheneOS[0]. It runs in a sandbox without the same deep system access that it has on less secure versions of Android. There's no requirement here to authenticate with any Google account. You'd just have the Play Services running/available, which can be a requirement for some apps.
This is the bigger disappointment than the 24 days (and counting) that they need to repair my Pixel 7 right now. I'm really glad I didn't buy a new Pixel 9 already.
They know they'll lose some sales, but the few percent of people who'll buy a Pixel anyways but keep the stock OS on it lead to a net plus for them.
They don't care about you liking their hardware and using it like you own it (oh the good old days). They care about you using their software so they can track you better and put ads in your phone experience, because long-term, this is where their money is.
These days all that looks very depressing. The new redesign from Apple, and now this. I was actually thinking about maybe I’d like to give Pixels another chance. If buying used, I can play that lottery after all. But having no custom ROM option basically leaves me as miserable as with Apple: either take it as it is or leave.