I get that stockholders love Sundar Pichai, but under his leadership all I’ve seen him do is kill the Android community and now he’s about to kill the ecosystem too. He’s so shortsighted in his approach that it hurts.
That’s modern CEOs in a nutshell. Damage the company long term to get those good short term returns for shareholders.
Golden parachute primed and ready to bail, sir!
What are you going to do about it? Its not like there are a lot of options unfortunately.
Probably the beginning of the end for that open source project.
Beginning of the end?
They killed off AOSP apps and replaced then with proprietary ones. Almost the latest Android features are proprietary and Google tied.
Well it is end of the google doing us any favours
Not sure if it is actually the end though… We at least got to put up some fight lol
Since the title makes absolutely no sense:
To balance AOSP’s open nature with its product development strategy, Google maintains two primary Android branches: the public AOSP branch and its internal development branch. The AOSP branch is accessible to anyone, while Google’s internal branch is restricted to companies with a Google Mobile Services (GMS) licensing agreement. While some OS components, such as Android’s Bluetooth stack, are developed publicly in the AOSP branch, most components, including the core Android OS framework, are developed privately within Google’s internal branch. Google confirmed to Android Authority that it will soon shift all Android OS development to its internal branch, a change intended to streamline its development process.
Donate to Lineage OS I guess
Seriously though I think it would be nice to see more manufacturers take projects like Lineage OS seriously. Lineage OS has the organization and base to create a better ecosystem.
Wonder how it will affect custom Rom developement like GrapheneOS.
We already had to wait until the stable tags to get the vast majority of the source code, so not much will change overall. It’s a major step in the wrong direction but without a large direct impact on us. It only reinforces that we need to obtain partner access via an OEM we can work with to help improve their platform security while also being able to port our changes earlier.
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I was thinking more about the additional development time and how far behind open source devs would be vs OEMs. Having all development be closed leaves a sour taste either way.
How so? I doubt many ROMs are based on code that isn’t part of an Android release. Surely GrapheneOS devs can just use the Android 16 branch once it’s released to make an Android 16 version of GrapheneOS.
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Google is still planning on giving them the code; that’s in the article
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Android is GPL so I don’t see how that would really work
Although they could pull a Red Hat
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I really hope the courts put a stop to it at some point. There are a few active cases at the moment and US courts historically have backed the GPL.
Nobody’s saying that Google won’t give them the code, though. Nothing is moving to closed source, Google just isn’t going to be showing the current work-in-progress code for the next release to the public.
I don’t think it’ll change. Google will still be releasing source snapshots for each release.
Isn’t Graphene Lineage OS based?
Well, this is exactly the kind of question one asks if one wants to get lectured about multiple ways they’re wrong by the graphene developers.
In other words, no. It isn’t :)
Before long I’ll be getting threats…
I feel like all these decisions don’t mean anything until the justice department case resolves.
