Exclusive: Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, and here's why
Exclusive: Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, and here's why
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.
It won't kill it immediately but if anyone wants to keep it going it's going to further and further diverge from real Android over time.
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.
I don't think it'll change. Google will still be releasing source snapshots for each release.
I feel like all these decisions don't mean anything until the justice department case resolves.
Ok peace love and fuck google but serious replies only
Why do we devs need Android?
Most apps I build just display shit. They show prompts to the user to guide them through what I want them too.
I can't remember ever needing to implement some high frequency data processing onboard and even so. Webassembly and PWAs are getting better pretty dang fast (isn't figma a 100% wasm-pwa?) so if I actually needed those I could have those.
The last remnants of what a program could do on bare metal is like LLMs and visual processing. I'd also rather have those in a standalone app but soon we're gonna get some sort of WebNPU standard and (well) I might as well process images in webassembly (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ
Like imo browsers are becoming virtual machines with (what amounts to) an undefinably infinite app store.
When I freelance as an app developer I always encourage my clients to go the PWA route and then I wrap a PWA runner for the app stores because they only want to be on the app stores for marketing purposes and bc users are used to it.
Because that's all that these OSs are, just UI's wrapping a browser (in my humble opinion).
You need android because that's what the majority of smartphones on this planet run.
PWA rant incoming.
The context of your question reminds me of why I had to leave app development -- it's a race to the technological bottom. It's a real damn shame that PWAs work so well because it points to distribution and consumer reach to be the real limiting factors in writing a great application rather than infrastructure and code. It shouldn't have to be this way, but it is because we don't want to write an app for every platform separately. However, when we do this, we lose something and that is the vision for how the OS developer intended for applications to operate and interact with the rest of the system. It's a gap-filling technology that makes up for the lack of consistency between platforms that just never sat very well with me. It's something that shouldn't need to exist, but it does to fill an important role that could be designed out of an ideal system.
Rant over. Think I will label this as a rant at the beginning of the comment before wasting readers' time.
We need Android because at some point an app needs to interact with the real system. This could be through a library or some kind of native plugin. Sure, we could accept it's proprietary all the way down in the system, but that would be a dark world to live in, indeed. We could live without it, but we should care.