10 ms·

Google makes Android development private, will continue open source releases

236 points by coloneltcb 2y ago

BeefySwain 2y ago
Android effectively stopped being "open source" when they added Google Play Services. Try running anything on stock AOSP now. Good luck!
- ewzimm 2y ago
  You can have a very usable phone with https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/ Obviously, you will be able to find plenty of examples of things that don't work, and you probably have a bank app or some other thing that you need Google for, but alternatives do exist, and I'd argue that you can have a healthier, more productive, and more enjoyable experience if you can have all your needs met by software that isn't treating you as a product. My opinion is you should use whatever works; I do. But try not to absolutely need software that you can't control.
  - bitsandboots 2y ago
    As you say, due to banking, this works more or less depending on which country you live in. Some countries have tied their banking to their phones, with apps that use SafetyNet to check how Googled you are. Somehow corporations and nations have given sovereignty away for convenience and so you may need 2 phones: the google one and the good one, to properly be f-droid only.
    - tonyhart7 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - bitsandboots 2y ago
        I agree with you that most consumers probably do want things that are bad for them. I would at least be cautious of services provided by one of the companies with the most anti-trust lawsuits this century, I really don't think they're your friend.
        tonyhart7 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ewzimm 2y ago
        It’s dangerous to assume so much as this about the thoughts of someone on comments, but let me offer a supporting opinion to the other point: People like things to be consistent and reliable. When we’re talking about technology, they probably don’t know what specific coding or licensing or development practices lead to that, but they know that they don’t like it when something they use gets worse over time. When things they use everyday change at the whim of one company that has full control, they don’t always like it. Having software that’s free to modify and distribute makes it so people will always have options and not depend on one company or another having the same opinions about what makes software good.
        tonyhart7 2y ago
        "Having software that’s free to modify and distribute makes it so people will always have options and not depend on one company or another having the same opinions about what makes software good" Yeah its called android, company like samsung,xiaomi,huawei etc literally modify android and its come out of the box with the phone are you saying that android without google is the answer since android is still google, saying you dont want google but still using android is not really live up to the opinion since google can change android core anyway
        ewzimm 2y ago
        This isn’t about wanting or not wanting Google but wanting freedom. I don’t avoid Google completely, but I don’t want to be dependent on them. I always want to have free and open alternatives to what they provide. The AOSP works for those different companies because it’s free to modify. Huawei had to move away from Android (still using parts) because Google services were not free or available to them. That was fine because at least the core parts remained free. If the basic functions of life like paying for things don’t work without Google, it’s a problem. That’s bad for people and too much pressure for Google to do the right thing for people who have different needs.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  Before Google Play Services, updates were a big concern for Android. If Android N had the feature you wanted, but Verizon/Motorola only shipped N-1 for your Droid, you were out of luck. There were pie charts routinely tossed around showing which devices had which Android version numbers. You don't hear those concerns nearly as often anymore. Makes me wonder what the tradeoffs/alternatives are. Maybe they could have still moved features to a Play Services-esque library but published the source for it. Considering we're commenting on a post about how developing in the open is too inconvenient for modern Google, the difference might have been moot.
- ohgr 2y ago
  I’m running GrapheneOS without it fine. Everything I need works fine.
- Ferret7446 2y ago
  Android is not any one thing and it was never open source. AOSP meanwhile is entirely open source, to the letter. AOSP is a compromise, because device manufacturers don't want to share anything. Google effectively negotiated with device manufacturers to open source part of their software. Device manufacturers lose some of their secret features to competitors. In exchange, they don't have to develop those features themselves. App developers get a standard platform, which benefits everyone: users and manufacturers and app developers. This is very much a win-win situation, because the alternative is that every manufacturer has their own proprietary system.
  - alexvitkov 2y ago
    > This is very much a win-win situation, because the alternative is that every manufacturer has their own proprietary system. No, it's a lose-lose situation. If we have 100 different mobile OS's it's a matter of time until a "good one" appears, and we get some sort of innovation in the space - be it from a technical perspective, from an UX perspective, or whatever. Now we're all stuck with Android, where manufacturers can't really do anything interesting with their phones, users get an incredibly bloated, technically incompetent system, and all parties have to abide by Google's every whim.
- mbac32768 2y ago
  what app won't work without Google Play Services that doesn't deserve to be confined to a Firefox tab?
- maxloh 2y ago
  Alternative clean-room implementations exists, like microG, but it is quite limited compared to Google Play Services though.
mrtksn 2y ago
So how fare we are from telling AI to make us a clone of iOS and include the good bits about Android, make no mistakes? If the stuff the AI companies are promising has any truth in them, Android and iOS or any software should become irrelevant soon.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  We are about as far from it as we were when we lived in caves and banged rocks together.
  - mrtksn 2y ago
    I'm not so sure about that anymore
    - dmitrygr 2y ago
      Tell your A"I" to generate you an SMP-capable scheduler, aware that each core cluster can be of a different perf and power consumption class. Not a vague explanation of one. Real code, please. Let me know how that goes for you. That is one of 1e9 problems that need to be solved to make a modern OS, not even one of the harder ones.
      - alexvitkov 2y ago
        You don't have to replicate all the insanity that goes on in a modern OS. Lock threads to a particular core on creation, every core does a Round-robin over all threads. You're 50% there. Have the core detect congestion, and move yeet threads to another random core when it's congested. You're 75% there. Use three lists for priorities instead of one. You're 90% there. Make up for the other 10% with sane design in other subsystems.
- patrickwalton 2y ago
  We're a long, long way from any model one-shotting an entire OS, but the gains of AI will definitely make it more likely that some team decides to develop a new open source OS where it would have otherwise been impossibly resource-intensive.
hnlurker22 2y ago
Google doesn't want AI to learn how to compete with them
- ImJamal 2y ago
  The code will still be open source? How would AI be impacted?
- djmips 2y ago
  It's actually they don't want us to see the AI coding.
  - ohgr 2y ago
    We’ll see it in the CVEs.
  - hnlurker22 2y ago
    Great point
bayindirh 2y ago
So this is effectively the "Oracle Solaris" moment of Android, but without changing ownership? Nice. While Android was not open source for a long time, at least it's not openwashed anymore.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  > While Android was not open source for a long time What do you mean by this? Maybe you couldn't get your contributions in, but you could fork Android any time.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Any important and useful part of Android is already moved to closed source components long time ago. Moreover, without closed source and kernel targeted drivers, it’s not possible to even boot hardware with Android for an eternity now. None of the companies will give you even an object file which you can link against a more modern kernel (given the delta is not that big so ABI is not broken), yet alone the source code. As a result, Android is a big mountain of open code, without the crucial parts needed to make it work. AOSP is a shell of its former shell, and being emptied day by day. Now it’s moving to a cathedral model from a bazaar one, and who knows when Google will release the source code of the “new version” of AOSP. They may even strip the tree to GPL parts since they have to open these parts and conveniently forget to update the MIT parts on the open part. IOW, silently stop as Oracle did for the parts they can.
  - Lammy 2y ago
    It was closed-source for the entirety of Android 3.x “Honeycomb”, the tablet-only Android version that introduced Holo on the Motorola XOOM etc. Source code for 3.x was retroactively made available when 4.0 resumed its open-sourceness: https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8 https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235926 > This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases. However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich. So, we haven't created any tags that correspond to the Honeycomb releases (even though the changes are present in the history.)
WalterSobchak 2y ago
Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-aosp-3538503/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...
bitsandboots 2y ago
Android has been bad-faith open source for as long as I can remember. Android is look-but-dont-touch source. Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation, its existence is to serve Google's whims. Android was already a platform on life support. Google has wielded its authority to dictate how apps should behave such that even 3rd party stores do not stray far from Google's rules. Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates.
- gjsman-1000 2y ago
  Let's not expand the term open source to automatically mean community driven development or free software. Neither need apply for a project to be open source. > its existence is to serve Google's whims Ah, yeah... the existence of every major project is to satisfy the companies paying for the development. Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003. Blender is funded by 35 corporations. Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.
  - NegativeLatency 2y ago
    > Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003 There's a big difference between all/most of the interest coming from a large company, compared to the numerous organizations that work together to make Linux what it is.
  - bitsandboots 2y ago
    I'd love to expand the term actually, because it's been misused to come to mean that something is community oriented, collaborative, even benevolent. Not even open source, but just the word "open". OpenAI for one. It's been abused for public image. You're example of Linux is a bad one. Its contributions are corporate, but they are collaborative. With Android, Google dictates and others follow. Linux is not this way.
    - gjsman-1000 2y ago
surgical_fire 2y ago
I am curious how it would affect projects such as GrapheneOS or LineageOS. Hopefully they can still function like this
- borntoolate 2y ago
  It sounds to me like Graphene will have a large gap of access to fixes compared to the special vendors.. I wont be upgrading to a newer Pixel until I see a year or two of this working out and I think that is less likely than a descent.
- charcircuit 2y ago
  I doubt it effects them. Those operating systems are based off Android 15. I don't think either of them were trying to backport Android 16 code into their OS.
  - nvllsvm 2y ago
    The 2025032500 release of GrapheneOS contains a backported fix from Android 16. https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025032500 https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025032500
  - jadbox 2y ago
    +1 I don't think it effects them as they usually only pick up releases after they are published, which is when Google will release the source now anyways.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484927 (Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482798)
charcircuit 2y ago
This title is clickbait. A lot of repos in AOSP were already like this. Calling development private seems misleading because you can still contribute to them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

236 points by coloneltcb 2y ago

Android effectively stopped being "open source" when they added Google Play Services. Try running anything on stock AOSP now. Good luck!

ewzimm 2y ago
You can have a very usable phone with https://f-droid.org/ https://f-droid.org/ Obviously, you will be able to find plenty of examples of things that don't work, and you probably have a bank app or some other thing that you need Google for, but alternatives do exist, and I'd argue that you can have a healthier, more productive, and more enjoyable experience if you can have all your needs met by software that isn't treating you as a product. My opinion is you should use whatever works; I do. But try not to absolutely need software that you can't control.
- bitsandboots 2y ago
  As you say, due to banking, this works more or less depending on which country you live in. Some countries have tied their banking to their phones, with apps that use SafetyNet to check how Googled you are. Somehow corporations and nations have given sovereignty away for convenience and so you may need 2 phones: the google one and the good one, to properly be f-droid only.
  - tonyhart7 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - bitsandboots 2y ago
      I agree with you that most consumers probably do want things that are bad for them. I would at least be cautious of services provided by one of the companies with the most anti-trust lawsuits this century, I really don't think they're your friend.
      - tonyhart7 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ewzimm 2y ago
        It’s dangerous to assume so much as this about the thoughts of someone on comments, but let me offer a supporting opinion to the other point: People like things to be consistent and reliable. When we’re talking about technology, they probably don’t know what specific coding or licensing or development practices lead to that, but they know that they don’t like it when something they use gets worse over time. When things they use everyday change at the whim of one company that has full control, they don’t always like it. Having software that’s free to modify and distribute makes it so people will always have options and not depend on one company or another having the same opinions about what makes software good.
        tonyhart7 2y ago
        "Having software that’s free to modify and distribute makes it so people will always have options and not depend on one company or another having the same opinions about what makes software good" Yeah its called android, company like samsung,xiaomi,huawei etc literally modify android and its come out of the box with the phone are you saying that android without google is the answer since android is still google, saying you dont want google but still using android is not really live up to the opinion since google can change android core anyway
        ewzimm 2y ago
        This isn’t about wanting or not wanting Google but wanting freedom. I don’t avoid Google completely, but I don’t want to be dependent on them. I always want to have free and open alternatives to what they provide. The AOSP works for those different companies because it’s free to modify. Huawei had to move away from Android (still using parts) because Google services were not free or available to them. That was fine because at least the core parts remained free. If the basic functions of life like paying for things don’t work without Google, it’s a problem. That’s bad for people and too much pressure for Google to do the right thing for people who have different needs.
bsimpson 2y ago
Before Google Play Services, updates were a big concern for Android. If Android N had the feature you wanted, but Verizon/Motorola only shipped N-1 for your Droid, you were out of luck. There were pie charts routinely tossed around showing which devices had which Android version numbers. You don't hear those concerns nearly as often anymore. Makes me wonder what the tradeoffs/alternatives are. Maybe they could have still moved features to a Play Services-esque library but published the source for it. Considering we're commenting on a post about how developing in the open is too inconvenient for modern Google, the difference might have been moot.
ohgr 2y ago
I’m running GrapheneOS without it fine. Everything I need works fine.
Ferret7446 2y ago
Android is not any one thing and it was never open source. AOSP meanwhile is entirely open source, to the letter. AOSP is a compromise, because device manufacturers don't want to share anything. Google effectively negotiated with device manufacturers to open source part of their software. Device manufacturers lose some of their secret features to competitors. In exchange, they don't have to develop those features themselves. App developers get a standard platform, which benefits everyone: users and manufacturers and app developers. This is very much a win-win situation, because the alternative is that every manufacturer has their own proprietary system.
- alexvitkov 2y ago
  > This is very much a win-win situation, because the alternative is that every manufacturer has their own proprietary system. No, it's a lose-lose situation. If we have 100 different mobile OS's it's a matter of time until a "good one" appears, and we get some sort of innovation in the space - be it from a technical perspective, from an UX perspective, or whatever. Now we're all stuck with Android, where manufacturers can't really do anything interesting with their phones, users get an incredibly bloated, technically incompetent system, and all parties have to abide by Google's every whim.
mbac32768 2y ago
what app won't work without Google Play Services that doesn't deserve to be confined to a Firefox tab?
maxloh 2y ago
Alternative clean-room implementations exists, like microG, but it is quite limited compared to Google Play Services though.

mrtksn 2y ago

So how fare we are from telling AI to make us a clone of iOS and include the good bits about Android, make no mistakes? If the stuff the AI companies are promising has any truth in them, Android and iOS or any software should become irrelevant soon.

dmitrygr 2y ago
We are about as far from it as we were when we lived in caves and banged rocks together.
- mrtksn 2y ago
  I'm not so sure about that anymore
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    Tell your A"I" to generate you an SMP-capable scheduler, aware that each core cluster can be of a different perf and power consumption class. Not a vague explanation of one. Real code, please. Let me know how that goes for you. That is one of 1e9 problems that need to be solved to make a modern OS, not even one of the harder ones.
    - alexvitkov 2y ago
      You don't have to replicate all the insanity that goes on in a modern OS. Lock threads to a particular core on creation, every core does a Round-robin over all threads. You're 50% there. Have the core detect congestion, and move yeet threads to another random core when it's congested. You're 75% there. Use three lists for priorities instead of one. You're 90% there. Make up for the other 10% with sane design in other subsystems.
patrickwalton 2y ago
We're a long, long way from any model one-shotting an entire OS, but the gains of AI will definitely make it more likely that some team decides to develop a new open source OS where it would have otherwise been impossibly resource-intensive.

hnlurker22 2y ago

Google doesn't want AI to learn how to compete with them

ImJamal 2y ago
The code will still be open source? How would AI be impacted?
djmips 2y ago
It's actually they don't want us to see the AI coding.
- ohgr 2y ago
  We’ll see it in the CVEs.
- hnlurker22 2y ago
  Great point

bayindirh 2y ago

So this is effectively the "Oracle Solaris" moment of Android, but without changing ownership? Nice. While Android was not open source for a long time, at least it's not openwashed anymore.

dotancohen 2y ago
> While Android was not open source for a long time What do you mean by this? Maybe you couldn't get your contributions in, but you could fork Android any time.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Any important and useful part of Android is already moved to closed source components long time ago. Moreover, without closed source and kernel targeted drivers, it’s not possible to even boot hardware with Android for an eternity now. None of the companies will give you even an object file which you can link against a more modern kernel (given the delta is not that big so ABI is not broken), yet alone the source code. As a result, Android is a big mountain of open code, without the crucial parts needed to make it work. AOSP is a shell of its former shell, and being emptied day by day. Now it’s moving to a cathedral model from a bazaar one, and who knows when Google will release the source code of the “new version” of AOSP. They may even strip the tree to GPL parts since they have to open these parts and conveniently forget to update the MIT parts on the open part. IOW, silently stop as Oracle did for the parts they can.
- Lammy 2y ago
  It was closed-source for the entirety of Android 3.x “Honeycomb”, the tablet-only Android version that introduced Holo on the Motorola XOOM etc. Source code for 3.x was retroactively made available when 4.0 resumed its open-sourceness: https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8 https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235926 > This release includes the full history of the Android source code tree, which naturally includes all the source code for the Honeycomb releases. However, since Honeycomb was a little incomplete, we want everyone to focus on Ice Cream Sandwich. So, we haven't created any tags that correspond to the Honeycomb releases (even though the changes are present in the history.)

WalterSobchak 2y ago

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-aosp-3538503/ https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-...

bitsandboots 2y ago

Android has been bad-faith open source for as long as I can remember. Android is look-but-dont-touch source. Its massive codebase that requires immense resources to build is not open for negotiation, its existence is to serve Google's whims. Android was already a platform on life support. Google has wielded its authority to dictate how apps should behave such that even 3rd party stores do not stray far from Google's rules. Users of android phones have little hope to run a program from 5 years ago, or to roll back a bad update in an era full of bad updates.

gjsman-1000 2y ago
Let's not expand the term open source to automatically mean community driven development or free software. Neither need apply for a project to be open source. > its existence is to serve Google's whims Ah, yeah... the existence of every major project is to satisfy the companies paying for the development. Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003. Blender is funded by 35 corporations. Not one open source project larger than a library has gotten anywhere major without corporate sponsorship.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  > Linux has been over 80% corporate commits every year since 2003 There's a big difference between all/most of the interest coming from a large company, compared to the numerous organizations that work together to make Linux what it is.
- bitsandboots 2y ago
  I'd love to expand the term actually, because it's been misused to come to mean that something is community oriented, collaborative, even benevolent. Not even open source, but just the word "open". OpenAI for one. It's been abused for public image. You're example of Linux is a bad one. Its contributions are corporate, but they are collaborative. With Android, Google dictates and others follow. Linux is not this way.
  - gjsman-1000 2y ago

surgical_fire 2y ago

I am curious how it would affect projects such as GrapheneOS or LineageOS. Hopefully they can still function like this

borntoolate 2y ago
It sounds to me like Graphene will have a large gap of access to fixes compared to the special vendors.. I wont be upgrading to a newer Pixel until I see a year or two of this working out and I think that is less likely than a descent.
charcircuit 2y ago
I doubt it effects them. Those operating systems are based off Android 15. I don't think either of them were trying to backport Android 16 code into their OS.
- nvllsvm 2y ago
  The 2025032500 release of GrapheneOS contains a backported fix from Android 16. https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025032500 https://grapheneos.org/releases#2025032500
- jadbox 2y ago
  +1 I don't think it effects them as they usually only pick up releases after they are published, which is when Google will release the source now anyways.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43484927 (Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482798)

charcircuit 2y ago

This title is clickbait. A lot of repos in AOSP were already like this. Calling development private seems misleading because you can still contribute to them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]