11 ms·

Changes to Android Open Source Project

311 points by TechTechTech 9mo ago

TechTechTech 9mo ago
Android source code will be released twice per year instead of every quarter.
- idle_zealot 9mo ago
  At this rate, given a few more years Google will announce that they're moving to a "once a century" release model for AOSP.
  - LoganDark 9mo ago
    They'll decrease the frequency by a year every year so they never actually release it again
    - cyberax 9mo ago
      Would it be so bad? The recent Androids have been going downhill. E.g. the mandatory edge-to-edge nonsense.
      - LoganDark 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        morcus 9mo ago
        I am asking out of curiosity and nothing else: what use cases do you have that motivate you to get a new phone every year? Do iPhones get notably better with every release? I'm guessing camera or storage would be big ones?
        hypercube33 9mo ago
        I'm not parent but a counter perspective - the only three motivations I have are: phone dies camera vastly improves (imo it's been on a decline since the Nexus 6) phone is too slow to use I'm on year 5 of my Samsung s21u that I can replace the Samsung ux slop with asop ports
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        Well, with this last one they finally made the telephoto 48MP. Also, vapor chamber is nice. I don't know if the 18 will have enough for me to upgrade, and it might even have a reason for me not to upgrade (removing gestures from Camera Control). But so far it's been every year, because I've only been using iPhone for a couple years, and my first was a refurbished 15 Pro Max. The 17 Pro (non-Max) only comes with up to 1TB of storage, but that's still more than my 15 of before.
        cyberax 9mo ago
        > when I started being able to afford to get the latest iPhone every year. I'm truly sorry about you having to re-live the trauma of using iPhone all the time.
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        If it's not for you, that's fine. I used to think it wasn't for me too.
        lrvick 9mo ago
        It is not for anyone but Apple, because they control the source code and full remote code execution access to your device at a higher privilege level than you as the supposed owner have.
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        I trust Apple with that. Maybe not as much as I would've were Jobs still around, but I certainly still trust them more than any Android OEM.
        MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        Including custom ROM devs like the GrapheneOS team or the LineageOS team? That's a lot of trust you're putting in a company that only has their own profit at heart.
        rwyinuse 9mo ago
        After Trump's re-election, I figured that there's not much difference between using a cheap Android from Chinese OEM, or an iPhone. Both will give away my information if the totalitarian government (Chinese or American) requests so. I don't really have particular preference on whether it's the Chinese or Americans spying on me, so in the end it all boils down to price. Chinese Android devices deliver same level of performance and features as Apple for 1/4 of the price. Of course if I really cared about privacy, I would just install GrapheneOS or LineageOS on supported Android device, so no Apple in that case either.
      - mixermachine 9mo ago
        Got to say, I like the current Android versions. In the early days I flashed my Motorola Defy every second month with some cool new ROM. Always rooted and Xposed, always enabling something new. Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need. OneUI 8.0 and Android 16. For work (app de) I also have a Pixel 7a, always with the newest Android Beta. Also works well. Even the entry level phones work OK to pretty good now. My Samsung A16 5G (also for work) functions surprisingly well for 150€.
        drnick1 9mo ago
        > Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need. Maybe, but it is fully under Google and Samsung's control, and is choke full of spyware. You couldn't pay me to use a stock (Googled) Android phone for this reason alone.
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        Back when I used Android phones, tweaking was pretty important to me too. I still remember when I installed CyanogenMod on a Motorola XT1565, those were the days... Eventually, LineageOS, and then some new phones happened, not all of which were rootable, though I eventually ended up with a OnePlus 7 Pro which was pretty tweakable and even opened the possibility of bootloader re-locking, until a TWRP bug wiped my device and I pretty much stopped tweaking. Was never quite able to get EdXposed working right again...
        MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        How well is rooting supported on these newer Android versions/devices? If I install LineageOS on my device, for example, I can be reasonably sure that Magisk will work fine. But how well does it work on a stock, locked-down ROM?
        kasabali 9mo ago
        Most devices doesn't have unlockable bootloaders now thus you can't even root them unless it was a popular device and a temporary /finicky hack was found.
- Groxx 9mo ago
  Great. So now nobody gets bugfixes until after the main vendors get priority access to it. for six months. There's no way this isn't intentional hostility towards forks.
  - BoorishBears 9mo ago
    The writing was on the wall the day they shipped Doze with GPS as an OS feature. All those years back I started calling it, since I built software for (long-lived) HMI devices that ran on Android
    - kotaKat 9mo ago
      We were doomed when they stopped shipping a dialer or SMS app in AOSP. “Phone by Google” is disgusting.
      - lossyalgo 9mo ago
        And then Signal removed SMS support so we're stuck with Gogole's crap.
        Zak 9mo ago
        There are several SMS clients on F-Droid.
        Groxx 9mo ago
        Yea, SMS and phone apps are quite numerous. I don't think it's a problem, the subsystems all the apps use is open enough and not hard to build against. Except for RCS, that's completely locked down and is pretty solidly becoming literally just Google. Fuck RCS.
        okanat 9mo ago
        Not just Google is the problem, the entire industry is the problem. Almost all of the cell-based standards are locked away and purely depend on the operators, major infrastructure companies like Motorola, Ericsson and Huawei and modem implementors like Qualcomm, Apple or Broadcom. Implementing them independently is extremely difficult and even if you manage to do it you cannot have them commercially available due to radio regulation and patents. Even academic research can only be done with collaboration of those huge companies. It is impossible to make a phone that is LTE capable completely independently (or even without nation state support). You cannot implement VoLTE or RCS without support from the carriers. They all have their own proprietary protocol on top of the standards. Google has basically infinite money and their own patents and industry relationships and government support so they can figure out RCS. An indie company, even with infinitely motivated engineers and good funding do not have any of it.
- bossyTeacher 9mo ago
  This is them trying to strangle Graphene and LineageOs. We desperately need an ecosystem where manufacturers are legally compelled to publish the source code for their drivers and similar so as to make it easier for alternative Oses to exist. Android will soon become fully closed source. The writing is on the wall.
  - yaro330 9mo ago
    No, neither of them register as a blip on the usage stats and both have, and will continue having, priority access through OEM partnerships.
  - aesh2Xa1 9mo ago
    The founder of GrapheneOS commented on this a few days ago here on HN, and basically said it doesn't impact GrapheneOS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550366
  - singpolyma3 9mo ago
    The drivers are legally required to be, well not published, but the source sent to anyone who asks.
    - TingPing 9mo ago
      Plenty of drivers are proprietary. There are many ways of doing so, like much of it can exist in userspace, or in firmware, or using a shim in the kernel.
      - singpolyma3 9mo ago
        Just because it's legally required doesn't mean everyone obeys the law I agree.
MORPHOICES 9mo ago
[dead]
yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
So here's what I don't get. What's the point of this? Like, what is the downside to Google releasing the source to a version as they ship it?
- jsusjjdjejej 9mo ago
  I think eventually we will get to ... Ah this is too hard to open source at all... Come at us with GPL requests..
- justinclift 9mo ago
  Aren't they legally obligated to release the source code of whatever GPL software they ship? ie the version shipped that is
  - SXX 9mo ago
    This is why most of Android outside of linux kernel is not GPL.
  - resonious 9mo ago
    By GPL, they're only obligated to release an offer that allows costumers to request the source code. They can still keep the source "closed" by default.
    - globular-toast 9mo ago
      No they have to actually fulfill that request too. Once someone has the source they are then free to distribute it.
      - growse 9mo ago
        I don't remember if this is in the original text, but is there a time constraints on distributing the source on request? If a user asks for the source, and the distributor says "sure" and then delivers it 12 months later, have they violated the license?
charcircuit 9mo ago
>ensure platform stability for the ecosystem Aka "We will do less releases because certain OEMs don't want to be seen as outdated as they don't want to spend the resources to rebase even 4 times per year."
- fluidcruft 9mo ago
  Well it does prevent them from shipping things prematurely. I guess.
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    They can still ship play services and their own apps at a faster cadence.
    - fluidcruft 9mo ago
      I meant OEMs rushing the gun on new features that aren't fully baked. That probably does add support burden. (I don't know if it happens anymore but it used to be a problem on the OEM forks)
      - Groxx 9mo ago
        They push half-baked stuff all the time anyway, I don't think this meaningfully affects that frequency.
        gitttnwmrlg 9mo ago
        Well, now they can only ship half baked stuff twice a year.
        charcircuit 9mo ago
        They should at least be shipping monthly updates with the months security updates. Well some months have not had any since Google is now trying to batch them to be quarterly because OEMs couldn't keep up with monthly security fixes.
rtpg 9mo ago
Is there any good faith read of this that people can lend credence to? The one I could maybe come up with (with their mention of stability) is "we want OSes derived from AOSP to be stable, instead of following main too closely". They mention third party devs working off of stable too... so maybe they're like "instead of dealing with outside contributors messing around with our 'wip' stuff, we'll sign up for integration work".
- nine_k 9mo ago
  So the source code will be released in a kind of FreeBSD releases? These pieces work together, base things off them, don't mess with (or even see) any WIP stuff. In other words, the result is still open, but the development process is not.
  - bsimpson 9mo ago
    I don't work on Android, but I suspect it's a whole lot less work for both confidentiality and maintenance to not have to worry about daily/weekly OSS releases. That's probably worth more to the decisionmakers than the value of random contributions from people who aren't already inside the partner tent. [edit] based on the other comments, I surmise that public pushes were already infrequent.
  - shevy-java 9mo ago
    > the result is still open, but the development process is not. Is the source code available at all times? This is a genuine question, I don't know right now.
- cyberax 9mo ago
  Android's foundation has been mostly stable for years now, with fairly minor changes between releases. So I guess they just don't want to deal with too many versions to document and support, given that device vendors are generally awful.
  - tonfa 9mo ago
    Also for a long time they were doing yearly (or longer) release, afaiu it's only the past two years that they switched to quarterly (with the QPR release).
exabrial 9mo ago
We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong.
- ofrzeta 9mo ago
  There are some, right? I think I lost track a bit, but one is Sailfish OS. I guess it is super hard for alternative devices/OSs to enter the market.
  - tazjin 9mo ago
    You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS. Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ... But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher. As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work. The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.
    - 3abiton 9mo ago
      Yes, the chicken and the egg problem. But here is the thing, the more adopters there are the more likely to get support. Not to mention the userbase will be mainly in the EU.
      - tazjin 9mo ago
        The EU is entirely dependent on US services, which don't much care about a fringe phone OS some fraction of people in the EU use. It's like adding duck/egg, crow/egg and other similar problems into the dependency web, too.
saagarjha 9mo ago
Ok, so at this point we’re getting iOS kernel source releases more often than AOSP drops? Maybe they should rename to i Open Source at this point because they seem to be doing a better job than Google at this now.
- tonfa 9mo ago
  Isn't the kernel tree for AOSP open (so can see changes continuously)?
  - izacus 9mo ago
    The development isn't done in the public tree (anymore), you essentially get a git push every 6 months in public.
    - tonfa 9mo ago
      For the android parts or for the kernel. I was asking specifically about the kernel. (My impression was based on lwn discussions about that change) Edit: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ has a lot of recent changes
      - izacus 9mo ago
        Ah, the situation there is a bit more complicated, sorry :)
journal 9mo ago
redirect your efforts into other areas. I'd love a simpler device like https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-7-8-10.1.htm?sku=33672 https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-7-8-10.1.... to be well supported with a lightweight friendly OS. This is about as root as you can get for those who want root access. You'll have to put in an effort yourselves or you'll forever be using slop devices and software.
- xg15 9mo ago
  This sounds like defeat - essentially retreating into niches that only a handful of enthusiasts will be using, while leaving the mainstream to Google etc.
  - journal 9mo ago
    why is everyone so negative about anything alternative. it won't succeed and all. how do you know? maybe it's not defeat. maybe you'd be better off without any devices.
Elfener 9mo ago
I like the android way of security, where "rooting" your device to install updates is insecure, but using a horrifyingly out-of-date android (because your manufacturer, the only one who can update your device, didn't bother) is secure.
- zx8080 9mo ago
  It's because "security" is not a user one, but a security of Google Play Services. As rooting may tamper the google's telemetry (can we already call it "spying" please).
  - goodpoint 9mo ago
    It's about keeping google's device secure *from* the user.
  - 3abiton 9mo ago
    Not to mention, play integrity is being used a some sort of "anti cheats" by bank apps and other essential services. Even some government apps in the EU, essentially forcing you to be spied on by google. The worse part is that, you can do all of those functionality with a browser on linux (or Android), yet to use them as Android apps on a device without gapps (even if jt's not rooted and with locked bootloader) is not allowed. Make this make sense.
    - goku12 9mo ago
      > Even some government apps in the EU, essentially forcing you to be spied on by google. The same in India. I can't use even the government weather app and the disaster alerts app without signing in to google play. Seeing that this malpractice (of forcing the users into Google's surveillance net) is widespread among seemingly unrelated agencies like banks and government agencies of several nations, I would really like to know who is peddling this draconian scheme among them. I want to send some angry rants to the app owners/developers and ask for those malicious peddlers to be permanently banned from further interference in cyber security matters of these institutions.
a2128 9mo ago
Every time Android gets worse and less open, especially with recent ID verification for APK installs, I think Canonical's 2013 comment on closing Bug #1 ages even more like milk: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 Bug: Microsoft has a majority market share Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. [...] A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software. Closing comment: Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing. Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it's important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed.
brettermeier 9mo ago
Those AI translations are really bad these days... In german it says in the subline "Verwenden Sie das Android-Betriebssystem, um Ihr Gerät mit Strom zu versorgen.", that means: Use Android to power your device with electricity. Please don't show me your crappy translations any more.
- 1f60c 9mo ago
  I checked and it's indeed the translation Google Translate gives for "Use the Android operating system to power your device." Gemini 3 Pro offers "Nutzen Sie die Power von Android für Ihr Gerät." as a modern, tech-savvy alternative, as well as more literal translations that correctly recognize the idiom.
- j7c6 9mo ago
  Yeah, I, too, was confused by this translation at first glance... That reminded me of when I had to install M$ Office for work. The download button read "Büro herunterladen" (Büro is the exact german translation of Office)
sylware 9mo ago
android is plagged with planned obsolescence. Don't know if that's going to help.
shevy-java 9mo ago
We simply can not trust Google. It kind of became the Microsoft of the 1990s now.
- justarandomname 9mo ago
  Insert: "You were supposed to defeat the Sith, not join them!" meme here...
  - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
    To be really honest yeah. Not sure why people downvoted but this is sort of true Microsoft was absolutely dominating and buying up everything (similar to today's tech giants) and they were literally the most mega corporation ever Until they got hit by the monopoly lawsuit. That alone scared microsoft so much that it backed off After the backing off is when Companies like google, heck Apple was directly invested to be saved by microsoft just so that they dont get threatened by the govt as monopoly and amazon. In a way people mention so why couldn't Microsoft create their own engine but its also the fact that blink/chromium is based on fork of webkit which itself is a fork of KHTML from the kde team but webkit added many features (from what I could tell) and is a really complex software in it of itself This was created by apple and apple as we know it would not have been able to exist without Microsoft backing off them My point here is that in previous times, Microsoft was a large curtain blocking any innovation if they wanted but after it was feared by even a threat like monopoly, they took it very seriously and thus we have the cultural innovation in many ways that we have Now the monopoly question was a genuine question still launched by the government. Today the landscape is different, Google and these large tech companies would buy things and the meta strategy has become to sell, its a very cynical point of things which really just ends up screwing the customers in the end. The government doesn't care, it might slap some 1% fine and there is a quote that if crime's punishment becomes only fines, then crime becomes legal and the fines compared to company are so small and they got legal structure so high that they strech it for as much as possible Overall, the govt.'s being really lobbied by these tech giants and they stiffle tech innovation in the end In the end all of them are the same, they all kind of want to be a microsoft pre monopoly era. Govt's lack of understanding of the matters around the world is the reason why tech feels so intrusive. This has real consequences to you and me, now I don't trust the govt will be able to improve if its gets lobbied or corrupted and that's a seperate matter and might take new laws all around the world to prevent such corruption / lobbying but right now, the other best thing is to showcase support by being the minor fraction of the population who supports/donates to open source / msme businesses
jokoon 9mo ago
I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image. One reason, I guess it's not possible because it's a complex OS? But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers? It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.
- yaro330 9mo ago
  It's not that difficult, plenty of ROMs exist, and analogues of all the apps exist as well.
- H8crilA 9mo ago
  GrapheneOS does this just fine. It comes with optional sandboxed Google Play Services and Store, meaning that these run just like any other app, with no special permissions. You can give them only Network access. The Play Store is still the most secure way to download everyday apps, so a lot of GrapheneOS users use Google's Play Store with a burner account in a separate profile, usually the Owner (the main) profile - since you can then disable apps in Owner and install them into other profiles. And the sandboxed google stuff can be used to run proper Google apps without any problem. Even sandboxed Android Auto works.
- bossyTeacher 9mo ago
  > But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers? In part, afaik. On one hand, you have binary blobs that come from Google and you cannot generate yourself. The other part, is that you, as an individual, have no relationships with manufacturers so you have no access to their drivers.
- drnick1 9mo ago
  > I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image. > It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question. It's not particularly difficult -- see Graphene and Lineage. The main issue is that there are few phones on which to run these custom builds. Ironically, Google Pixels allow to run other operating systems than the one they come with (the bootloader can be unlocked). Other than the Pixel and a couple of Chinese models, you are looking at low-end or ancient hardware. You can't just build a phone without OS and install Linux/Android like you would on a PC.
ninjagoo 9mo ago
Android started out as an open ecosystem that is slowly being closed. How much funding would it take to re-create a credible open-source ecosystem for phones?
acoustics 9mo ago
I thought QPR2 and QPR4 were the only releases anyone cared about regardless.
usr1106 9mo ago
Google is an increasingly evil company run from an increasingly evil country. No decent person with self-respect should run their code. Unfortunately the development has already gone so far that real alternatives are few (I don't consider Apple or Huawei alternatives. Typed on SailfishOS, but there are reasons that it's not my primary phone.)

311 points by TechTechTech 9mo ago

TechTechTech 9mo ago

Android source code will be released twice per year instead of every quarter.

idle_zealot 9mo ago
At this rate, given a few more years Google will announce that they're moving to a "once a century" release model for AOSP.
- LoganDark 9mo ago
  They'll decrease the frequency by a year every year so they never actually release it again
  - cyberax 9mo ago
    Would it be so bad? The recent Androids have been going downhill. E.g. the mandatory edge-to-edge nonsense.
    - LoganDark 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - morcus 9mo ago
        I am asking out of curiosity and nothing else: what use cases do you have that motivate you to get a new phone every year? Do iPhones get notably better with every release? I'm guessing camera or storage would be big ones?
        hypercube33 9mo ago
        I'm not parent but a counter perspective - the only three motivations I have are: phone dies camera vastly improves (imo it's been on a decline since the Nexus 6) phone is too slow to use I'm on year 5 of my Samsung s21u that I can replace the Samsung ux slop with asop ports
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        Well, with this last one they finally made the telephoto 48MP. Also, vapor chamber is nice. I don't know if the 18 will have enough for me to upgrade, and it might even have a reason for me not to upgrade (removing gestures from Camera Control). But so far it's been every year, because I've only been using iPhone for a couple years, and my first was a refurbished 15 Pro Max. The 17 Pro (non-Max) only comes with up to 1TB of storage, but that's still more than my 15 of before.
      - cyberax 9mo ago
        > when I started being able to afford to get the latest iPhone every year. I'm truly sorry about you having to re-live the trauma of using iPhone all the time.
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        If it's not for you, that's fine. I used to think it wasn't for me too.
        lrvick 9mo ago
        It is not for anyone but Apple, because they control the source code and full remote code execution access to your device at a higher privilege level than you as the supposed owner have.
        LoganDark 9mo ago
        I trust Apple with that. Maybe not as much as I would've were Jobs still around, but I certainly still trust them more than any Android OEM.
        MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        Including custom ROM devs like the GrapheneOS team or the LineageOS team? That's a lot of trust you're putting in a company that only has their own profit at heart.
        rwyinuse 9mo ago
        After Trump's re-election, I figured that there's not much difference between using a cheap Android from Chinese OEM, or an iPhone. Both will give away my information if the totalitarian government (Chinese or American) requests so. I don't really have particular preference on whether it's the Chinese or Americans spying on me, so in the end it all boils down to price. Chinese Android devices deliver same level of performance and features as Apple for 1/4 of the price. Of course if I really cared about privacy, I would just install GrapheneOS or LineageOS on supported Android device, so no Apple in that case either.
    - mixermachine 9mo ago
      Got to say, I like the current Android versions. In the early days I flashed my Motorola Defy every second month with some cool new ROM. Always rooted and Xposed, always enabling something new. Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need. OneUI 8.0 and Android 16. For work (app de) I also have a Pixel 7a, always with the newest Android Beta. Also works well. Even the entry level phones work OK to pretty good now. My Samsung A16 5G (also for work) functions surprisingly well for 150€.
      - drnick1 9mo ago
        > Now I run a S23 Ultra and after two years it still does everything I need. Maybe, but it is fully under Google and Samsung's control, and is choke full of spyware. You couldn't pay me to use a stock (Googled) Android phone for this reason alone.
      - LoganDark 9mo ago
        Back when I used Android phones, tweaking was pretty important to me too. I still remember when I installed CyanogenMod on a Motorola XT1565, those were the days... Eventually, LineageOS, and then some new phones happened, not all of which were rootable, though I eventually ended up with a OnePlus 7 Pro which was pretty tweakable and even opened the possibility of bootloader re-locking, until a TWRP bug wiped my device and I pretty much stopped tweaking. Was never quite able to get EdXposed working right again...
      - MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        How well is rooting supported on these newer Android versions/devices? If I install LineageOS on my device, for example, I can be reasonably sure that Magisk will work fine. But how well does it work on a stock, locked-down ROM?
        kasabali 9mo ago
        Most devices doesn't have unlockable bootloaders now thus you can't even root them unless it was a popular device and a temporary /finicky hack was found.
Groxx 9mo ago
Great. So now nobody gets bugfixes until after the main vendors get priority access to it. for six months. There's no way this isn't intentional hostility towards forks.
- BoorishBears 9mo ago
  The writing was on the wall the day they shipped Doze with GPS as an OS feature. All those years back I started calling it, since I built software for (long-lived) HMI devices that ran on Android
  - kotaKat 9mo ago
    We were doomed when they stopped shipping a dialer or SMS app in AOSP. “Phone by Google” is disgusting.
    - lossyalgo 9mo ago
      And then Signal removed SMS support so we're stuck with Gogole's crap.
      - Zak 9mo ago
        There are several SMS clients on F-Droid.
        Groxx 9mo ago
        Yea, SMS and phone apps are quite numerous. I don't think it's a problem, the subsystems all the apps use is open enough and not hard to build against. Except for RCS, that's completely locked down and is pretty solidly becoming literally just Google. Fuck RCS.
        okanat 9mo ago
        Not just Google is the problem, the entire industry is the problem. Almost all of the cell-based standards are locked away and purely depend on the operators, major infrastructure companies like Motorola, Ericsson and Huawei and modem implementors like Qualcomm, Apple or Broadcom. Implementing them independently is extremely difficult and even if you manage to do it you cannot have them commercially available due to radio regulation and patents. Even academic research can only be done with collaboration of those huge companies. It is impossible to make a phone that is LTE capable completely independently (or even without nation state support). You cannot implement VoLTE or RCS without support from the carriers. They all have their own proprietary protocol on top of the standards. Google has basically infinite money and their own patents and industry relationships and government support so they can figure out RCS. An indie company, even with infinitely motivated engineers and good funding do not have any of it.
bossyTeacher 9mo ago
This is them trying to strangle Graphene and LineageOs. We desperately need an ecosystem where manufacturers are legally compelled to publish the source code for their drivers and similar so as to make it easier for alternative Oses to exist. Android will soon become fully closed source. The writing is on the wall.
- yaro330 9mo ago
  No, neither of them register as a blip on the usage stats and both have, and will continue having, priority access through OEM partnerships.
- aesh2Xa1 9mo ago
  The founder of GrapheneOS commented on this a few days ago here on HN, and basically said it doesn't impact GrapheneOS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550366 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550366
- singpolyma3 9mo ago
  The drivers are legally required to be, well not published, but the source sent to anyone who asks.
  - TingPing 9mo ago
    Plenty of drivers are proprietary. There are many ways of doing so, like much of it can exist in userspace, or in firmware, or using a shim in the kernel.
    - singpolyma3 9mo ago
      Just because it's legally required doesn't mean everyone obeys the law I agree.

MORPHOICES 9mo ago

[dead]

yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago

So here's what I don't get. What's the point of this? Like, what is the downside to Google releasing the source to a version as they ship it?

jsusjjdjejej 9mo ago
I think eventually we will get to ... Ah this is too hard to open source at all... Come at us with GPL requests..
justinclift 9mo ago
Aren't they legally obligated to release the source code of whatever GPL software they ship? ie the version shipped that is
- SXX 9mo ago
  This is why most of Android outside of linux kernel is not GPL.
- resonious 9mo ago
  By GPL, they're only obligated to release an offer that allows costumers to request the source code. They can still keep the source "closed" by default.
  - globular-toast 9mo ago
    No they have to actually fulfill that request too. Once someone has the source they are then free to distribute it.
    - growse 9mo ago
      I don't remember if this is in the original text, but is there a time constraints on distributing the source on request? If a user asks for the source, and the distributor says "sure" and then delivers it 12 months later, have they violated the license?

charcircuit 9mo ago

>ensure platform stability for the ecosystem Aka "We will do less releases because certain OEMs don't want to be seen as outdated as they don't want to spend the resources to rebase even 4 times per year."

fluidcruft 9mo ago
Well it does prevent them from shipping things prematurely. I guess.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  They can still ship play services and their own apps at a faster cadence.
  - fluidcruft 9mo ago
    I meant OEMs rushing the gun on new features that aren't fully baked. That probably does add support burden. (I don't know if it happens anymore but it used to be a problem on the OEM forks)
    - Groxx 9mo ago
      They push half-baked stuff all the time anyway, I don't think this meaningfully affects that frequency.
      - gitttnwmrlg 9mo ago
        Well, now they can only ship half baked stuff twice a year.
        charcircuit 9mo ago
        They should at least be shipping monthly updates with the months security updates. Well some months have not had any since Google is now trying to batch them to be quarterly because OEMs couldn't keep up with monthly security fixes.

rtpg 9mo ago

Is there any good faith read of this that people can lend credence to? The one I could maybe come up with (with their mention of stability) is "we want OSes derived from AOSP to be stable, instead of following main too closely". They mention third party devs working off of stable too... so maybe they're like "instead of dealing with outside contributors messing around with our 'wip' stuff, we'll sign up for integration work".

nine_k 9mo ago
So the source code will be released in a kind of FreeBSD releases? These pieces work together, base things off them, don't mess with (or even see) any WIP stuff. In other words, the result is still open, but the development process is not.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  I don't work on Android, but I suspect it's a whole lot less work for both confidentiality and maintenance to not have to worry about daily/weekly OSS releases. That's probably worth more to the decisionmakers than the value of random contributions from people who aren't already inside the partner tent. [edit] based on the other comments, I surmise that public pushes were already infrequent.
- shevy-java 9mo ago
  > the result is still open, but the development process is not. Is the source code available at all times? This is a genuine question, I don't know right now.
cyberax 9mo ago
Android's foundation has been mostly stable for years now, with fairly minor changes between releases. So I guess they just don't want to deal with too many versions to document and support, given that device vendors are generally awful.
- tonfa 9mo ago
  Also for a long time they were doing yearly (or longer) release, afaiu it's only the past two years that they switched to quarterly (with the QPR release).

exabrial 9mo ago

We need a third alternative, based on freedom with your device. No root access, remote control by apple and google, all wrong.

ofrzeta 9mo ago
There are some, right? I think I lost track a bit, but one is Sailfish OS. I guess it is super hard for alternative devices/OSs to enter the market.
- tazjin 9mo ago
  You can sell the phones alright, and they might even work, but the fact is that participation in society - especially if you live in a city - will be much harder without Android/iOS. Note, not impossible: You can always carry cash to avoid phone-based bank payments (which would be needed at e.g. my local farmer's market, where nobody has a card payment terminal), some taxi services (Yandex Go for example) provide a web view with some of the features, you can open map services in the browser ... But for the browser-based cases the experience will be even worse than the standard app experience, and friction is overall much higher. As a result, only a very small fraction of nerds are committed enough to buy and use these devices. You then have a chicken&egg problem about getting a third option to work. The only way this has been done semi-successfully in recent years is Huawei's HarmonyOS - and they did it by way of a) already being an absolutely massive phone company, and b) keeping around an expensive Android-compatibility core for many years.
  - 3abiton 9mo ago
    Yes, the chicken and the egg problem. But here is the thing, the more adopters there are the more likely to get support. Not to mention the userbase will be mainly in the EU.
    - tazjin 9mo ago
      The EU is entirely dependent on US services, which don't much care about a fringe phone OS some fraction of people in the EU use. It's like adding duck/egg, crow/egg and other similar problems into the dependency web, too.

saagarjha 9mo ago

Ok, so at this point we’re getting iOS kernel source releases more often than AOSP drops? Maybe they should rename to i Open Source at this point because they seem to be doing a better job than Google at this now.

tonfa 9mo ago
Isn't the kernel tree for AOSP open (so can see changes continuously)?
- izacus 9mo ago
  The development isn't done in the public tree (anymore), you essentially get a git push every 6 months in public.
  - tonfa 9mo ago
    For the android parts or for the kernel. I was asking specifically about the kernel. (My impression was based on lwn discussions about that change) Edit: https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common/ has a lot of recent changes
    - izacus 9mo ago
      Ah, the situation there is a bit more complicated, sorry :)

journal 9mo ago

redirect your efforts into other areas. I'd love a simpler device like https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-7-8-10.1.htm?sku=33672 https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-wifi6-touch-lcd-7-8-10.1.... to be well supported with a lightweight friendly OS. This is about as root as you can get for those who want root access. You'll have to put in an effort yourselves or you'll forever be using slop devices and software.

xg15 9mo ago
This sounds like defeat - essentially retreating into niches that only a handful of enthusiasts will be using, while leaving the mainstream to Google etc.
- journal 9mo ago
  why is everyone so negative about anything alternative. it won't succeed and all. how do you know? maybe it's not defeat. maybe you'd be better off without any devices.

Elfener 9mo ago

I like the android way of security, where "rooting" your device to install updates is insecure, but using a horrifyingly out-of-date android (because your manufacturer, the only one who can update your device, didn't bother) is secure.

zx8080 9mo ago
It's because "security" is not a user one, but a security of Google Play Services. As rooting may tamper the google's telemetry (can we already call it "spying" please).
- goodpoint 9mo ago
  It's about keeping google's device secure *from* the user.
- 3abiton 9mo ago
  Not to mention, play integrity is being used a some sort of "anti cheats" by bank apps and other essential services. Even some government apps in the EU, essentially forcing you to be spied on by google. The worse part is that, you can do all of those functionality with a browser on linux (or Android), yet to use them as Android apps on a device without gapps (even if jt's not rooted and with locked bootloader) is not allowed. Make this make sense.
  - goku12 9mo ago
    > Even some government apps in the EU, essentially forcing you to be spied on by google. The same in India. I can't use even the government weather app and the disaster alerts app without signing in to google play. Seeing that this malpractice (of forcing the users into Google's surveillance net) is widespread among seemingly unrelated agencies like banks and government agencies of several nations, I would really like to know who is peddling this draconian scheme among them. I want to send some angry rants to the app owners/developers and ask for those malicious peddlers to be permanently banned from further interference in cyber security matters of these institutions.

a2128 9mo ago

Every time Android gets worse and less open, especially with recent ID verification for APK installs, I think Canonical's 2013 comment on closing Bug #1 ages even more like milk: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 Bug: Microsoft has a majority market share Almost always, a majority of PCs for sale have Microsoft Windows pre-installed. In the rare cases that they come with a GNU/Linux operating system or no operating system at all, the drivers and BIOS may be proprietary. [...] A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software. Closing comment: Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing. Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it's important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu's perspective, this bug is now closed.

brettermeier 9mo ago

Those AI translations are really bad these days... In german it says in the subline "Verwenden Sie das Android-Betriebssystem, um Ihr Gerät mit Strom zu versorgen.", that means: Use Android to power your device with electricity. Please don't show me your crappy translations any more.

1f60c 9mo ago
I checked and it's indeed the translation Google Translate gives for "Use the Android operating system to power your device." Gemini 3 Pro offers "Nutzen Sie die Power von Android für Ihr Gerät." as a modern, tech-savvy alternative, as well as more literal translations that correctly recognize the idiom.
j7c6 9mo ago
Yeah, I, too, was confused by this translation at first glance... That reminded me of when I had to install M$ Office for work. The download button read "Büro herunterladen" (Büro is the exact german translation of Office)

sylware 9mo ago

android is plagged with planned obsolescence. Don't know if that's going to help.

shevy-java 9mo ago

We simply can not trust Google. It kind of became the Microsoft of the 1990s now.

justarandomname 9mo ago
Insert: "You were supposed to defeat the Sith, not join them!" meme here...
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
  To be really honest yeah. Not sure why people downvoted but this is sort of true Microsoft was absolutely dominating and buying up everything (similar to today's tech giants) and they were literally the most mega corporation ever Until they got hit by the monopoly lawsuit. That alone scared microsoft so much that it backed off After the backing off is when Companies like google, heck Apple was directly invested to be saved by microsoft just so that they dont get threatened by the govt as monopoly and amazon. In a way people mention so why couldn't Microsoft create their own engine but its also the fact that blink/chromium is based on fork of webkit which itself is a fork of KHTML from the kde team but webkit added many features (from what I could tell) and is a really complex software in it of itself This was created by apple and apple as we know it would not have been able to exist without Microsoft backing off them My point here is that in previous times, Microsoft was a large curtain blocking any innovation if they wanted but after it was feared by even a threat like monopoly, they took it very seriously and thus we have the cultural innovation in many ways that we have Now the monopoly question was a genuine question still launched by the government. Today the landscape is different, Google and these large tech companies would buy things and the meta strategy has become to sell, its a very cynical point of things which really just ends up screwing the customers in the end. The government doesn't care, it might slap some 1% fine and there is a quote that if crime's punishment becomes only fines, then crime becomes legal and the fines compared to company are so small and they got legal structure so high that they strech it for as much as possible Overall, the govt.'s being really lobbied by these tech giants and they stiffle tech innovation in the end In the end all of them are the same, they all kind of want to be a microsoft pre monopoly era. Govt's lack of understanding of the matters around the world is the reason why tech feels so intrusive. This has real consequences to you and me, now I don't trust the govt will be able to improve if its gets lobbied or corrupted and that's a seperate matter and might take new laws all around the world to prevent such corruption / lobbying but right now, the other best thing is to showcase support by being the minor fraction of the population who supports/donates to open source / msme businesses

jokoon 9mo ago

I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image. One reason, I guess it's not possible because it's a complex OS? But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers? It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question.

yaro330 9mo ago
It's not that difficult, plenty of ROMs exist, and analogues of all the apps exist as well.
H8crilA 9mo ago
GrapheneOS does this just fine. It comes with optional sandboxed Google Play Services and Store, meaning that these run just like any other app, with no special permissions. You can give them only Network access. The Play Store is still the most secure way to download everyday apps, so a lot of GrapheneOS users use Google's Play Store with a burner account in a separate profile, usually the Owner (the main) profile - since you can then disable apps in Owner and install them into other profiles. And the sandboxed google stuff can be used to run proper Google apps without any problem. Even sandboxed Android Auto works.
bossyTeacher 9mo ago
> But is the real obstacle being smartphone brands not publishing their hardware drivers? In part, afaik. On one hand, you have binary blobs that come from Google and you cannot generate yourself. The other part, is that you, as an individual, have no relationships with manufacturers so you have no access to their drivers.
drnick1 9mo ago
> I wish I could understand why it is so difficult to build an un-googled android image. > It is so easy to install linux on a PC, yet I don't see the same happening for android while it's actually running a linux kernel, so it really begs the question. It's not particularly difficult -- see Graphene and Lineage. The main issue is that there are few phones on which to run these custom builds. Ironically, Google Pixels allow to run other operating systems than the one they come with (the bootloader can be unlocked). Other than the Pixel and a couple of Chinese models, you are looking at low-end or ancient hardware. You can't just build a phone without OS and install Linux/Android like you would on a PC.

ninjagoo 9mo ago

Android started out as an open ecosystem that is slowly being closed. How much funding would it take to re-create a credible open-source ecosystem for phones?

acoustics 9mo ago

I thought QPR2 and QPR4 were the only releases anyone cared about regardless.

usr1106 9mo ago

Google is an increasingly evil company run from an increasingly evil country. No decent person with self-respect should run their code. Unfortunately the development has already gone so far that real alternatives are few (I don't consider Apple or Huawei alternatives. Typed on SailfishOS, but there are reasons that it's not my primary phone.)