It's not bullshit at all. The bulk of what development they're doing is now not in AOSP, but things like the Hangouts app or Play Services. The other changes ar

It's not bullshit at all. The bulk of what development they're doing is now not in AOSP, but things like the Hangouts app or Play Services. The other changes are increasingly minor while stability on their own Nexus devices has gone down. For example, were you to improve the Android stock messaging app they are completely within their rights to prevent you pushing it back into AOSP, and worse, if you make a breaking change and distribute as an "improved Android" you could be classed as a fork, which violates the T&C of the SDK. Google having this veto to artificially hold back Android prevents other players from producing interesting forks of it. Cyanogenmod will be perceived as a long term threat, and so they will progressively up the stakes in order to make life difficult, but they're starting with stuff which is easier to justify. Once they've started the fanboys will find it much harder to change their tune. You can see what's been going on by their staff situation.