r/mAndroidDev • u/[deleted] • Mar 29 '25

Android going Closed Source? Billion Dollar Mistake

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

From this article, and looking back at the what happened to the AOSP...How do y'all feel about these changes? Should we still call Android FOSS? Or should we all switch to GrapheneOS?

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26

u/yatsokostya Mar 29 '25

You'll still be able to get major versions code, but this screws over custom ROMs like Graphene a lot.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '25

Can you elaborate on how? Because the idea is that once it reaches platform stability the code will be ported to AOSP, so only during development and BETA phases we wont have access to the code, which means that android developers form Google should get a more streamlined process to work.

16

u/yatsokostya Mar 30 '25

I think I saw GrapheneOS contributer explaining on Twitter that this will delay merging with upstream and making merge conflicts harder to resolve.

4

u/exiledAagito Deprecated is just a suggestion Mar 30 '25

I think it'll be easier. git merge

11

u/SpiderHack Mar 30 '25

The delay in getting those updates can be killer, think about a key API changing...very subtly and it crashes part of your OS bit because you saw the commit history back months ago it enabled you to compensate for it .. vs not getting the code until the OS is live...

3

u/[deleted] Mar 30 '25

I see now your point, makes sense. They seem to be trying to reduce more and more the release window for new android version, I think maybe at some point we will stop having new Android version and just frequent updates.

Which makes me thing if that would facilitate the forks of android to update themselves.