Google will move Android AOSP development behind closed doors
Google is adjusting how Android is made, with the AOSP branch moving behind closed doors, leaving the entire OS to be privately developed.
It’s never been a better time to switch to !linuxphones@lemmy.ca
PostmarketOS can't happen fast enough
LineageOS, & GrapheneOS hopefully will still be good for now
As a GrapheneOS user I'm with you on this. Hopefully this won't negatively impact the development of GOS. I feel like it will though.
I wonder how this will affect Ubuntu Touch.
It's important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features "behind closed doors", not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I'm actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn't crazy uncommon, and I imagine it's mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn't want to develop code with that kind of pressure.
Not only that, the Android Police article mentions they had a lot of trouble merging the internal branches and the public branches, so I’m guessing as time went on they’ve diverged more and more.
Why would you want people to test your software on all sorts of random hardware when you could just pay people to test it on a smaller scale!
I'm not a fan, but I understand it and am generally okay with it. I still wish it all happened in the open like Linux.
Boiling the frog, slowly... As more of these terrible decisions keep stifling Android up to a point where it becomes just a vessel to Google's proprietary garbage (as it has been the case for many years already for a lot of things), it should be a wake up call for mobile Linux to keep improving and do it faster.
Here are the donation pages for your open-source alternatives:
https://opencollective.com/postmarketOS
https://liberapay.com/ubports-foundation/
https://liberapay.com/mobian/donate
https://e.foundation/donate-2/
https://shop.jolla.com/details/12596a34-597b-47d4-a502-c0ef15d2a4de/
From AOSP to AP
I don't know anything about Android AOSP, so I found this clarification important:
This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.
Yes, there will still be the aosp repository as open-source. It will have some lag, but still there. Thus said, Google has moved a lot of things into the Google Play services over the years (closed sources). So, who knows what's next! Let's praise that some companies inject money / devs into postmarketos!
With this happenning and apple getting extorted to accept third party apps it would be funny if they switch places
Click bait headline.
Surprised pikachu face... they've been closing Android bit by bit every year, everybody knows their real intent is to turn it into closed source.
They are closing nothing here. It's the equivalent of the developer doing local commits and delaying the public pull request.
