Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

But copyleft is bad and everyone should use BSD ...

Code is turned proprietary by huge corporate with massive development resources. No one could have predicted this.

Yep. An open source license doesn't mean anything if a project is dependent on a single company for ongoing development.

Only if they stop pushing code changes to AOSP...

Can someone just fork it? Like MySQL was forked into MariaDB?

As much as I - a Pixel 7 (GrapheneOS) user - would hate that, doing so would essentially put Android on equal footing as iOS and would give me a serious reason to consider switching to an iPhone. Apple's hardware is just so much sleeker, faster, and better than Google's mediocre Pixel line.

On the other hand, this would breathe new life into the world of open source cellphone software that isn't Android. It has existed in a limbo of free and corporate for over a decade and everyone gave up on alternatives like FirefoxOS.

It's a bit disturbing that that might be the plan though.

If you actually read the article, they explain that it isn't actually that big of change to how it was done.

" For a while now, Google has been developing most parts of Android behind closed doors in its “internal branches,” with the “AOSP branch” only having certain other aspects of Android’s framework (including Bluetooth, kernel, and some other core components). As such, it’s been quite a while since the current state of AOSP is at the same level as Google’s internal builds, leaving developers and others to wait on Google to make a public release to get all of the new changes.

With this change to move everything to its internal, private development branch, Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branch"

[flagged]

Google kinda irked me when they purchased Motorola - I was hopeful we'd get nice hardware with the android team focused on making android better but they instead gutted the company and sold it off and android has been more solid on non Google devices from what I can tell. From pixels not having an operating system shipping to people to pixels 4 and 7 having notable worse camera features (I should note I'm biased to how well the camera works since it's one of my three main uses of a smartphone) compared to say the Nexus 6 phones.

I've wondered if android and pixel breaking off Google would be a good thing or not honestly since there is talk about cutting chrome off.

A classic Ars story I always like linking in discussions like these: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

If I understand correctly, it sounds a bit like Valve and SteamOS. They publish the source, but they optimize for their internal developers and tools, not for easy source access by anonymous members of the public. Valve has been publishing its source as tarballs, not git commits (hence, projects like Jovian and Evlav reconstructing it in GitHub).

"likely just noise"

It's always noise to people that don't care, but matters to people who rely on AOSP, including third-party ROM developers.

I think the determinant will be how transparently this process is maintained.

This is technically how open source is supposed to work. There never was any obligation to develop in public, or technically to release the source code publicly either. There is no obligation to communication, bug requests, etc.

The obligation is specifically to provide the source code (without certain usage restrictions) for binary releases when requested, and no more.

Which is bad since all the forks will be behind at least few weeks, months maybe.

And think about all the merge conflicts you have to resolve after 3 months of code changes.

Developing in the open would make contributions from the community way more viable, would give the public the ability to see what's coming and prepare for it, would increase the likelihood that security vulnerabilities or other bad things are discovered and prevented early on. It would make the project more likely to serve the interests of its users.

First they came....(Explains the strategy)

Additionally, that's already the case for much of the Android projects. The remaining projects that developed directly in AOSP will develop on the internal branch like the rest.

Thanks for linking it.

what did you switch to?

More and more Apple has been adding ads into iOS. Always have another Apple credit card ad in wallet, or Apple Music ad in settings, etc.

It's funny because this only works on a single device, the Android emulator, and not even first-party Nexus and Pixel devices without first downloading hundreds of megabytes of proprietary blobs.