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Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

9to5google.com

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Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#51

Post by pas »

lunar_rover wrote: post #43
llarsson wrote: post #25

Help me understand what this means to e.g. GrapheneOS, please. Will it be able to exist and just have to wait longer for updates or will it be in real jeopardy?

Potentially longer gaps between major updates, since they can no longer follow upstream closely. However, Google might have planned to slowly make Android proprietary, which means death to 3rd party forks.

Most of those forks twiddle a lot of low-level knobs, and if Google does not want to support those then the forks will have a hard time anyway.

The big problem is that aaaaaalll these forks are still just a tiny tiny tiny drop in the bug mobile phone OS bucket.

If the forks want to be sustainable they need to cater to the market a bit. (Of course that's much harder said than done, but we see - for example with Nothing Tech - that there are new successful upstarts from time to time.)

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#52

Post by nimbius »

monetus wrote: post #21
mainecoder wrote: post #14

I hope they make it closed source and make us much money out of it as possible for shareholders that is their job and their duty, why are they giving this away for free they have already captured market share by claiming opensource and building a community now all they have to do is make it proprietary and the old opensource version slowly wither and become unstable, then they can charge money for the operating syste…

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

if it really is, they should take note of exactly what happened to Oracle when they acquired solaris and mysql and turned them into proprietary applications.

Whatever investment they had made in them literally evaporated in a week as mariadb and galera showed up. OpenIndiana basically made continued solaris development at Oracle a moot point, not that it wasnt already with Linux on the scene.

RedHat has tried something similar with CentOS, Encumbering it to try and drive sales, which backfired just as predictably. Rocky is a treat to run.

Rolling up Android into a proprietary walled garden would be a disaster. This isnt apple. What you could expect is a massive developer exodus from the open community to other friendlier projects. If your interest is western security/hegemony in technology then it would be a shame to see all that intellectual capital suddenly captured by a FOSS project from a marxist leninist country thats all too happy to give it away for free (DeepSeek anyone?)

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#54

Post by la_fayette »

chasil wrote: post #38
microtonal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they can already do that, because most people and apps (outside China and maybe some other regions) expect Google Play/Play Services to be present.

Amazon maintains their Fire devices with their Android fork. Huawei maintains their Android fork that runs without the Play store. Google will not be able to close Android/AOSP without triggering a well-funded fork.

Also Meta Horizon OS is based on AOSP. This will probably also affect their development.

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#55

Post by red-iron-pine »

rwmj wrote: post #50
soraminazuki wrote: post #20

This really reminds me of Open Solaris. > We will no longer distribute source code for the entirety of the Solaris operating system in real-time In the case of Open Solaris, the code never came out from that point onwards. For Android, the likely end goal is to do the bare minimum of distributing only copyleft code that they don't own copyright to. Until those get replaced with a closed alternative. https://www.youtu…

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.

"curse your sudden and inevitable betrayal"

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#56

Post by SllX »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #47

Can we please just go back to having some sort of Debian-based GNU/Linux on a smartphone. Just create a really great mobile interface on top of that. The more I learn about Android, the more I think the whole thing is a waste of time.

You say “go back” but that was never more than a niche thing. For better or worse, Google’s Android has pretty much always been the chief representative of mobile Linux. And far from being a waste of time, Android is the most widely distributed mobile operating system on the planet.

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#57

Post by rmholt »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #47

Can we please just go back to having some sort of Debian-based GNU/Linux on a smartphone. Just create a really great mobile interface on top of that. The more I learn about Android, the more I think the whole thing is a waste of time.

> just go back to having some sort of Debian-based GNU/Linux on a smartphone

Two years of full time engineering man hours

> Just create a really great mobile interface on top of that.

Probably another 3 years of full time engineering man hours

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#58

Post by rs186 »

ironman1478 wrote: post #6

This headline really is misleading. The source will still be released, it just means that the work leading up to a release will be in private. IMO, there's nothing wrong with that, since it's likely that a lot of the intermediate com mediates are likely just noise.

"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.

Re: Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week

#60

Post by nvllsvm »

mainecoder wrote: post #14

I hope they make it closed source and make us much money out of it as possible for shareholders that is their job and their duty, why are they giving this away for free they have already captured market share by claiming opensource and building a community now all they have to do is make it proprietary and the old opensource version slowly wither and become unstable, then they can charge money for the operating syste…

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.
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