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…
Yep. An open source license doesn't mean anything if a project is dependent on a single company for ongoing development.
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.
Maybe I'm just a tech philistine but I find my Pixel 8a and my wife's iPhone to be basically indistinguishable in any meaningful way.
They are completely different. One of them lets you have the sexy blue text boxes in iPhone group chats, and the other makes everyone see you with the green box of shame.
What apps? I think only android auto requires it. All the rest works just fine with occasional glitches. Of course that most probably greatly depends of what kind of apps you are using but usually microG is just enough.
Many banking apps will outright refuse to run on rooted devices, much less google-free forks. There are ways around that but those ways are unreliable and could break at any given time -- I am not risking losing the ability to pay for things online just for the sake of running an android fork. (in my country, all the banks switched to requiring 2FA from their app if you make online purchases with your visa or masterc…
Right, but if Google's Android becomes closed source and a well-funded FOSS fork becomes available, that changes the situation. If Samsung, Xiaomi, Motorola, HONOR, OPPO, etc. all agree to use a new FOSS fork as their base, well Google's new closed-source Android becomes irrelevant. Samsung alone is large enough to be able to maintain a fork of Android, and a large enough percentage of the smartphone market that whatever OS it's running will be supported by banking apps.
Maybe I'm just a tech philistine but I find my Pixel 8a and my wife's iPhone to be basically indistinguishable in any meaningful way.
They are completely different. One of them lets you have the sexy blue text boxes in iPhone group chats, and the other makes everyone see you with the green box of shame.
Unless you live outside of the US in which nobody gives a damn and they all use WhatsApp. After moving, I only get sms messages from the doctors office and my friends back in America.
What apps? I think only android auto requires it. All the rest works just fine with occasional glitches. Of course that most probably greatly depends of what kind of apps you are using but usually microG is just enough.
Many banking apps will outright refuse to run on rooted devices, much less google-free forks. There are ways around that but those ways are unreliable and could break at any given time -- I am not risking losing the ability to pay for things online just for the sake of running an android fork. (in my country, all the banks switched to requiring 2FA from their app if you make online purchases with your visa or masterc…
FWIW, my banking app works very well on /e/OS, which is an AOSP derivative.
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.
I don't understand the difference between what is described in the article and how Android has been developed from the start. They have always developed new versions internally and then dumped into AOSP right before release. https://groups.google.com/g/android-building/c/T4XZJCZnqF8/m...
Isn't the plan to move Android to Fuchsia eventually (and seamlessly)?
Hasn't this been the plan for like a decade now? I know some of their products run Fuchsia, like the Nest displays, but no word on main Android devices
If they did ever have such a plan, they've clearly long since abandoned it. I bet they entertained the idea at one point but it was never seriously put into action.
What apps? I think only android auto requires it. All the rest works just fine with occasional glitches. Of course that most probably greatly depends of what kind of apps you are using but usually microG is just enough.
No, most "geo" applications depend on Google services and will crash without them. Local authority transit apps, etc.
I've been running GrapheneOS without any Google Services. Most things work without issue.
In the past 2 years I've encountered a total of 3 apps that wouldn't run without Google.