Google says this change will simplify things for developers and OEMs.
Google continues to do everything they can to close android down and force everyone to use their os directly. Imo this is a direct attack on graphene OS and anyone based on aosp. Now for every release developers will have to manually merge basically an unusable mess of changes.
Edit: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/21231-google-will-develop-the-android-os-fully-in-private Might not change anything actually.
Seems like graphene is already merging based on tags vs individual commits. It’s also not like google is letting anyone (graphene) merge commits into android.
Iirc the graphene developers have basically given up on up streaming some changes because google doesn’t actually want many of the security fixes/ changes graphene devs make. Their faq still says they’ll try to upstream stuff, I wonder if this will impact that. https://grapheneos.org/faq#upstream
There’s little need for them to hide their development work like this. They just don’t want to take the time to adopt a FOSS-friendly process that keeps the community in the loop early.
So, when will we have a proper open os for phones and what is the biggest problem here? Should we wait for EU to force google to dismantle the Play Store?
The main challenges I can think of is lack of native app support, phone hardware being pretty proprietary, and lack of carrier compatibility. Any truly open phone OS would have to emulate Android or iOS apps which would be very demanding on resources. Or just exclusively have web apps and fully open source apps of which there are very few for phones. Then you’d have to reverse engineer the chips that talk to the towers and/or get cell carriers to release firmware. Just overall a mess that has basically translated into the smartphone market being dominated by megacorps.
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sigh
