Google makes Android development private, will continue open source releases

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Status of Android “Open Source”

  • Many argue Android stopped being meaningfully open when key functionality moved into proprietary Google Play Services and closed vendor drivers; AOSP is described as an increasingly hollow “shell.”
  • Others counter that AOSP is fully open-source by definition and historically was a huge leap forward: a complete buildable phone OS released under open licenses when no comparable mobile OS existed.
  • Debate over terminology: some see Android as “open-core” or “bad-faith open source” because the open parts alone are not very useful; others say this is moving the goalposts and ignores the real benefits AOSP enabled.

Usability Without Google

  • Users report running F-Droid–only setups, GrapheneOS, LineageOS, /e/OS, or microG with good results for many everyday tasks.
  • However, banking apps, RCS, ChatGPT, and various commercial apps increasingly rely on SafetyNet/integrity APIs and refuse to run on de-Googled or rooted devices; in some countries banking is tightly tied to such checks.
  • This leads some to keep two phones: a “Google phone” for constrained apps and a privacy-respecting phone for everything else.

Google’s Development Model Change

  • The shift to private development with periodic source drops is compared to the “Oracle Solaris” moment and to the Honeycomb era, raising fears that non-GPL parts could be delayed or quietly dropped.
  • Others note many AOSP repos already worked this way and alternative OSes mostly track released versions anyway; their main concern is slower access to fixes and backports, not total breakage.
  • There is skepticism that you can meaningfully upstream changes into core Android today, reinforcing the sense of “look-but-don’t-touch” source.

Ecosystem, Control, and Fragmentation

  • Before Play Services, OS upgrades were fragmented and largely controlled by carriers and OEMs; moving functionality into Play Services reduced that but centralized power at Google.
  • Some see today’s duopoly (Android vs iOS) as stifling innovation compared to a world with many competing mobile OSes; others argue the shared platform prevents a worse chaos of fully proprietary vendor stacks.

AI and Future OS Development

  • A few speculate AI could soon generate a new mobile OS; most respondents are highly skeptical, citing the difficulty of producing real, performant systems code (e.g., SMP schedulers) via current models.