The hope is lost for Android, there is no moving forward with google antagonizing its foss roots. Libre phone it is. We have to forcibly remove the bandage.
The hope is lost for Android, there is no moving forward with google antagonizing its foss roots. Libre phone it is. We have to forcibly remove the bandage.
I wish you were wrong, but I don't disagree with assessment. I am on grapheneos ( edit: on pixel ) now, but even that should only be a pitstop now since google has decided to show its hand in such a nasty ( if not that unexpected ) manner.
Everyone is quick to ascribe malice without understanding why changes are made. It's never done for the reasons you think. Without a formal relationship between Graphene and Pixel, things were operating out of luck. This is why the next target hardware is starting with a business relationship. Even desktop Linux is most successful when business relationship between a vendor and the distro maker. Everything else is ripe for random breakage in support.
It is not quick. Whatever goodwill google had, it is gone based on their actions alone. And this is beside the point, because, I am not judging on what they intended to do, but what their actions, including after intense community backlash, were. In other words, their intent is irrelevant given the circumstances. Their actions, however, even without intended malice, will cause tremendous damage all around.
AOSP is open source so it could be forked.
Except many key features are nowadays delivered via APEX modules, distributed via PlayStore.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/apex
APEX modules are open source components of AOSP. See https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/modules/. Those modules include a lot of other AOSP code beyond what's directly in packages/modules too.
Google began shipping Google builds of the APEX modules via the Play Store to work around non-Pixel devices not shipping the latest monthly, quarterly and yearly OS releases. For Google Mobile Services devices, many of the APEX modules are required to be the official Google builds from the Play Store. The changes to APEX modules are released as part of the quarterly and yearly AOSP releases.
https://grapheneos.org/features#anti-persistence
GrapheneOS has apex modules disabled and never had the need for that.
ART updates are distributed via APEX since Android 12.
So is it stuck in Java 12?
I believe it's similar to kernel modules in that they can either be compiled into the kernel or distributed separately. Graphene probably just distributes it as part of the system images. This just means rollouts are coupled. Apex doesn't imply closed source, only that there is a stable surface that allows more modular updates.
APEX modules have their changes released as part of AOSP quarterly and yearly releases. There were also monthly releases with the new features distributed in the monthly mainline updates until recently. GrapheneOS is entirely capable of signing APEX modules with cross-device keys and distributing updates in our App Store, but we have very frequent OS updates and little need for APEX modules. APEX modules require a reboot to kick in so we prefer doing everything via OS releases which already only have to ship changes due to delta (incremental) updates. APEX modules are only relevant to us through how they've made the code more modular and created API boundaries between modules which are stable within major releases. It creates a bit more work for us to maintain some of our changes since we need to change the defined APIs but beyond that it's largely the same as before.
No, all of the standard APEX modules are part of the Android Open Source Project. Only device-specific APEX modules used to distribute driver support aren't part of it.