It's important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features "behind closed doors", not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I'm actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn't crazy uncommon, and I imagine it's mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn't want to develop code with that kind of pressure.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Not only that, the Android Police article mentions they had a lot of trouble merging the internal branches and the public branches, so I’m guessing as time went on they’ve diverged more and more.
Why would you want people to test your software on all sorts of random hardware when you could just pay people to test it on a smaller scale!
C'mon, that's what PR's, RCs, and betas are for
Lots of people make a PR very early though, just to keep track of development and have a space to jot down thoughts and ideas, and get feedback during.
Would you really want everyone in the world looking at every end of day commit before you've refactored it into something vaguely passable?
Would you really want everyone in the world looking at every end of day commit before you've refactored it into something vaguely passable?
Honestly, it has been fine. Almost nobody really pays attention to anything they don't care about, and most people who do care tend to be pretty helpful.
Heck, I'll sometimes make a wip.diff file and scp it back and forth between work and home machines just because the code feels not ready for other eyes.
While I'm way too lazy to do that myself, I respect you for the skill and effort.
😅 it's not often nowadays, I'm not fresh meat at work anymore so I feel less insecure these days lol
Who tf looks at feature branches unless it's particularly relevant to them or they're reviewing a PR?
It's not like they merge half-baked features straight to master every day lol
So what exactly are we losing?
You can't review changes in the next build before it's actually released?
Currently you can still keep up with the master branch. PRs are merged a fair bit more often than new builds are made.
Ah and nobody outside of Google can contribute to Android development. I believe up till now if you found a bug you could fix it and open a PR? No?
When that code is used on devices all over the world for many very important tasks, yes.
Why do you feel that Vs when merges happen?
I'm not a fan, but I understand it and am generally okay with it. I still wish it all happened in the open like Linux.
PostmarketOS can't happen fast enough
LineageOS, & GrapheneOS hopefully will still be good for now
As a GrapheneOS user I'm with you on this. Hopefully this won't negatively impact the development of GOS. I feel like it will though.
I wonder how this will affect Ubuntu Touch.
Boiling the frog, slowly... As more of these terrible decisions keep stifling Android up to a point where it becomes just a vessel to Google's proprietary garbage (as it has been the case for many years already for a lot of things), it should be a wake up call for mobile Linux to keep improving and do it faster.
Here are the donation pages for your open-source alternatives:
https://opencollective.com/postmarketOS
https://liberapay.com/ubports-foundation/
https://liberapay.com/mobian/donate
https://e.foundation/donate-2/
https://shop.jolla.com/details/12596a34-597b-47d4-a502-c0ef15d2a4de/
From AOSP to AP
I don't know anything about Android AOSP, so I found this clarification important:
This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.
Yes, there will still be the aosp repository as open-source. It will have some lag, but still there. Thus said, Google has moved a lot of things into the Google Play services over the years (closed sources). So, who knows what's next! Let's praise that some companies inject money / devs into postmarketos!
With this happenning and apple getting extorted to accept third party apps it would be funny if they switch places
Click bait headline.
Surprised pikachu face... they've been closing Android bit by bit every year, everybody knows their real intent is to turn it into closed source.
They are closing nothing here. It's the equivalent of the developer doing local commits and delaying the public pull request.
I trust them. They showed that they only care for their customers and not for maximizing profits.
/s right?
Google's main goal is privacy and costumers happiness, Trump's is democracy and Putin's is peace.
You must be from a parallel universe where Google actually followed through with their "Don't be evil" motto.
Here Google scrapes every last atom of data from all of its users.
For some people sarcasm is a unknown thing.