Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP
grapheneos.social821 points by theanonymousone 14 hours ago
821 points by theanonymousone 14 hours ago
The amount of roadblocks Google is putting up for GrapheneOS is just ridiculous. None of their decisions make any sense, from the delayed source patches upstream, to the embargos, attestation issues, etc. Google simply regrets android being open source.
I hope people remember this when advocating for chromium. Just because it is open source doesn't mean they don't control it. We need to start the long process of hard forking now or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
> Google simply regrets android being open source.
But they won't learn that on their own. They are breaking the deals. So we move. We force their hand
> But they won't learn that on their own
I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.
I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.
Tbh I don't think fighting open source is Google's best play. I think it is in their own best interest to keep it fully open. It is free labor by those who are most passionate. It gives strong signals at what people want, this direction you develop. It strengthens security as more people try to test it. It means people work on forks rather than alternatives. All this is true even with a monopolistic market share.
So yes, I do think they are being naïve. The stance is myopic. It is only a good move in the short term, and barely even that. It is under the false belief that we operate in a zero sum game.
Most successful open source projects have devs being paid by big corporations, including Linux itself, which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Also in the last century most software was commercial, and thanks to business friendly licenses we are back to demos, PD, Shareware and co, only with new names for a younger generation.
Google will do just fine.
I don’t get the hate for business licenses.
I’ve seen many open source contributors deflated because they wanted to share their code/solutions with other individuals and the world to learn from only to have their work sold as a service by a big cloud vendor without seeing something back for it. Or maybe even getting more work back to support the cloud vendor for free.
So I’m not surprised at all that licenses that allow commercial use up to a point and above that require seperate license or contributions back. It is still open source in a lot of ways. Can still be part of other open source distributions that themselves make no profit etc. And only companies that are more than able to pay must pay something.
which only really took off in the 2000's when companies like IBM started caring.
Correlation is not causation.
What I lived through, was Linux taking off like a juggernaut, and IBM embracing it as a result. Large corps came along for the ride, they didn't drive it and at best paid for some gas.
DEVs being paid is simply what it is. The entire scsi/sata stack was originally re-authored by 3ware for example.
Why?
To sell stuff, and the guy was an advocate too.
It's always been this way, under the great wonder of the GPL, blessed be it.
Google learned that it's exactly not in in their best interest when they lost their court case against Epic a few years ago which is why they are shifting focus away from open source and moving towards Apple's walled garden approach. If they had locked down their platform similarly as Apple did, Epic would probably have lost it's case for similar reasons.
Granted, we know Android would not be where it is today without open source contributions.
I think this is true, but I also believe the original people who built it are not the people in charge now.
Like most projects, anyone that thinks Linux or Steam will stay as they are when the generation that started it all is gone, is in for a surprise.
We haven't had antitrust enforcement for 25 years. It's high time we did.
Google needs to be broken up.
Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.
If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.
You can just look at the commit stream and see for yourself. Despite community pearl-clutching, 99% of the work is just good old fashioned software engineering.
Can anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ?
If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?
OwnCloud -> Nextcloud, OpenOffice -> LibreOffice, Elasicsearch -> OpenSearch, privacyIDEA -> eduMFA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice
Difficulties maintaining a sufficient number of contributors to keep the project viable have persisted for several years. In January 2015, the project reported a lack of active developers and code contributions.[49] There have been continual problems providing timely fixes to security vulnerabilities since 2015.[50][51][52][53] In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.[54][55][56]
Sounds like AOO is effectively dead, so this example is a fail to my challenge.
OpenSearch & ElasticSearch both seem alive, as well as OC & NC.
Neither https://github.com/privacyidea/privacyidea or https://github.com/eduMFA/eduMFA say either is a fork of the other.
I think you failed to share 3, 2 seem to valid examples of my challenge but the other 2 are questionable.
AOO became a thing after LibreOffice essentially won. Before that it was OpenOffice.org owned by oracle, forked into LibreOffice in 2010, with LibreOffice getting significant traction and Oracle throwing in the towel and donating OO to Apache Foundation in 2011.
>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.
It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.
Or go the other way and make web pages not programs at all, like they originally were. Unfortunately, just communicating information isn't cool, doesn't monetize, and certainly doesn't get clicks.
The biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders.
It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.
The modern web is user hostile by design.
If a web browser allows images, then the website always has full control over how content renders. It's the default. HTML and related standards are trying to persuade developers to cede some of that control in the name of accessibility, user choice, searchability, device compatibility etc. that all-image websites lack. But this can only succeed if the developers still can do everything they want to. If they can't, then they'll fall back to images and everyone loses.
> Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway).
The biggest thing standing in the way of this is actually Apple, since they don't allow competing browser engines or equivalent so you can't make something like this for iOS whatsoever.
Apple can create a clone for their wall-garden when they want to catch up to the times.
But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.
> But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does.
Not at first. Yet over time the work increases as one must differ more and more from Chrome. I believe that's why so many forks are giving up on Manifest V2.
Forks are giving up on mv2 because it's not as important as the people online say it is. If mv2 was what would cause a browser to gain market share they would keep maintaining it, but if the market is not rewarding browsers with mv2 then it does not make sense to maintain.
Seriously. The average person in real life has no idea what MV2 or MV3 is. And despite what people here would have you believe uBlock Origin Lite works nearly as good as uBO and is generally indistinguishable from its MV2 counterpart. A casual user wold not be able to tell the difference, nor do they care.
Differentiating isn’t as important as not engaging in Google‘s heinous practices
The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.
Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.
Windows only isn't still 90% market share because of Wine, then Proton.
Neither Wine nor Proton run on Windows. Building Android emulators for Linux: Worth your time. Building Android knockoffs which claim to remove the Google from Google's operating system? Foolishness.
Valve is working on supporting apks for their new VR operating system. If this goes anything like Proton then I'm hopeful for the future of Android without Google.
Gamedevs would still target Android, just like they target Windows, letting Valve run after them.
Android is even more of tragedy, given how all relevant NDK game development APIs are also available on GNU/Linux.
Reimplementing Windows was a huge task. If the windows source code was available, why wouldn't you begin with a copy-paste?
The developer effort is not wasted because it's open source. Anyone can fork it at any time. None of it can be thrown away from humanity, wasting it.
The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation. Each phone manufacture wants to build their own experience and building on top of AOSP is how they do so.
Is it really a losing game? Building a new OS from scratch is not worth it. Why throw away an entire app catalog for your device? Consumers want access to existing app catalogs when buying a phone. If anything is a losing game it's building a new mobile operating system over forking Android as a base.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.
This is what empire-building middle managers say to rationalize their boondoggles, but in actual fact most customers can't even tell the difference between two different vendors' Android skins, definitely can't tell the difference before they buy one, and the way they actually differentiate phones is on real hardware differences that show up in the specs like the camera or performance.
The hardware company's idiosyncratic fork of the software is irrelevant at best and annoyingly irregular in the common case.
> The reason why no one runs AOSP is because the phone market rewards differentiation.
No, the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays.
AOSP apps were abandonned around Android 11, you can't just keep them as is for real users, it looks amateur.
Even the open-source ROMs came to the same conclusion eventually and developed their own.
>the reason is that AOSP doesn't even include a functional keyboard nor a functional call manager nowadays
No one was using those apps so it didn't make sense to spend time on them.
If you are not working to destroy Android, you are supporting it. You might feel happy about your custom ROM nonsense and how it protects your privacy, but that just means you're selfish, because nearly everyone will still be trapped on Google's version.
Technologists need to aggressively reject solutions which don't spread freedom to ordinary users as well.
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify building a new one from scratch.
AI generating code changes the game significantly, though there are issues with that. A new OS would have taken several millions and multiple teams, but can now be done for far less. The problem is hardware to run it on. Who'd pay $2,000 for a shittier phone with less features when a $500 used one with GrapheneOS is right there? So the market, (in)efficiently, hasn't come up with a new phone OS. Not because it isn't warranted, but because the free market isn't a perfect system.
LLMs can't even get much simpler programs right without humans holding their hand, let alone an OS. The odds of an LLM just banging out an OS are nil.
Why bother building a compatibility layer when you can just start with Android and start promoting your LLM from there?
It wasn't worth it, but it's 2026, not 1991, when Linus first released Linux. AI can shit out a new OS, given enough tokens, and a VM/compatibility layer would let you run Android apps until native ports became available. The question is why would you want to do that? Computers are vastly more capable than they were when the Linux kernel was originally designed, and the needs of programs and their permissions have changed as well. https://xkcd.com/1200/ While throwing away all the learnings and starting from scratch are usually not justified, sometimes it is the right choice, if enough things have changed. Should GPS location, fine grained or coarse, and related permissions, be a part of the OS kernel or a user space daemon that other processes can query or some other thing? That wasn't a question when Linux was created but should be a core consideration for a replacement system that was created today, along with a myriad of other modern day questions that didn't exist back then. I don't think it's a loosing game, and I don't have the resources to make one myself, but I do think that the world's materially changed enough to justify it.
but perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?
This is cool until Google doesn't load in your free browser.
Then, you use this: https://duckduckgo.com/
Actually, use it now.
This. Also, use OSM for maps and run your own SMTP server, if you can. Nobody should need Google.
This works for nerds, but not for grandma who can't even describe what she's doing without using the word "google".
Nerds with grandmas can manage grandma's DNS or better yet set up MDM (I'm serious).
Actually it is still cool if they don't.
Because of their enshitification we do have alternatives that were developed.
At this point the their only services I'm using are Maps, Translate and Keep Notes and it is mostly due to lazyiness as all of those already have alternatives.
Edit: forgot about YouTube, which is ironic, because that one is a toughest one because the value comes from creators, but I'm doing my part and using GrayJay[1] so I can follow them if they switch their platform.
> Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source.
Yes, and now that they've achieved market saturation, it's time to pull up the ladder.
Thanks for all the free work, suckers!
Don't worry, we will fork and just repeat the pattern with new names! See you next time!
GNU generation is over 50 nowadays, and newer don't really get open source as we used to.
I mean, FOSDEM full of Apple laptops on the corridors, the message was really lost.
I would say its even more proactive than support other projects. It is becoming clearer that every single technically competent member of the friends or family is now required to educate and proactively change devices.
Remember this upcoming Christmas that the ye oldie tradition of fixing PCs clearing awful exploiting phone apps (and cancelling subscriptions) should also include the "fix my browser" again, instead of Internet Explorer being replaced by Chrome, our collective duties is to replace Chrome with Firefox, plus its useful extensions to block ads and improve the web experience removing trackers etc.
Your call to arms today is to ensure all your tech colleagues join the movement, and then we can see Google's management views on "market growth"; they forget they made Chrome, we sold it - its our fault we forgot the "infinite growth of shareholder value"...
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox
Implying I ever left Firefox in the first place.
> or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.
With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.
Is Firefox or Mozilla perfect? Heck no. But we're not comparing Mozilla against pre-IBM Red Hat or Ben & Jerry's or whatever your concept of the ideal corporate citizen is. We're comparing Mozilla against Google. That's a very low bar that Mozilla clears with ease, especially if you're criteria includes shoving AI down your throat.
Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?
> Firefox is no longer part of most browser compatibility matrices, what ease?
What would be the point of a browser compatibility matrix then?
Compatibility between market relevant browsers.
Which for the large majority of companies means Chrome and Safari nowadays.
Thanks to Apple's stance on iOS, otherwise it would be only Chrome, as younger generations apparently never got the IE history lesson.
Mozilla definitely wastes a bunch of money building features I don’t want. But underneath it all, Firefox is still an excellent web browser. You just occasionally have to disable “pocket” or “gadgets” or something.
It is sad to see Firefox riding various hype trains over the years, but I can't really blame them. Miss the wrong train, and you fall behind and may not be able to catch up. Miss the train to nowhere, and you are only wasting resources.
As for the excellent browser that people want, that raises the question of what people want. There are likely as many answers as people.
I don't understand this - what is wrong with Firefox these days? It does everything I need, and very few things I don't want.
Very puzzled why there isn't more love for Firefox, even on HN.
Yeah. It’s a tough balance to achieve but that’s the situation we’re in right now so Mozilla really ought to step up (and I totally wish they would).
My biggest pain point at the moment (entirely subjective mind you) is not even the AI nonsense, but how disjointed and alien the Firefox UX and general feel is to Apple platforms (what I use, at the moment). I don’t want Firefox to mirror Safari 1:1 but I do want the Firefox UI and UX to feel polished, well thought out and thoroughly in line with system HIG specs—given that I spend a lot of time in a browser, it shouldn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land amidst my other desktop applications.
Aggressive UI improvements would go a long way to restore some faith in the incandescent fox‘ mission—at least for me.
Behaving like a native application also has tradeoffs. If you're only working on one platform, then sure you will want it to behave like a native application. If you're working on multiple platforms, chances are that you're going to value consistency. And while macOS users prefer their UI, the same can be said of Linux and Windows users. Guess which one is going to win out there.
Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy but using work provided mac with firefox for 15 years I never noticed UI being disjointed from the system any more than Chrome.
> Maybe I'm not enough of an Apple fanboy
Maybe you’re too preoccupied trying to discredit valid criticism as “fanboyism” to realise how important UI and UX are for products such as browsers.
Besides, Chrome itself is already an absolute mess of conflicting and downright distasteful UX choices and patterns. Firefox seems to be stuck in the past but Chrome seems to actively DESPISE being available on Mac.
What aspects feel foreign on macOS? The Firefox preferences for sure. Anything else?
Tab close buttons are on the right (windows style) instead of on the left (macOS style), for one.
Not only that, but general colours are system-like but offputtingly different (dark theme is different from Mac dark theme just enough to be unsettling). Spacing (padding, margins, etc) is uneven on a lot of options, toggles and fields. Swipe back/forth being a simple arrow on the corner of the screen instead of full page swipe (like Safari) in the year of our lord 2026 is a complete disgrace (yes, chrome does this too, yes chrome also sucks). Press CMD+F and just watch as a search bar that hasn’t been updated to modern visuals in about 20 years pops up at the bottom. Pretty much everything around Firefox feels like a random collection of Windows and Linux behavioural patterns mashed together like a digital Frankenstein monster.
And despite what many people here like to think: these things matter. UX improvements compound exponentially, and so do UX problems. Firefox has an opportunity here to be a first-class citizen on every OS it runs on. It has the opportunity to be the browser that respects your OS choices no matter what, but alas, Firefox seems rather content carrying its “ah yeah I remember using it back in ‘06” reputation.
Firefox is not a bad browser by any means, but it feels like Firefox is the browser equivalent of the “how do you do fellow kids” meme. An out-of-time experience pretending to blend in under the guise of “AI”.
I mean, it’s the same on every browser except Safari
Orion also does it right.
Every other browser aren’t using macOS native UI therefore are wrong in this environment. But right on their own in being the same everywhere.