> 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.

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.

> 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!

> 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.

The “we” in your post is interesting to me. Who do you mean? Individuals?

> So we move. We force their hand

What do you have in mind?

LOL "start" using Firefox. I've been using Firefox for half a decade. There's zero I miss about Chrome.

It's sad we lost ChromeOS. They got Linux, they got open source, they didn't make so so so many unforced errors.

Now that the chromebooks are also Android, it feels like the slide is only going to grow ever more fearsome.

I don't think this is actually true. Phone makers seem happy to have the platform locked down even further. They're putting even more roadblocks, as evidenced by most of them making bootloaders unlockable.

That’s possible (never underestimate the bad decision-making of phone makers), but what would they have done instead? Windows Mobile 6 was the only licensable alternative, but it was a known quantity and obviously a generation behind Android and iOS.

No, everyone knew what they were getting into with Android. It wasn't taken lightly by the power users of the time either. I still have a phone somewhere with Ubuntu Touch on it. I really was hoping that would be my phone OS by now. Not that Canonical isn't capable of similar, but that it would bring about acceptance of Linux phones.

I think we're all more surprised by how long it took for Google to make these bad moves. For a period of time in the 2010s we actually started thinking maybe Google was alright.

Phone manufacturers had Symbian which became open source

Pixels used to have far better updates than any other Android devices but they stopped improving it years ago. It should have kept improving because it's not at all adequate. They need to be able to release OS updates more than once per month and it shouldn't take months for patches to make it into the OS. It currently takes them at least around 2 months to get even the most urgent patches into the OS. They could fix emergency calls being broken if the patch was made around 3 weeks before an OS release, but that's about as quick as they can go. It's not at all adequate for security and is a complete joke compared to Chromium's release cycle. They can get an emergency Chrome update released within a couple days. They should at least be able to do it for the Pixel OS in a week.

GrapheneOS is often around 4 to 6 months ahead on merging Linux kernel LTS releases. We used to handle this ourselves but switched to the Android GKI LTS branch maintained by Greg KH. Unfortunately, it was often struggling to keep up even before the absolutely massive increase in Linux kernel security patches this year. AI models have rapidly accelerated vulnerability discovery and it's an ongoing crisis for the Linux kernel. We want to be on the latest LTS revision within days and want to be using the latest LTS branch within months of it being released. We're not at all happy with how Android is handling things and plan to fix that ourselves. We'll get things back to how they should be.

We also ship all the AOSP userspace patches months before Pixels due to shipping all of the security preview patches as soon as possible. There are sometimes minor regressions but we find and fix them ourselves downstream. The security preview system has a terrible design especially considering that frontier AI models can reverse engineer the patches. There should at least only be a source embargo for around 24 to 72 hours rather than pretending as if it can work with the patches available 2 to 6 months in advance.

I just ran https://github.com/CakesTwix/Android-CVE-2026-43499 on my Pixel 9 Pro and it seems to have been patched. I did get a system update not long ago, though.

There's "dropping the ball" and then there's "not reaching out your glove to catch it to begin with".

It'd be interesting to see which one is happening here.

Yeah. Which doesn't mean Google isn't happy to comply for its own profit motivations.

Agree. The only time a company does something in the public interest is when it believes doing so would ultimately benefit the shareholders. Everything is a business decision.

If the hardware security is on par with iPhone / pixel 8+, then sure.

Otherwise there's no need for NSA backdoors (as Cellebrite matrix shows) :)

Sure, let's just trade the NSA for the CCP, no issues there.

Oh! I had thought they stopped at the same time they closed off AOSP commits - that makes this entire rabble-rousing effort _exceptionally_ silly, then; I can't see the angle GrapheneOS are trying to push at all in that case (like, I get their side of the _concern_, but "Google are shipping features to Pixels that you don't get" becomes... quite a poor argument indeed in that scenario).

Exclusive access to QPR1 and QPR3 releases gives Pixels an unfair advantage over other Android OEMs. They get an extra 2 major updates per year. Introducing new APIs for third party app developers as part of these updates means third party apps will now run best on the Pixel OS. Google apps already run best on the Pixel OS due to many exclusive features. It's Google's standard overall approach to propping up parts of their business with their monopolies in other markets. It's not legal.

HarmonyOS kernel (HongMeng) is not only closed source but also encrypted. Those devices do not allow you to unlock the bootloader or install apps not signed by them (albeit I don't know how that works for emulator apps, a signed Android emulator could possibly allow arbitrary apks).

Huawei made a big mistake by not fully open sourcing HarmonyOS, you can't flash OpenHarmony so it doesn't count.

That's Huawei's Android fork, right? Is it available on devices outside of China? I'm not seeing an obvious place to buy a device running it.

LOL an OS controlled by the Chinese government?

What's particularly bad about the names of Graphene, Mint and Cinnamon? Especially compared to Android and iOS!!

Seems like that's anti-competitive behavior, holding back security updates except for Google's own stock users.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282190165630051

> It would be interesting to know if Google's legal team is aware they're giving Pixels months of early access to new Android features and bug fixes including certain important security patches. Pixels being given this competitive edge over Google's OEM partners is very dubious.

Can you link to patches or commits they upstteamed? I'm not aware Google ever accepted any.

Yes, but a popular one that's usable by regular people and with a very wealthy organization behind it.

They exist but they need more polish and support from device vendors to be a viable alternative to the duopoly. It should be just as easy for the average phone buyer to get and use a 'Linux phone' as it is to get an Android or fruit phone. This is more or less true now for Linux distributions no matter what the naysayers keep on repeating, the next step is to make it true for mobile devices. There will still be naysayers but... who cares? Let them listen to themselves in their echo chambers like they've been doing w.r.t. 'Linux on the desktop'.

Ah that's great news! Do you know how to force an upgrade?

Android has free and open artificial pancreas that is still easy to install and keeps us with complex type 1 diabetes alive.

Google may just want to kill us and Apple don't even let this kind of software exist without massive hurdles...

Because it's much worse (for me).

However at this point, as a GrapheneOS user if I couldn't use it for any reason I'll go to iOS (even though I used it for a couple of years and I've been fed up).

Because (1) you'd be rewarding the entity that originated and normalized the loss of freedom that Google much later adopted, and (2) as Apple restricts more freedoms you'll still be able to enjoy them on Android for a few more years as Google remains (comparatively) more user friendly.

I want to believe this, but it's hard for me to take this at face value. It's been about 4 years since I've run pmOS, so my experience IS very out of date, but I also have a hard time believing that the experience has radically changed in the meantime.

The short is that yes the GNOME/KDE apps do often look more impressive, but they suffer the same sort of malaise which seems to have infected Linux desktops sometime since Eternal September, and between the sporadic crashing and "this doesn't feel right", it's really hard for me to accept "It's more polished than AOSP!".

pmOS's installation page opening with a warning:

   Make sure you read state of postmarketOS before installing postmarketOS. 

  The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for everyone, but we are not there yet. Usability and most importantly stability issues need to be worked out first. If you are looking for an OS that is as usable as iOS or Android, this project is currently not for you.

I tried getting it to run on a Pixel 3a and struggled for hours, eventually gave up (albeit I tried running it with Wayland and Niri which seems less tried-and-true).

Contactless payments do work on Graphene - but only with the Curve app. It also requires the card-holder to be from the UK or EU.

for some people contactless payments are essential for their lifes

They can't due to the shortcomings of the hardware (why develop a hardened os to the grossly insecure hardware) or the vendor (no/slow updates, etc).

Anyone is free to fork, add the desired hardware support and flash.

(that's aside of some Moto flagships in 2027)

Those Razr phone updates need to start landing sooner ....

More like OEMs need to take security more seriously and add in the capable hardware and commit to firmware updates long term.

That is definitely not how I remember the feature phone era. The OS was an afterthought seemingly whipped together a couple months before the device hit the shelves and nothing was consistent even across different models from the same manufacturer.

Also, Samsung extensively customizes their OneUI fork of Android, with its own UI look and feel that evolves independently from Android based on their own priorities.

Plus Samsung's Android maintains hundreds of features that either don't exist at all on AOSP/Pixels or later folded into mainline Android.

Including the little know killer app suite "Good Lock" available on their Galaxy store which give power users an almost obscene amount of additional niche options and customizations that would give UX minimalist designers at Google or Apple a heart attack.

I don't think so. Google's customers are phone OEMs and as long as they are happy, things will continue as is. The precedents here are Microsoft with Windows and maybe Apple with iOS.

Anything Oracle doesn't have much relevance. They were not really interested in growing any marketshare of those products for anyone.

> If Samsung and everyone else said "sorry Google', or even a large majority, you're out. Gone. Nada.

The OEMs are incapable of writing a competent operating system, and don't particularly care to.

> Google is also getting more and more pushy with Chrome. What if everyone depending upon that backend, shrugs and says "Sorry Google, we're hard-forking Chrome and we'll all maintain it".

With what maintainers?

https://chrome-commit-tracker.arthursonzogni.com/organizatio...

> Oracle was a mighty powerhouse

It definitly still is. We run Postgres when we host our banking / financial stuff, but when we talk with banks and say that, they demand Oracle not that 'open source amateur stuff'. We have a version of our software for Oracle (and MSSQL) as well so no biggy, but still, we always try if we know it's not a complete immediate kill (which it will be if we put it in our documentation as only option). Oracle is still everywhere at the big guys.

> it will no longer be in control of Android

Who will step up to maintain it? Keep in mind that it has to be somebody that every other OEM trust. In other words it would likely have to be an alliance of manufacturers. And they'd inevitably treat OEMs outside the alliance poorly and we'd be back to the current situation, but worse.

Google's Android customers are phone OEMs. The major ones seem to like how things are going. Until Samsung and whomever start the OpenHandset Foundation or some such and fork Android, there's never going to be the Mariadb of Android.