> 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.

> 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.

This is correct but rarely in practiced.

During firefox DRM/HTML5 issue, I know many people from Free software foundation Europe absolutely telling in their blogs, talks etc please stop Mozilla from implementing this DRM or that... but finally when I spoke to these in private they told --- ya, whatever - I need to see this series in netflix etc- so I have another device with chrome etc to watch it. (Indeed Firefox did implement it)

This behavior is the reason average Joe gives up...

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.

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.

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.

Phone manufacturers had Symbian which became open source

It didn't become a major regret really until the antitrust treated android as a competitive space and iphone separate. That decision led to a lot of wtf and tactics changing. Because the platform had been made open it was then an issue of tying vs if it had just been closed like apple there wouldn't have been an issue was a pretty stupid take if you ever want to see an open platform again.

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.

It's like PC parts being modular. IBMs greatest mistake and the industry wants to make sure it never happens again.

Its more a reflection of the vastly different internal culture of the time (and different executive leadership).

When Patrick Pichette left and Sundar became CEO both led to massive culture shifts.

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

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).

I felt compelled to reply to this because I agree with it so strongly (which is also why I phrased my initial post as "sort of odd" rather than "some evil anti-consumer monopoly volcano lair conspiracy"); so many corporate oddity theories are easily caused by dysfunction that I wonder how many of their proponents have ever really been exposed to a corporate job.

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.

No, I was a lowly consumer who still laments the demise of BB10. It was one of the best mobile operating systems I have ever used. Fast, stable, with a refined UI that prioritised efficiency.

I believe GrapheneOS talked about hosting their own unifiedpush server and baking it into the OS not long ago

Yes, if the banking app refuses to run on Graphene, you can forget about Waydroid completely. Hell will freeze over before Waydroid passes play integrity.

My bank can support my phone or accept that I'm going to come waste their time in person, I'm not backing down here.

This is something that gets mentioned a lot, especially from people who don't use Graphene or other custom ROMs themselves. Personally, I have not had any issues using banking apps on Graphene without Play Services. While this is just anecdotal, even if apps required them, I use a separate "secure profile" where I dump all the fishy, but necessary apps that require Google. I used to run a separate Lineage phone with microG for this purpose, but it became too cumbersome

My phone is not that old but it stopped getting OS updates and I stopped considering it a way to do anything banking related when my bank declared that my phone OS was too old to run the app.

Literally insane that banks will allow you to do banking on ancient phones with an unpatched Android full of CVEs, but won't allow you banking on a modern ungoogled OS.

GrapheneOS won't be interested in other hardware support, since the only devices that meet their hardware security standards are Pixels and the upcoming Motorola phone.

AI is definitely going to cause a chilling effect for (human-written) code. Why connect with other young nerds to make something cool when an AI can make it for you? Why share code if you've never sought out shared code yourself?

Further contribution to the trend of humans becoming more capable but less social.

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.