Gist: “Evidently, starting next month, all external code contributions to AOSP will require approval from two Google reviewers before they can be submitted.”
Before anyone raises their pitchforks: Google already has to accept changes made to Android, like any project ever created. The change is only that there now has to be two people instead of one.
Yes, Android is moving in bad direction in user freedom perspective, but please don’t react hostile to every single news about Android, because then you show community caring about this stuff as being crazy.
Great, first they strip away Foss features and then they lock down code contributions.
You are free to fork AOSP and maintain your own fork if you have the resources.
Unfortunately not many people / organizations do or have the stomach to commit to doing that, and that’s how Google is able to maintain a tight grip on what is supposed to be an open source project.
Goes to show you the importance of lineage os
Google’s tight grip is because of Google play services, not AOSP. Without Google play services AOSP is useless for 99% of people.
Not quite: Google is quietly but very definitely busy gutting AOSP of anything nice and up to date. The dialer for example is becoming hopelessly outdated. And the reason for that is because they’re trying to transition as many nice, free default AOSP services to their non-free, functionally better but Google Play Service-tied equivalents.
The problem with that is that nobody really has the resources to counter their efforts and come up with good open-source alternatives to what Google is slowly removing or letting rot in AOSP. As a result, AOSP is slowly becoming more and more unappealing.
Of course that’s exactly what Google wants: they milked open-source for all it was worth to drive the wide adoption of Android, and now it’s in their way. They would like nothing better than to kill off AOSP tomorrow but they can’t do that. So instead, they’re boiling the frog slowly until it’s too late to do anything about it by the time it notices that the water is too hot.
The good thing about open source is that anyone can contribute.
Yeah, you won’t make any money out of it, but if your goal isn’t to make money, then you can team up with others to create your own Android dialer from scratch and that will be adopted.
There’s no vendor lockins possible
I don’t think that this is a control move.
