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Google will develop the Android OS fully in private; Will continue open source releases.
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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This is not at all a summary of the article. They're moving to trunk-based dev to reduce merge conflicts coming in from the public on AOSP.
I don't like it, because those few devs who contribute to AOSP without an agreement currently will have lagging code, but what you describe is just plain wrong. Is it possible? Sure. But it always has been, that doesn't mean that's what is happening.
Is it possible? Yes
Is it likely given Corpo take over of civilization? Also yes...
Even then, not really. Not legally, anyway. Open source licences require that the user be provided with the source code (if requested) alongside the binaries. If they roll out an update to Android (to code which is under an open source licence), they have to release the code at essentially the same time. Rolling out an update and then withholding the source code for an unnecessarily long time would be against the terms of the licence.
It's an Apache license with a contributor agreement. At any point they could close source. People could fork from it at that point, but any new features/updates/breaking changed from then out would be behind the scenes. There's no GPL poison pill in this one, I'm afraid.
Note: I don't at all expect this extreme of a direction.
For as long as it's still under the Apache licence, they're still obligated to release the source under the terms of that licence. They'd need to change the licence to stop providing code; which as you say, they could do, but that would also kill AOSP entirely overnight so is a bit of a bigger problem than the one described in the OP.
Exactly. I don't think they'd ever go down this road, but the big players like Samsung have agreements in place where they will continue to get access to
mainor some trunk. No reason they couldn't change license and require all players to do the same thing, though O doubt that would happen given the massive security PR implications. So many Android devices would end up with vulnerabilities, tarnishing the image.There's also just no real incentive for them to do it. The number of devices running fully de-googled Android forks are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Everyone running devices with non-standard Android but which still uses Google Play Services and the rest are just as valuable to Google as the ones running stock. And it suits Google to have the small ultra-privacy hobbyist market still running Android forks, even de-googled ones, rather than moving on to something else entirely.
Good clarification. It's also worth clarifying that choosing hidden trunk based development instead of public trunk based development makes it clear that community contributions aren't one of their priorities.
Ahhh yes very very true. Also a great addition.