Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Where have we heard that before?
AOSP on a diet plan as Google halves Android code drops
Google has confirmed there will be two code dumps to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) per year, down from the four developers have become accustomed to. The announcement was made on the Android Open Source Project's home page: "Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk stable development model and ensure platform …
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Thursday 8th January 2026 16:38 GMT MrAptronym
Google is slowly heating up the water. They clearly want more control so they are floating developer registrations to restrict people from installing software normally a.k.a. 'sideloading'. They have a duopoly on phone OSes. Now they are reducing releases which presumably makes OSes based on android harder to maintain. That isn't a coincidence.
Once they have figured out how to lock down the systems in a more apple-like way and made sure no offshoot is going to show up that is commercially viable, I wonder how they plan to further enshitify Android?
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Thursday 8th January 2026 17:20 GMT 3arn0wl
Sovereignty
There's been a lot of talk of late about sovereignty - and US cloud storage and Microslop is usually mentioned alongside that. But actually, Google was the company that originally brought spyware to the masses. Surely the EU & China should be looking to - and financially supporting - one of the Linux-based initiatives such as postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch.
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Thursday 8th January 2026 21:21 GMT graemep
Re: Sovereignty
China has alternatives.
Neither the EU, nor the rest of Europe, nor (AFAIK) anyone else in the world has any plans to do this. Lots of noise, a bit of moving government cloud stuff off US providers, but that is about it, and they are (if anything) increasing dependence on Google and Apple for things such as ID and age verification apps.
European governments mostly want spyware, as it extends their surveillance abilities so are delighted to work with US big tech.
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Friday 9th January 2026 10:11 GMT 3arn0wl
Other options
Well, we know that Google likes to market Android as "the world's most popular mobile operating system" but there are actually no shortage of possible alternative touch-screen OSs :
- Samsung, the smartphone market leader with 19.7% market share has Tizen (not based on AOSP),
- As you say, second placed Huawei, with 18% of the market, has HarmonyOS, which is moving away from a dependence on AOSP, and
- 4th-placed Xiaomi, on 14.4%, has HyperOS.
In fact, looking at it, Chinese marufacturers have >50% market share, when you include Vivo (9%), OPPO (9%), ZTE and OnePlus, and we know of "China's" intention to be free of US IP…
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
