About half a year ago, I wrote an article about persistent rumours I’d heard from Android ROM projects that Google was intending to discontinue the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). AOSP has been gutted by Google over the years, with the company moving more and more parts of the operating system into closed-source, non-AOSP components, like Google Play Services. While you can technically still run bare AOSP if you’re really hardcore, it’s simply unusable for 99% of smartphone users out there.
Google quickly responded to these widespread rumours, stating that “AOSP is not going away”, and a lot of people, clearly having learned nothing from human history, took this at face value and believed Google word-for-word. Since corporations can’t be trusted and lying is their favourite activity, I drew a different conclusion at the time:
This seems like a solid denial from Google, but it leaves a lot of room for Google to make a wide variety of changes to Android’s development and open source status without actually killing off AOSP entirely. Since Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, Google is free to make “Pixel Android” – its own Android variant – closed source, leaving AOSP up until that point available under the Apache 2.0 license. This is reminiscent of what Oracle did with Solaris. Of course, any modifications to the Linux kernel upon which Android is built will remain open source, since the Linux kernel is licensed under the GPLv2.
If Google were indeed intending to do this, what could happen is that Google takes Android closed source from here on out, spinning off whatever remains of AOSP up until that point into a separate company or project, as potentially ordered during the antitrust case against Google in the United States. This would leave Google free to continue developing its own “Pixel Android” entirely as proprietary software – save for the Linux kernel – while leaving AOSP in the state it’s in right now outside of Google. This technically means “AOSP is not going away”, as Chau claims.
↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews
Ever since the claim that “AOSP is not going away”, Google has taken numerous steps to further tighten the grip it has on Android, much to the detriment of both the Android Open Source Project and the various ROM makers that depend on it. Device-specific source code for Pixel devices is no longer being released, Google dabbled with developer certification even for developers outside of Google Play, and Google significantly scaled back the release of security patches to AOSP.
And now it’s early 2026, and Google is about to take the next step in the slow killing of the Android Open Source Project. On the main page of the Android Open Source Project, there’s now a new message:
Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing
android-latest-releaseinstead ofaosp-main. Theandroid-latest-releasemanifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP.
This means that instead of four AOSP code releases every year, Google is now scaling back to just two every year. The gutting and eventual killing of AOSP has now reached the point where the open source nature of AOSP is effectively meaningless, and we’re yet a few more big steps closer to what I outlined above: eventually, Google will distance itself from AOSP entirely, focusing all of its efforts on Pixel Android alone – without any code contributions to AOSP at all. If you still think “AOSP is not going away”, you’re delusional.
OASP is already on life support, and with this latest move Google is firmly gripping the plug.
Devil’s advocate here…
I know loss of AOSP is bad. But there were several external events that led Google into doing. Specifically those coming from competitors, and later regulators. So, what started as the most open mobile operating system, ended up being a closed shell
Like a scared tortoise, closing inside his shell.
Why?
Amazon released Fire Phone. This is entirely within the spirit of AOSP. However they did that in a way that would directly attack Google.
This was the first straw. There were some changes, but not much.
Samsung wanted to take over Android. Google was in a losing battle. At the time there was no in house hardware. And any feature they released would automatically be on Galaxy S. While Google offered nothing to differentiate, Samsung was adding exclusive features.
Google bought Motorola, and all the essential GSM patents. (Samsung gave up their attack after that)
Regulators? Don’t get me started on it. They wanted Google to act like a free public domain provider, with no realistic way to make a revenue out of it.
I can go on, however over the years, Google has realized it is extremely difficult to maintain a public open source project, while earning something for their efforts.
Again, the idea was simple. Google would give away the entire source code, for return they would expect Google services to become available. Everyone said “please give the source code, but we will also remove your services for your trouble”
And here we are today. Thanks everyone! AOSP is gone for all practical purposes!
No, this is not what regulators asked of Google. What they did was ask Google to stopping using monopolistic strategies that allowed them to earn more than they ought to from their trust and gatekeeper positions. Now this might affect Google’s revenue, but if you let companies circumvent law and/or be unethical just so they can keep the dividends rolling, I’m not sure you’re doing your job as a regulator.
worsehappens,
“The road the hell is paved with good intentions”
That is exactly what regulators asked of Google. But, how?
They asked Google to abandon their current working revenue stream. And when Google tried to adopt, they did not like it, and added random fees ranking in billions.
If you leave all the options from the table, bar one, you are essentially asking for that.
And regulators (specifically EU) received exactly they asked for.
They have nobody else but themselves to blame. And they cannot claim naiveté.
This website has personal history with AOSP, and I remember. An earlier straw was Google releasing the Nexus 4 phone, and deciding that it wouldn’t release the firmware for it, making AOSP unavailable for that platform. It ended up with the person responsible for AOSP leaving the project, because Google had promised that they wouldn’t do that. Then they promised they’d release it after the phone and the latest AOSP launched, and they broke that one too. A few more steps and “Don’t be evil.” was gone, all so they could get in that extra step.
I hope PostMarket OS, and Phosh/Plasma can undo some of the damage, eventually.
I’ve been daily-driving a Librem 5 for 2+ years and the only reason I have to keep Waydroid installed is to run the stupid bank MFA application. =\
It would be lovely to be able to get rid of it.
My daughter just bought a Japanese feature phone to get away from smart phones. This is an emerging trend. My hope is someone makes a nice one that works with American carriers, and these things just die off. They have been a net negative for global civilization.
Some Chinese company is certain to make an alternative btw. This move smacks of global economic geo-politics. And it won’t work, whatever they are thinking, just like it won’t work to restrict nvidia exports. It’s all cutting off our western noses to spite our stupid faces.
If you can’t tell from my fatalism, I’m American.
min1123,
Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle, and it would be pretty much impossible to put it back.
An operating system like Android is a massive undertaking. There are not many companies on earth that can do that.
Just one minor example?
How many engineers are out there that can build a real time camera stack that stitches incoming frames without flicker or artifacts?
I would assume there would be less than 100 engineers in the entire world total that can do it.
And Google probably employs a significant portion of them.
Take this, and multiply my thousands of small, individual APIs
sukru,
I disagree. There are plenty of companies that can build such an operating system. Incidentally this even includes android itself being built by a small company before selling to google. The part that’s infeasible isn’t building the platforms, rather it’s growing the market share. Powerful incumbents can be virtually impossible to displace in a mature market.
Hypothetically if there was a huge gap in the market and neither iphone nor android existed, I am confident we’d see lots of companies throwing their hats into the ring. Their absence from the market today does not represent their inability to build platforms, but their inability to compete under the absolute duopoly.
The “small company” that was sold to Google had some ideas and PowerPoint slides. That’s it. It was enough to convince Google to buy them, but not even remotely enough to deliver working mobile, let alone convince phone makers to pick it.
zde,
We can debate whether or not they would have succeeded without google, but google weren’t part of the original plan. Some companies actually delivered working products. I don’t like Microsoft, but windows phone was actually decent. They didn’t drop out because the phone was bad, but because they failed to compete on apps. I actually liked webos, but again the problem for competing platforms isn’t building the platform, it’s building the ecosystem. This is the main reason alternatives fail.
Alfman,
If you think about it, there is a massive incentive to do just that now. However only one, Huawei has done that, and that was due to government forcing them.
That is true. However even that “small” company was actually Google. The original Android prototype had almost nothing to do with what was eventually released.
Today I would estimate the Android team spends roughly $10 billion per year to keep it up to date and competitive.
Given open source model does not work, and closed one has no benefits over Android partnership… I don’t think we will see a massive change.
Samsung seems pretty content with what they have, though they would still nibble at Google’s parts of the software stack.
Yes, it was great when we had more ecosystem competition. LG, Samsung, Nokia, Motorala, ZTE, HTC with many OS variants Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Palm, Symbian, …
The problem is people are finicky and are quick to punish bad actors.
I was an HTC person, until they killed their quality
Later went onto LG, which decided to drop support from flagship phones in a year, forcing us to upgrade (and my next phone was *not* an LG, when I was forced)
One by one they shot themselves in the foot.
sukru,
Exactly. It doesn’t make sense to invest in a market you have little possibility of winning at. Completing against duopoly trillionares is a fools errand unless you have unique circumstances like government granted subsidies.
I doubt very much that goes towards development. With that amount of money they could realistically rewrite and support several operating systems if they wanted to. Honestly they’re so spoiled with resources and don’t even realize it and/or don’t care. Imagine how many doors this amount of wealth could open for smaller companies with more ambition.
I don’t think it’s going to change either. Once a market is dominated by untouchable incumbents, there aren’t many opportunities for real change outside of new markets.
Sure, but how many times has google shot itself in the foot too? They keep making mistakes and drawing criticism over and over again, but that no longer matters when you have such tight control over the market. Google can afford to make mistakes that would wipe out another company and it barely tilts the needle for google, just another entry on google graveyard.
Do you understand that the entire history of success around Linux, is due to the fact that anyone can take it and making a competing product? I don’t understand why you list that as a fatal flaw for Android. That’s insane. It’s all Linux.
CaptainN-,
I had a similar reaction. Open source means that projects can and do get forked, this is always in the cards with open source projects from day one. Yes it does mean competitors can fork AOSP, but that’s just the way open source works and has nothing to do with google specifically.
From the sounds of it, Google might not believe in open source sharing any more, and I guess that would be fair enough except for the hypocrisy of relying on open source so heavily themselves. Google likely run millions of linux servers and there are billions of linux phones running android that don’t have to pay royalties for running linux thanks to the rights they got through the GPL.
I understand the business case against open source and it’s not hard to see why google are against it especially now that they’ve achieved their success. However I don’t see a scenario where google are the victim for others using the rights granted by FOSS. Google are simply a corporation that does not (or at least no longer) believes in the virtues of open source for their software. It’s their right to stop contributing to AOSP, but that’s on google not the market.
The truth is, Google could replace the Linux part of Android with their own kernel if they wished. They already have Fuchsia exactly for this purpose.
For an acceptable user experience, you need to provide server-side parts. Those components have never been open source for any OS, and someone has to pay for the servers.
It directly connects to energy consumption, which has always been a big problem for developers of alternative OSs.
For example, if you don’t have centralised push notifications in the OS, your battery will probably die in a couple of hours.
And we haven’t even started talking about demands from banks, streaming platforms, etc.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
I thought they would do that too, but they didn’t. I suspect that all of the canceled projects at google are indicative of google corporate’s disregard for these types of projects including Fuchsia. That could have succeeded, but google didn’t have interest in seeing it through. obviously Fuchsia didn’t interest the executives.
Honestly that doesn’t ring true for me, I know I don’t rely on any 3rd party infrastructure (other than the carrier obviously) and I don’t think this is a significant impediment for AOSP forks in general. Obviously if you’re a google user using google play, then yes you need google’s infrastructure for that, but don’t forget that many users of android forks are explicitly trying to avoid google services…”that’s not a bug but a feature”.
I agree with you that some 3rd party apps are notoriously dependent on google accounts & services and it highlights a very real gripe in the world of alternatives. But the need for those google services in forks isn’t demand-based so much as it is the result of a duopoly market where alternatives unfortunately have zero support from those banks, streaming platforms, etc.
Alfman,
It is more basic than that.
I wonder whether it has any connection to Fuschia, Chrome OS and Android being under different cost centers?
Of course these components have opensource variants and you can pay for the servers yourself if you wish. That was my personal project in 2025, and I don’t need any of the Google services anymore, neither on my phone nor on my computer (Google or any other big tech for that matter). That doesn’t mean I’m asking for a free lunch. I’ve shelled out money for software (open source or not), hardware and bandwidth, as was my plan all along, but it is not that costly, I’m now not participating in reinforcing any monopoly whose vested interests vastly diverge from mine and I incidentally regained control of my data. It might not be perfect, but the balance is absolutely better now than in 2024 as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t think this is for everyone, and I’m not expecting any significant number of people to do it, but I do firmly believe it should be doable and no company should have a hold such that we need to accept there “privacy policy” to be able to participate in our economic, civic and social environments. When we blindly accept the GAFAMs as gatekeepers for our interactions with each other, with our banks, even with our states, with no practical alternative, we hand them way too much power. I’ve proven myself they don’t have that much power over me at the moment, but I know it might become way harder in the future and I feel we should support every effort to insure this stays practically doable (as in, not just theoretically).
Alfman,
Google just did not realize how asymmetric the “sharing economy” was. Even for a behemoth operating billions in size.
Android is just one example where “so called” partners wanted to take advantage of the situation (like Samsung, I cited above) and return nothing back.
Add in other fields. Google used to publish all papers, some even before implementing, (I know, because in some of our meetings my colleagues would some with their recently published papers as part of our new project plans). Not always, but many times.
And look at how OpenAI (ha ha!) returned the favor in recent years.
Where is the paper for ChatGPT? DALL-E, SORA?
They learned the hard lesson.
(Of course, I am for opening as much code as possible. I’m just trying to explain what happened in practice)
sukru,
This is not new though. It’s always been normal for users (corporate or otherwise) to not give anything back above and beyond their obligations. This has been the case long before and long after google purchased android. So I don’t think painting google as a victim now makes much sense. They knew or should have known what they were getting into.
IMHO what’s going on is that young companies starting out are eager to embrace FOSS since they’re the ones mooching off other’s work (including google), but they become more resentful when others start mooching off of them. This has always been part of the bargain with FOSS.
The thing is none of these points are unique to google. FOSS is always going to be a hard sell if you aren’t willing to give away your work to others for free because that is what happens with FOSS. If google exec opinions on FOSS are changing, it’s not because FOSS itself changed, it has to be because google themselves are changing.
Alfman,
Google was unique that they maintained an absolute beautiful open source ecosystem for over a decade, even through the times it was financially damaging for them.
But all good things come to an end.
You do realise that there were bazillion attempts to build phones on Linux with zero success — before and after Android, right?
Linux works just fine on open hardware platform of a PC, but it would never succeed on phones except in a the form that Google is pushing. History have shown us that much.
Why — we can speculate a lot… that’s just an observable fact.
zde,
The main differentiator is that Google actually spent a lot of effort to make Android a viable platform, and was willing to meet the hardware manufacturers’ demands as needed.
They had both backwards and forwards compatibility for APIs. They made sure an Android 1.0 app continued to run for years, and a Android 5.0 IoT device was still viable decade later.
They even allowed Play Store on third parties without direct agreement (but the user had to do the download manually)
You don’t get that with a Mozilla Phone, KDE phone, Maemo, Tizen, or whatnot. They force you to follow the software and cut off support quickly.
(This is extremely different than rest of Google. They do the opposite. This is more like Microsoft and their fanatical support of WIndows compatiblity)
Right. But now look on what governments try to make them do: open the platform and make it available to competitors that would splinter it and would create bazillion incompatible forks.
Why should Google tolerate the destructions of what they tried so hard to build?
Of course they would do whatever it takes to stop fragmentation.
CaptainN-,
They had “assumed” a de facto deal.
1 – Google develops Android and releases for everyone to adopt
2 – Many different device manufacturers freely use the platform
3 – Google has some services installed by default to fund the endevour
They might have been naive. It does not matter.
But as soon as (3) stopped happening, and manufacturers switching to other services for money, they scrambled to change the deal.
After all, who would think people would choose Bing over Google?
(Hint: Greedy CEOs of phone manufacturers)
The rest is history.
I wonder where this will leave the likes of GrapheneOS. We might get to a point where no Android-based OS is more secure than iOS, which is.. pretty insane.
a QNX based mobile OS would be pretty sweet and secure
/s
We already tried one and it died a horrible death because it had no apps.
In the end people forget that SMART-phone may only be useful if it have apps and the only way to provide apps for them is to have one or two platforms what developers have to target.
THAT is why smartphones went nowhere before iOS and Android: to provide app for the phone one needed to support dozen of models, in fact Google have bought Android because of that insanity: they had to test each release of Google Maps on dozens (or was that hundreds?) of phones from different carriers with different OSes and shapes and it was clear that with such splintering of the ecosystems banks would never come, payment systems would never come, etc.
Look just a few messages above about how “everything works fine with Librem, except one needs Waydroid to run banking app”… well regulators are trying to ensure banking apps would STOP working under Waydroid, at some point… who would benefit from that?
I’m glad that they closed the OS. This will make an additional barrier to some authoritarian governments from creating “homegrown” OS to oppress their citizens even further.
I will miss GrapheneOS though.
Not really. It’s relatively easy to create a smartphone OS. What’s NOT easy is to make everyone develop apps for it.
But “authoritarian governments” have a cheat code: they may simply outlaw all other OSes… as simple as that.
My point, when we already have apps for Android, you could ban phones that lack specific government applications or even make a fork of Android. Look at Huawei in the past, and recent news from Russia and India, for example.
Russia develops their own “Aurora” OS (fork of Sailfish OS). Huawei plans to drop support for Android in their OS soon, too. Not really sure what you are talking about when you say “look on recent news from Russia and India”.
I would say that if Android would be closed it would make work of “authoritarian governments” EASIER, not harder: today they are lots of “dosmetic OSes” both in Russia and China that are simply a skin for Android and don’t provide the control that “authoritarian governments” really want.
If Android would be closed that would create trouble for providers of these pseudo-domestic OSes and would ensure that “authoritarian governments” would control all the smartphones faster… this process would inevitably happen, anyway, I’m just not sure why anyone would want to expedite it…
From the government’s point of view, it’s much easier to make demands when you have an established applications ecosystem in your country. Making their “own” devices (cheap devices based on past-generation hardware made in China), based on AOSP, is more feasible than asking users to switch to Aurora OS or any other similar software without any ecosystem at all.
I don’t believe Huawei will ever drop support for Android in its international firmware. Nobody outside China would buy it.
India government’s attempt https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/02/india-says-users-may-delete-mandatory-state-owned-security-app/
Russia’s RuStore is an alternative to Google Play Store, which doesn’t exist for Apple devices btw
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/08/21/kremlin-backed-messaging-app-max-to-come-pre-installed-on-devices-starting-next-month-a90306
It seems many people think Open Source is what is important, but the Free Software part is more important for users (which are ‘under attack’ right now)..
These days: company lead open source (MIT, Apache, BSD, etc. license) is just that (under control by a company) and it can change at any point.
It’s only a community project if it uses something like (L/A)GPL and do not force contributors to sign a Contributor license.
Open Source is important for mobile OSs because of the exposure to attacks on phones.
The GPL license for the code doesn’t protect you from dependence on proprietary services.
Free Software licenses are still Open Source, I’m not saying to stop with open source, I’m saying: choose a copyleft license instead of just an open source license this helps build a community.
Look at the Linux kernel itself, all these companies eventually agree, this works better.
There’s zero chance of community projects grabbing significant market shape in smartphones. ZERO.
Simply because to provide cellular connection you need huge behemoths that would install base stations and support them.
That means any “community project” may ONLY exist in the gaps that form where these mastodons are not looking.
People are working on reducing size of these gaps (regulators, mostly)… what do they want to achieve? Fully closed ecosystem? They would reach there, sure… what then?
It’s long past the point to have a Android Foundation of somekind and take control out of Google.
Given the mess that manufactures did with Symbian and their inability even to make their own software stores half funcional (just take a peek at that PoS from Samsung: comments filled with spams and scams), I don’t hold my hopes high.
The lesson here is simple: free software, those licenced under GPL and similar, are the ones that you can rely to stay that way. All other projects backed by corporations with “open source” licenses are at best charity from them, at worse, bait and switch.
The longest “bait and switch” ever… anyone still cheering for google?
Guys, did I completely miss something here? I am not saying any of these changes are positive but have they even restricted access to the source at all?
> the open source nature of AOSP is effectively meaningless
says Thom
> I’m glad that they closed the OS
says @a_very_dumb_nickname
> AOSP is gone for all practical purposes!
says @sukru
> Open source means that projects can and do get forked,
> From the sounds of it, Google might not believe in open source sharing any more,
says @Alfman
> For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release
says Google
Let me outline my understanding. Please, tell me what I am getting wrong about this?
– The AOSP source remains totally Open Source and available via Apache 2.0
– Google recommends that “the community” contributes to the “android-latest-release” branch
– This branch allows all the openness and collaboration from “the community” you would expect from any open source project
– Per @Alfman, you can still fork AOSP if you prefer not to collaborate on “android-latest-release”
– Google themselves are committing to drop their contributions twice per year (in Q2 and Q4)
– All the projects based on AOSP today can continue to be based on AOSP as before
– The most recent source drop from Google was a couple of weeks ago
What did I get wrong? How is it no longer Open Source?
I am not defending Google’s choices. I am just trying to understand what people are saying about it and how accurate we are being. I must be misunderstanding something because our statements here seem totally wrong.
LeFantome,
It is still open source, and to be fair to your point my own opinions of the project aren’t based on anything linked in this article but rather earlier news like this…
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-not-killing-aosp-3566882/
Making FOSS developers reverse engineer drivers to support google’s hardware is regressive, but also things like removing applications and making the android ecosystem more dependent on proprietary code that is not part of AOSP. All of these factors are collectively pushing the overall project towards a state where it is less complete. I don’t think today’s news that google will post releases twice a year instead of four times is the specific basis for most people’s opinions here, rather it’s just another small piece of the overall picture.
I’m not sure AOSP will completely disappear as Thom says, but it has lost it’s spark.
You want GrapheneOS or another alternative to be as secure as possible. Well, it looks like all alternatives derived from AOSP will be less secure than Android builds from Google.
Will see if GrapheneOS returns with devices from some OEM and access to patches, as they said earlier.
@a_very_dumb_nickname
Real question: why?
According to the link Thom posted here, security updates will continue to be released continuously (as required). Nothing has changed with regards to security.
I mean, design changes can be made to address security. If Google does that, you will not see those changes until Q2 or Q4. But Google’s customers will not either.
> – This branch allows all the openness and collaboration from “the community” you would expect from any open source project
Nope. That’s not how things work. You upload your changes to “android-latest-release” — and they disappear into a black hole. That branch is NEVER UPDATED. You can upload your changes but they would never be accepted or applied, anywhere.
Six-to-twelve months later your changes may or may not arrive in the new source drop of Android that corresponds to the new release of Android. And “android-latest-release” is simply retargeted to a different branch.
That’s how things worked since April of the last year. The only change that was announces now is that drops would stop happening four times per year and are, now, happening twice per year. That’s all.
The only way for anyone outside of Google to meaningfully contribute is to sign agreement with Google, promise not to release phones without passing Google’s CTS suite and then, only then, you may contribute.
Most phone makers and many carriers are on the board, most individual contributors are not. I’m not sure if there are any such contributors now… there definitely existed such contributors just a year ago.
@zde
Thank you. That is different than what I understood.
While I would not say this means that “AOSP is no longer Open Source”, I do agree that it changes things significantly. It does make it difficult to have a true Community around the source even if the source is available. Again, thank you for clearing that up.
It is all described pretty clearly here:
https://source.android.com/docs/setup/about/faqs