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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
> – 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.