Posted by Animux 18 hours ago
Judging by public statements, Google is one of the 3 big western AI companies. Surely they should be rolling in cash and working hard towards AGI.
And yet, for whatever reason, they can't help themselves from further restricting user freedoms on Android. Why?
I don't want to be conspiratorial, but surely it's not money, right? It has to be control. Someone high up at Google just seems to resent people having control over their own devices.
On top of that, I believe that the sum of the actions of well-meaning people doesn't always result in something good. In big companies like Google, I'm sure that many people are taking decisions that they think are well-meaning, but the result is that Google is a toxic entity.
In other words, because Google sucks doesn't mean that all Google employees are evil. Many of them just take their high salary and try to do well, conveniently ignoring that they contribute to a toxic entity.
I don't get it, are the government contracts somehow contingent on them oppressing users and stifling open source?
>we are now in an age where users can create their own apps to do whatever they want within a few hours, sothis risks their Google Play Store profits
If that's the reason, they're doing a pretty poor job, since it's trivially bypassable by running "adb install".
They might actually be violating the gpl because of the attempt to set terms on redistribution and the retaliation (kill your account and block future access) if you do.
Those kind of moves are petty but there are worst tricks they can pull unfortunately.
It seems Grapheneos is the rare actor willing to put up a fight nowadays, and their "partnership" with Motorola seems to be a first step. They need to ensure a hardware platform.
My guess is at some point they will have to fork AOSP, just because Google will take it in directions that go against Grapheneos principles.
I am still sad that Huawei didn't go this way, I thought they would with HarmonyOS.
I wonder if it could happen at some point that an alternative Android becomes so big that OEMs start supporting it. It feels like it may be interesting for the big Android manufacturers to support something like GrapheneOS?
I wonder: for those Motorola phones that will come with GrapheneOS, won't that make it cheaper for Motorola because they won't have to pay the Google licence (because those GrapheneOS-Motorola phone won't be Google-certified)?
I think this is the huge battle GrapheneOS won with Motorola. There are probably a few manufacturers of phones unhappy or nervous regarding Google.
The next battle is really on the app front. Once a country says our government and bank apps need to run on the fork of AOSP then you will start to have a real alternative to the Google/Apple (and now Huawei) duopoly.
My guess is there are a lot of candidate countries for breaking out of the American/Chinese grab on every smartphones.
So in a way the future could look bright as long as we support GrapheneOS and Motorola.
i remember jumping through crazy hoops to interact with a google open source project years ago. i wouldn't be surprised if it's just megacorp bureaucracy.
We mirror the source code on GitLab. We put the upstream 17 code in the 17-base branch and our code on top of it in the 17 branch:
https://gitlab.com/grapheneos/kernel_pixel/-/tree/17-base
https://gitlab.com/grapheneos/kernel_pixel_muzel/-/tree/17-b...
We also have mirrors of the QPR1 Beta and QPR2 Beta code there too.