this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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570
AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 days ago by lzfm@lemmus.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
99 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

TL;DR

  • Google has made it harder to build custom Android ROMs for Pixel phones by omitting their device trees and driver binaries from the latest AOSP release.

  • The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.

  • While Google insists AOSP isn’t going away, developers must now reverse-engineer changes, making the process for supporting Pixel devices more difficult.

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[–] Feyd@programming.dev 102 points 2 days ago (3 children)

The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.

This actually probably make sense, but they could still be cool and have pixel drivers be open source in a different repo if that was the only reason.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 63 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Yeah, just that this has shit to do with the stated reasons. Google hasn't been an open source ally for quite some time now

[–] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 39 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Yup, the entire culture of Google has nearly changed. It used to be coder- and innovation-driven, and open-source was a natural thing to support. Make more money by growing the pie, creating markets with new tech.

Now it seems it's middle managers and MBAs calling the shots, and their strategy is generic business zero-sum mindset - lock down, restrict, extract. They still see the PR value in open-source, but that's it.

Just becoming 1990s Microsoft or 1980s IBM.

[–] defaultusername@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 2 days ago

Just another example of enshittification from a publicly traded company. Nothing really new here.

[–] Toes@ani.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Do you think it may be related to the monopoly issues they are currently facing?

[–] passepartout@feddit.org 18 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Would be great indeed, but "more neutral" in this case seems to mean vendor agnostic by abstracting the hardware away and have anything run on a closed source google container.