Judge me if you must, but the only reason I recently bought a Pixel was because of the intention on sticking GrapheneOS on it the second I got it out of the box. And it really worked great for me so far...
Unless it's something to do with work, I don't (intentionally) touch anything that has to do with Google, as I dislike too many things about them.
And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit more work to publish those binaries and make sure they work. But they still kind of have to do that, for themselves. So I think it's fair to assume why they did it. Because they made a choice to take a small loss on the devices they would sell for the few GrapheneOS users, and cash in on the walled garden, data mining, ads serving, yada yada, whatever brings the extra money after the initial phone sale.
> Judge me if you must, but the only reason I recently bought a Pixel was because of the intention on sticking GrapheneOS on it the second I got it out of the box.
The only judgement is a positive one. I thought this is what one does now that we all understand just how broad and deep the tracking is at nearly every level. Buying a Pixel and immediately flashing GrapheneOS has been my default mode of operation for years now on all cellphones in my home (wife and myself). No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I'd rather my life not be turned into an open book for targeted advertisements and whatever other purposes every detail of my existence is used for now or in the future. It's mind boggling to me how many seem to simply not care.
> I thought this is what one does now [...] No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I applaud your ability to do this (seriously, genuinely, I do), but if you truly believe what you do is normal, just "what one does now", I must inform you that you live in a very small bubble.
I would like to run GrapheneOS on my phone, but I like being able to use Google Wallet, among other things. If I look at what I use my phone for, way too much of it relies on Play Services, and (critically) the SafetyNet (or whatever Google is calling it now) checks passing.
This situation blows. I really don't like these trade offs, and iOS's trade offs are different but no better.
Admittedly, that part was a bit tongue in cheek. Rather, I wish that is "what one does now", as I think we might live in a somewhat nicer world rather than one driven by whatever has been happening as many of us get sucked into our algorithmically-driven feeds across various web properties and apps.
Also, fwiw, you can install Play Services after installing GrapheneOS[0]. It runs in a sandbox without the same deep system access that it has on less secure versions of Android. There's no requirement here to authenticate with any Google account. You'd just have the Play Services running/available, which can be a requirement for some apps.
To be honest, it's not like Google doesn't know this.
And it's not like it should be surprising to us that Google just ignores it.
They know they'll lose some sales, but the few percent of people who'll buy a Pixel anyways but keep the stock OS on it lead to a net plus for them.
They don't care about you liking their hardware and using it like you own it (oh the good old days). They care about you using their software so they can track you better and put ads in your phone experience, because long-term, this is where their money is.
It strongly highlights why we need a decent pixel 9 pro xl format device for linux phones and some focus there. Android is on its way out as something someone who cares about basic privacy can use
I only had Nexus and Pixel phones since they existed. I've never cared what hardware they had the only thing I cared is what they have killed now.
This is the bigger disappointment than the 24 days (and counting) that they need to repair my Pixel 7 right now. I'm really glad I didn't buy a new Pixel 9 already.
I’m not buying their devices after Nexus 5X and 6P disaster. Even despite my own devices did not boot loop. I mean buying them new and using them as my primary phone. Buying a used Pixel for $50, yeah, I might. So if it’ll face some weird hardware issue, I’m not going to be disappointed. I had zero issues (hardware-wise) with so many years of iPhones.
These days all that looks very depressing. The new redesign from Apple, and now this. I was actually thinking about maybe I’d like to give Pixels another chance. If buying used, I can play that lottery after all. But having no custom ROM option basically leaves me as miserable as with Apple: either take it as it is or leave.
> And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
Their support of Pixels with AOSP has been well documented! This has always been one of their selling points, as a sort of reference device. I've exclusively bought Pixel phones in recent years and this is one of the primary reasons.
Of course Google never made any guarantees, and a rug pull was always possible, but it's absolutely still disappointing and well worth commenting upon.
I have never seen this about the Pixel phones. Nexus phones were reference devices, Pixels are consumer-oriented devices, with exclusive features, not so different from Samsung or Xiaomi. The sales pitch is mostly about the camera and AI features.
Just the name change is telling. "Pixel" suggest a focus on pictures, whereas "Nexus" suggests a focus on Android itself (inspired by Nexus-6 androids in Blade Runner).
I dont recall Pixel device being sold saying "Buy our device and install GrapheneOS on it". I'd like to be wrong, so I'm happy to read articles if you have any.
Nothing I bought in the produce aisle today had instructions for use. Should I leave it to rot?
AOSP recipes themselves list reference devices and they could have updated this with their announcement in March if they didn't want external developers procuring these things as bricks for their gardens. GrapheneOS is just a community of a AOSP derivative there are any number of AOSP derived things people may have been doing with these devices.
I have a Macbook, and if I try to install Windows of it and fails, should I be angry with Apple? Should Apple be on the hook to make it work?
Or, how about Hackintosh (from yesteryear). Apple gave 0 support for it all those years when folks made it work, and one day it went away - and I dont remember saying Apple, please support Hackintosh.
Huh? Google gives everyone in the world instructions to make derivatives of AOSP and they could install them[1] on the reference devices which were all nexus/pixel. Google said nothing until they suddenly didn't deliver for those devices.
They made related announcements in March and certainly saw interpretations of their announcement by interested AOSP derivative maintainers.
That's not remotely the same as I figured how to boot X against so and so's wishes and now it stopped working.
> If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.
A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.
> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.
What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".
The fact that you could buy a Pixel (or Nexus), real hardware sold to consumers as a phone, download AOSP (and proprietary blobs), and get a working build with all hardware supported with no additional work was super appreciated.
Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
Plus, there's just something cooler about running your own build of Android on real hardware v.s. a VM.
> Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
The article mentions that they're also supporting GSI's as a reference target of sorts, and that's way closer to real hardware. GSI's are annoying for other reasons though - for example, there isn't a single "GSI" build type, they vary according to low-level device features (such as partitioning) and what version of Android they first came out with. Still, it's better than nothing.
These days there's also GKI, a "generic kernel build" (minus custom modules and blobs) that's supposed to work on any recent device. Note, this is not a "mainline" Linux kernel at all, it's still very much a downstream fork with lots of custom patches. But it too is supposed to enable testing and development in a unified way, regardless of the actual device.
GrapheneOS made an unforced error by exaggerating the situation. ("Boy who cried wolf"). When you're generic and obviously false in your criticism, it makes it easy for the company to counter it. "Google is killing AOSP" catches eye, but it is sooo easy for the company to counter.
What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.
To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.
How is he exaggerating the situation? What is false about the criticism? Are you referring to a previous time where they cried wolf? I read through the Twitter thread and GrapheneOS seemed pretty even keeled and above board about it to me (even if that is uncharacteristic)
Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.
> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.
If you want to define "AOSP is not dead" as "there exists a source-available AOSP repo that is not ground-up buildable for any real world device without losing major features like SecureBoot", that's fine, but that's not the definition being discussed.
Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.
If the Linux Foundation sold itself to Microsoft, ceased publishing kernel sources or binaries, and declared henceforth Linux would exist as WSL and nowhere else, it would be reasonable to say "Linux is dead" even if something with a subset of that functionality, named "Linux", still existed.
> Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.
There are a million devices out there that build on AOSP that are not Google Pixel. This is a Pixel news, not AOSP news.
They are talking about the device tree which has not been released with Android 16. So no way to run a custom kernel on actual hardware, unless that hardware is open. AOSP is a car without an engine now.
IIUC, GrapheneOS cares about being forensics-proof very much. And for Android phone forensics without consent, almost 0% of work are done after the boot chain ends. So it's all about firmware.
Non-Pixel devices usually require you to just give up secure boot, in this case a GrapheneOS install could be even worse than stock Android.
The point is that you should try to be factually correct without worrying about what it means you're defending. (Well, you don't have to if you don't want to, but it's at least a reasonable way for someone to behave.)
It's weird to write this in June of this year (giving the author his edit).
> then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put minorities in camps.
If this was on my 2025 bingo card I think we could have crossed it off a few times with ICE detention facilities and the prison in El Salvador. I don't think it's a requirement that you round them all up, it's plenty enough to simply target someone because of they're in a minority group which is what's happening. He did try to do that, the courts intervened. It's not a lie to not accept someone's framing or motivated reasoning on an issue.
I'm sure you can find plenty of outlandish things said about this admin, why pick the one that, to the people saying it, already happened?
"Well that's not EVERYONE, like someone said it was"
"Yes, I concede, it was only like dozens of people, you certainly have the high-ground in this debate about why we shouldn't have all these dead people"
... I feel the author has missed the point, which has led to an argument that is horrible and, I would say, wrong. Fact-checking is important but, to most people, whether it was 6 or 10 people murdered is not the substance of the debate - the original point is that we probably shouldn't have this guy going around murdering people.
If you then wade in to the debate and your only contribution is to try and make that argument X% less strong then yeah, that really is pretty cringe. If the purpose of the debate is to convince people that Joe Criminal is a horrible rotter that should never again see the light of day, and your aim is to make that argument less persuasive, then you are literally defending him. You may even be right to do so (say, if 10 murders leads to a punishment of horrible tortures and 6 just hanging), but don't pretend that's not what you're doing.
> If this was on my 2025 bingo card I think we could have crossed it off a few times with ICE detention facilities and the prison in El Salvador.
Isn't this the motte and bailey thing though? "Putting minorities in camps" has the implication that they're being put into camps because they're minorities. It's meant to invoke the thing the 20th century fascists did where if you're a member of the group you go to the camps, and moreover if you go to the camps you never come back.
Meanwhile ICE is detaining people because they're suspected of being in the country illegally, and then deporting them.
They suck at it, as usual, so some of the people aren't actually in the country illegally, but most of them are, and then when the government screws up the courts slowly get around to sorting it out. Which is a process that has maybe been in need of reform for quite a while now -- in particular it would be nice to see the government paying for its mistakes more often, and for the "unscrew this up" process to take less time -- but those aren't novelties only now being introduced, they're longstanding problems.
> "Putting minorities in camps" has the implication that they're being put into camps because they're minorities.
Right, and how do you do this and get away with it? In every single circumstance in history, how was this done?
You accuse them of some crime, skip the "prove they did it" part, and then put them somewhere where they can never contact anyone ever again.
Okay - now what is the Trump administration and ICE doing? Because, to me, it sounds a lot like that.
Now, I will admit - there's some plausible deniability here. You're correct that ICE is ass and they make mistakes.
What, I think, takes it over the edge is the hostile and adversarial approach of the Trump administration. The DOJ has refused to comply with some orders (lawful orders!) and the administration has doubled-down when they've made mistakes. Trump has even joked about having the power to bring back people from El Salvador, but choosing not to use that power. When you accuse random people of being part of MS-13 and just kind of shrug when courts say "no, bring that guy back" it gives the impression that you're intentionally trying to ruin people's lives.
There's tolerance for mistakes built into the mind's of Americans, but when mistakes are constantly underplayed, rug-swept, or outright lied about, we all get a little nervous. If the Trump Administration wasn't so hell-bent on burning as much good will as possible, we wouldn't be having this conversation on if people are being disappeared.
I don't understand the contention as I don't participate in the disinformation. ICE kidnaps people without showing documentation on who they are or why they're being kidnapped. They quickly move the people they capture to another facility in the US hundreds of miles away. Then, they send them to El Salvador, a hostile place, or a country they've never been to. This process occurs without seeing a judge to even double check the abducted person is who ICE claims they are. Let alone any actual due process. What's the contention?
Also, despite the insane cruelty that seems to be the process, both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump.
> then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put minorities in camps *and murder them*.
I think the author is fair to say that that's an exaggeration of what most people suggested Trump would do.
> Without the Pixel hardware repos (which include the device trees, driver binaries, and more), custom Android ROMs will have a hard time developing their OS updates. This might also have implications for security (vulnerability) researchers.
I really haven't kept up with third party roms for smartphones in a while. I take it graphene is a major player? Last one I heard of was lineage os. I guess I probably need to start looking as my pixel 5a has probably lapsed security updates
GrapheneOS is the security-first Android distribution. It tends to drop support for older devices not long after official driver updates stop, because it's harder to ensure top-notch security in that case. The Pixel 5A is in "extended support", which is to say deprecated.
LineageOS is the broad-support Android distribution. Its current version supports all Pixel devices. Third parties have even built recent-ish versions for ancient devices (e.g. Android 13 on the Nexus 5).
while lineageos and derived roms like /e/os are doing a good job supporting old smartphone models and temporarily saving them from thr landfill, they are struggling to support less than 5 year old models that aren't google pixel and fairphones.
The google pixel line were the only smartphone you could buy new on a brick and mortar shop on monday almost anywhere in the world and have it running on a custom rom on tuesday and graphene was leading the way in pushing privacy and security at its maximum while other rom maker are making a lot more concessions.
LineageOS still is king to save old devices but grapheneos definitely is a major player because some people like me did chose second hand google pixel with the sole purpose of being able to run graphene.
Ironically, running a google smartphone was the best way to live a life without sending data and rely on google services.
A major player amongst the tiny world of user-centric privacy-focussed third party Android based OSes I guess. Their major selling point — aside from privacy and maximal degoogling — is that you could take a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and have it work with not too much trouble. No elaborate study of a plethora of devices needed, and the device is supported for a comparatively long time.
The Pixel 6 I have will be hitting its end of life in October 2026. I had wished to be able to simply get a newer Pixel and just carry on.
No. It is not. Lineage and a lot of others are major players.
They just have different focus. GrapheneOS cares about being secure. Others cares about being, well, custom, and "privacy", "privacy" as in "noooooooooo I don't want to install google stuff jfc", instead of being secure against random threat actors.
Without GrapheneOS im probably going to iPhone. Been using Graphene for years, its so light and simple without all the Google cruft. Pixels with Google is not for me anymore.
Another one for the google graveyard. There's no benefit at this point to owning a pixel if you can't control it. I'm going to trial iPhone again and try to live with the few downsides, and the many upsides.
Sounds like "No, AOSP is not dead. You can still run it in an emulator if you want. Have fun..."
> For years, developers have been building Cuttlefish (available on GitHub as the reference device for AOSP) and GSI targets from source. We continue to make those available for testing and development purposes.
I'm a complete noob regarding AOSP, but if someone with more knowledge of the ecosystem reads this: Are those alternative reference targets actually useful for custom ROMs and would allow updating roms for Android 16 on Pixels as well, or is this a smokescreen?
This is such a shame. As a Pixel 6a user, I was always bothered by the battery situation of the phone but happily ran GrapheneOS on the device since buying. Recently the model had a battery combustion incident and now this. And there I was thinking of getting another Pixel phone down the line.
A key takeaway from this situation is that "alternative Android ROMs" are merely remixes of the original Android effort, and not genuine alternatives standing on their own. Absolutely at mercy of Google. Similar to browsers, how we only have like 3 engines for the myriad of browsers that we have. I am a graphene user currently, and I guess Graphene is safe on the current devices, as long as Google and the maintainer does security updates for them, we will just not get Android 16 at worst. And have to figure out what to use after the security support runs out in <7 years. So there is plenty of time still, no matter how they rock the boat.
Ah so I guess this is the reason that GrapheneOS just works on Pixels? Maybe after the initial hurdle this change has introduced will actually lead to a wider device support once the necessary changes are better understood. Let's hope.
In part. The stated reasons[1] are: (1) best hardware security features, such as memory tagging (2) quick patches (3) many years of official device support.
Back in the day I was maintainer of a CyanogenMod device. Back then you could pull the device trees and basebands and proprietary parts off the OTAs and phones directly after rooting them. Has that changed? LineageOS still exists. I haven't been in that scene for... over a decade but is Lineage freaking out to this extent? Yes, it takes effort to maintain a port and it's not as easy, but how much of GrapheneOS is actually implemented in the kernel vs post-init things (which are easy to modify).
Warning: Complete shots in the dark here so take with a truckload of salt
Watching Google's actions on Android over the past many years, they are clearly inching in one strategic direction, and that is toward being more iPhone like (i.e. locked down, user hostile, user distrusting, etc). There might be a few "two steps forward, one step back" points like the new Android terminal, but it feels like clear directional momentum away from user capabilities. It's an absolute shame too, because Google products could be hacker's delights (I mean owner-hackers, not grey/black hat).
In their defense they are far from alone. Since Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
The net result has been that I've become almost entirely disinterested in mobile phones and all the IoT things, which is a huge personal loss. It's not just disinterest, but is turning in to active hostility. I've started to hate my phone because of many of the things it can't do now (that it used to), though thanks to the proliferation and expectation of "always connected" I can't get away from it without suffering professional or social consequences that aren't worth it. It's become a required piece of equipment to function in everyday life, because of other parties. If I could go back to the days of a single landline phone in the house with maybe an emergency cell phone in the car, I truly think I would.
It didn't (and doesn't!) have to be this way Google. You have the market power to change this, and you wouldn't even have to do all that much. I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I just hope that the rising generation of hackers will hear our stories from the glory days when compute was empowering to the owner of it, not restricting.
> I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I'm not so sure of that, at least in the US anyway. Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
The only way out is regulation - laws that mandate devices be open, and alternative app stores, side loading, root access, and alternative OSes are supported by order of law.
> Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
Consider what happens if they actually do this. Millions of people have that phone platform and aren't going to buy a new phone for at least a couple years. Switching phone platforms is a large time investment for most people because all your stuff is on that platform's cloud services etc.
Meanwhile most of that stuff doesn't need a phone. You're watching Netflix on your big screen TV rather than your tiny pocket device most of the time, aren't you? Your bank has a website. So if it stopped working on your phone, you wouldn't immediately buy a new phone, you would just use the website. But now the streaming service and the bank are immediately getting millions of user complaints that their app is broken.
Either of the major platforms could also use any of the malicious compliance schemes they use for other things. Find some over-broad or unreasonable contractual provision in the "must supply DRM" agreement that you don't like anyway, point to it as a justification for making a change to the DRM system in the brand new version of the OS, and disable the DRM in the older versions of the OS that are on 95% of existing devices, blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
Then the users don't have to switch platforms, they "only" have to buy a new device and can avoid the platform transition cost. For the ones who do, the vendor gets to sell more devices. For all the ones who don't, the DRM pushers still get millions of user complaints and a strong incentive to release the app without the DRM in it.
And if they do release the app without the DRM in it, now the new devices don't need the DRM either ("we found a vulnerability in the later version too and had to disable it as well"), and now the users have no reason to switch platforms over it so the DRM can stay gone forever.
This is the same problem the incumbent duopoly causes for all other app developers. And that's bad -- the duopoly should be broken up -- but it does currently exist, and it could, if it wanted to, use that to do something good. (You might also consider what would happen if they both decided to lose DRM at once.)
> blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
I think you're vastly overestimating customers' willingness to listen and care about whose fault it is. In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time. It would take a concerted effort across tech companies to really take them down, and nobody is interested in waging that war because the cost of simply implementing DRM is too low for it to be worth the struggle and the risk.
> Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
This is part that is unfortunate. You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system, and would freely allow a corporation burning money to make improvements to it.
Instead what you see is an odd (and counterintuitive) behavior of saying alternate app stores are bad, side loading is bad - mostly because of Apple's unique PR/Marketing spin.
Whilst there are some seemingly unpaid Google defenders here today, I am always surprised how many people come out of the woodwork to defend whatever Apple chooses to do.
Ever since iOS and ipadOS came out, I haven’t had to do tech support or run malware removal software. A lot of my youth was wasted on that nonsense, and I see better uses of time.
Good for you. If that's the bar you're using to judge a company, I'm sure you defend your utility company (they supply electricity to your house!!), government (paved the roads for you), the car company (built the car for you to take you places).
I'll see on a thread defending Airbus and Boeing next.
The problem with Android is that it’s something of a bad compromise. That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing, and unfortunately nobody in the industry with any kind of power is doing anything to try to fix that situation. I’m not even really sure that it can be fixed so long as smartphones are based around custom ARM boards. Attempts at truly open ARM-based smartphones all have a laundry list of problems mostly thanks to compenent vendors that won’t play nice with drivers and documentation (or if they do, it’s with SoCs so old as to not be remotely competitive).
Following that, I may as well benefit from an overall smoother user experience, better app selection, etc on iOS. It’s not open and doesn’t pretend to be.
I’m keeping my eyes open for a smart device analogue of x86 desktop PCs, though. It might be powered by an open RISC SoC design or maybe someone finally figures out how to make x86 work well in handhelds, I dunno, but the current situation isn’t it.
> The problem with Android is that it’s something of a bad compromise. That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing,
You used to be able to do exactly that with Nexus & Pixel. That you still chose to buy something that doesn't let you do anything just proves GP's point.
Yeah, because that’d be limited to only Dell Inspirons and Latitudes for laptops. Half the point of using Android (or Windows or Linux) was to not have to be bound like that, so if that freedom is gone and you don’t like the OS for other reasons you’re not left with much of a desire to use it.
If you’re looking for preloaded with first party support, yeah options are limited. If you’re installing Linux yourself however, it’s much, much more universal than Android is. It’ll run on just about any x86 PC manufactured in the past 20 years and run well on the majority of them.
I don’t really need first party support though, as long as the OS in question has that kind of universality. I can grab Fedora or Mint or whatever and it’ll run more or less perfectly on any generic PC box I happen to have with a little effort.
It’s a much better situation than what we have with Android where outside of model-specific ROMs like Graphene, whether or not you can run a ROM on your phone depends on the model specific build (which has a decent chance of having been uploaded by a high schooler) existing and continuing to get updates. It’s a mess.
> That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing, and unfortunately nobody in the industry with any kind of power is doing anything to try to fix that situation.
You're right, but Google could do this (and probably the only one who could do it).
> You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system
Nope
I work on embedded security which is why there is no IoT shit at home.
I am forced to be tech support for my family, which is why they have iPhones and why i support locked-down hardware - less pain for me removing sideloaded shit than when they had Android devices.
I am bored of maintaining things - i just want them to work, which is why my WRT54G is gone and I use UniFi gear.
And I am tired of "slightly annoying, but i am supporting open source", i just want my laptop to wake up from sleep every time and last a while day, which is why I use a MacBook.
If it was open source IN ADDITION to doing everything else i want, sure. Being open source by itself is NOT a feature i am willing to pay for with any inconvenience. And being locked down IS a convenience when you are managing devices for people with no digital hygiene (aka: family)
A question for any Android folks in the thread: how performant is Cuttlefish? Would I get good performance if I ran it in KVM on something like a Raspberry Pi 5? I've been thinking about a design that runs some robotic services natively, with a user-facing Android inside of a resource-constrained VM.
Understood. I'm actually thinking about a product design for an aarch64-based industrial controller.
I'd want to run all of the machine interfaces directly on Linux, but am interested in using Android for everything user-facing. Could I get away with running Cuttlefish in KVM (on an aarch64 SOC) and get OK performance? I'm thinking that it could be a good way to keep the important stuff isolated.
Seang Chau on Wednesday evening posted that broadly “AOSP is NOT going away.” More directly to developers, Google has said it will remain “committed to AOSP updates.”
...are not precisely responsive to questions about build targets. Something like "There's an emulator you can build for," or "You can build for a Raspberry Pi" would be useful or informative, or tell developers why Pixel is no longer a reference device and why there is no apperent replacement.
So Android is now no better than iOS - and Apple has privacy. Any HN'ers out there with an iPhone but no other Apple devices? Do you face any limitations or so forth?
I'm not sure the release of Google Pixel phone binaries is what made Android distinct from iOS. I'm pretty sure I still cant choose what software runs on iOS outside of Apple saying so, and that's one of the largest distinctions that's brought up. If Apple were to change that, then I'd fully agree.
> However, the lack of the binaries makes the situation with the OS effectively the same. Once the device is EOL it's e-waste.
Agreed, I'm definitely disappointed in this. The coupling of the hardware and software makes the Pixel phones worthless outside of Google's supported android version for it. I'd love to see some kind of consumer protection laws against this, mandating at least some level of usefulness of the hardware outside of the vendor sanctioned OS.
One limitation is for example when an update goes wrong (rare, but can happen). You need a MacBook or anything else running MacOS to restore the device. Or might have to go to an Apple Store. Otherwise, no real limitations.
I run an iPhone but my main personal laptop is an old T480 with FreeBSD. I do have a spare MacBook Air flying around just in case though.
Sigh, it was only a matter of time. But they are not helping themselves down the road when they are broken up into pieces. Let's just hope if they do get smashed into pieces that mobile breaks off and they aim to please the techno community that has made them who they are today.
Too head strong, why is it these product managers build to break, just to build again.
Has already been done, many times over many years, by both companies and enthusiasts. If you want to look at the latest developments in the space, I'd recommend following the development of postmarketOS and Jolla / SailfishOS.
In a better world.. goog could be as helpful towards grOS as aapl towards asahi. But "anything that doesn't detract from selling hw is fine" can't make it into goog's once-aspirational "knowledge economy" business calculus. (Legal considerations contribute further inertia)
I think though, "write-only" third-party contributions are a necessary evolutionary step towards a more balanced ecosystem, so lack of an open reference could lead to the needed experimentation, both legal and technical
I've not kept up with Asahi, but how is Apple helping Asahi? My surface level understanding was Asahi was reverse engineering everything and Apple is offering 0 help/support.
If adding a capability to boot another OS is seen as a big gesture, Google providing an entire operating system source code should be a bigger deal yes?
One is cracking open a door (Apple) and the other is opening the door wide, and welcoming you into your home.
Google doesn't provide "entire operating system source code", it provides some parts, while other they keep closed. Also they are continuously removing parts that are essential from AOSP (that are either open or closed).
Removing support for Pixel devices makes AOSP even less useful for developers, because belief that VM will be a good replacement for real hardware test environment is a fairy tale next to sleeping beauty.
So no, they don't provide "entire operating system source code", what they provide is a caricature of open source project. So maybe they should call it COSP.
Didn't mean to imply that Aapl can't be accused of perfidious behaviour on the sw side, but the erstwhile welcomes mean that Goog's betrayal, when it happens, even a minor one that doesn't kill the biz, hurts a lot more?
Judge me if you must, but the only reason I recently bought a Pixel was because of the intention on sticking GrapheneOS on it the second I got it out of the box. And it really worked great for me so far... Unless it's something to do with work, I don't (intentionally) touch anything that has to do with Google, as I dislike too many things about them.
And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit more work to publish those binaries and make sure they work. But they still kind of have to do that, for themselves. So I think it's fair to assume why they did it. Because they made a choice to take a small loss on the devices they would sell for the few GrapheneOS users, and cash in on the walled garden, data mining, ads serving, yada yada, whatever brings the extra money after the initial phone sale.
> Judge me if you must, but the only reason I recently bought a Pixel was because of the intention on sticking GrapheneOS on it the second I got it out of the box.
The only judgement is a positive one. I thought this is what one does now that we all understand just how broad and deep the tracking is at nearly every level. Buying a Pixel and immediately flashing GrapheneOS has been my default mode of operation for years now on all cellphones in my home (wife and myself). No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I'd rather my life not be turned into an open book for targeted advertisements and whatever other purposes every detail of my existence is used for now or in the future. It's mind boggling to me how many seem to simply not care.
> I thought this is what one does now [...] No Play Services, Google apps or uninstallable Facebook...no problem!
I applaud your ability to do this (seriously, genuinely, I do), but if you truly believe what you do is normal, just "what one does now", I must inform you that you live in a very small bubble.
I would like to run GrapheneOS on my phone, but I like being able to use Google Wallet, among other things. If I look at what I use my phone for, way too much of it relies on Play Services, and (critically) the SafetyNet (or whatever Google is calling it now) checks passing.
This situation blows. I really don't like these trade offs, and iOS's trade offs are different but no better.
Admittedly, that part was a bit tongue in cheek. Rather, I wish that is "what one does now", as I think we might live in a somewhat nicer world rather than one driven by whatever has been happening as many of us get sucked into our algorithmically-driven feeds across various web properties and apps.
Also, fwiw, you can install Play Services after installing GrapheneOS[0]. It runs in a sandbox without the same deep system access that it has on less secure versions of Android. There's no requirement here to authenticate with any Google account. You'd just have the Play Services running/available, which can be a requirement for some apps.
[0] https://grapheneos.org/features#sandboxed-google-play
To be honest, it's not like Google doesn't know this. And it's not like it should be surprising to us that Google just ignores it.
They know they'll lose some sales, but the few percent of people who'll buy a Pixel anyways but keep the stock OS on it lead to a net plus for them.
They don't care about you liking their hardware and using it like you own it (oh the good old days). They care about you using their software so they can track you better and put ads in your phone experience, because long-term, this is where their money is.
It strongly highlights why we need a decent pixel 9 pro xl format device for linux phones and some focus there. Android is on its way out as something someone who cares about basic privacy can use
I judge you kindly. I did the same.
I only had Nexus and Pixel phones since they existed. I've never cared what hardware they had the only thing I cared is what they have killed now.
This is the bigger disappointment than the 24 days (and counting) that they need to repair my Pixel 7 right now. I'm really glad I didn't buy a new Pixel 9 already.
I’m not buying their devices after Nexus 5X and 6P disaster. Even despite my own devices did not boot loop. I mean buying them new and using them as my primary phone. Buying a used Pixel for $50, yeah, I might. So if it’ll face some weird hardware issue, I’m not going to be disappointed. I had zero issues (hardware-wise) with so many years of iPhones.
These days all that looks very depressing. The new redesign from Apple, and now this. I was actually thinking about maybe I’d like to give Pixels another chance. If buying used, I can play that lottery after all. But having no custom ROM option basically leaves me as miserable as with Apple: either take it as it is or leave.
> And yes, they're not obligated to provide those binary blobs, but since they've been doing it for such a long while, not announcing it well in advance, like they do with the so many services they choose to discontinue, just adds to that list of things I dislike about them.
This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
Their support of Pixels with AOSP has been well documented! This has always been one of their selling points, as a sort of reference device. I've exclusively bought Pixel phones in recent years and this is one of the primary reasons.
Of course Google never made any guarantees, and a rug pull was always possible, but it's absolutely still disappointing and well worth commenting upon.
I have never seen this about the Pixel phones. Nexus phones were reference devices, Pixels are consumer-oriented devices, with exclusive features, not so different from Samsung or Xiaomi. The sales pitch is mostly about the camera and AI features.
Just the name change is telling. "Pixel" suggest a focus on pictures, whereas "Nexus" suggests a focus on Android itself (inspired by Nexus-6 androids in Blade Runner).
I dont recall Pixel device being sold saying "Buy our device and install GrapheneOS on it". I'd like to be wrong, so I'm happy to read articles if you have any.
Nothing I bought in the produce aisle today had instructions for use. Should I leave it to rot?
AOSP recipes themselves list reference devices and they could have updated this with their announcement in March if they didn't want external developers procuring these things as bricks for their gardens. GrapheneOS is just a community of a AOSP derivative there are any number of AOSP derived things people may have been doing with these devices.
I have a Macbook, and if I try to install Windows of it and fails, should I be angry with Apple? Should Apple be on the hook to make it work?
Or, how about Hackintosh (from yesteryear). Apple gave 0 support for it all those years when folks made it work, and one day it went away - and I dont remember saying Apple, please support Hackintosh.
Huh? Google gives everyone in the world instructions to make derivatives of AOSP and they could install them[1] on the reference devices which were all nexus/pixel. Google said nothing until they suddenly didn't deliver for those devices.
They made related announcements in March and certainly saw interpretations of their announcement by interested AOSP derivative maintainers.
That's not remotely the same as I figured how to boot X against so and so's wishes and now it stopped working.
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/setup/test/running
> If you're a software engineer, you know not to depend on these kind of things, and there's no way to expect the library / framework author to reason about how people are using it.
Libraries and frameworks, I assume you meant open-source here, are a different thing.
A phone for which I paid a good amount of money, now doesn't let me use a different operating system anymore while maintaining the same (or arguably better) high level of security. Something which was possible thanks to the hard work of the GrapheneOS community, for the past ~looks at wikipedia~ 6 years... But that is no more, because the binary blobs cannot be forked like you would normally do in the case of FOSS libraries.
> What if someone else came up and said I'm using Pixel as a doorstop, and now that Pixel has a camera bump, it doesnt work anymore - I hate the company. Strange indeed.
Well luckily they can't physically alter the phone which I already own. If I didn't like the looks of the new Pixel, then I simply would not purchase it.
What Google can do though, is (indirectly) stop me from using it the way I envisioned before I bought this nice computing device, the way many others have been enjoying before me.
Anyway, I wasn't just talking about whether Google are wrong or not to do this. They understand what the consequences of their action are, and that just makes it shitty in my opinion. Am I upset? No, just disappointed.
> This is such a strange position. "I rely on an undocumented behavior, and I'm upset that things changed".
I view your position to put up a snarky defense based on weak analogies, for Google nonetheless, equally strange. "I'm on the internet where people can have different opinions, and I'm upset".
Most people are disappointed as far as I see. Upset at the greedy G after this many years of MOAR MOAR MOAR? Nah.
The fact that you could buy a Pixel (or Nexus), real hardware sold to consumers as a phone, download AOSP (and proprietary blobs), and get a working build with all hardware supported with no additional work was super appreciated.
Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
Plus, there's just something cooler about running your own build of Android on real hardware v.s. a VM.
> Cuttlefish, while it may be a more effective reference device, just doesn't accomplish the same thing because Pixels were used for more than just as a reference target (e.g. GrapheneOS).
The article mentions that they're also supporting GSI's as a reference target of sorts, and that's way closer to real hardware. GSI's are annoying for other reasons though - for example, there isn't a single "GSI" build type, they vary according to low-level device features (such as partitioning) and what version of Android they first came out with. Still, it's better than nothing.
These days there's also GKI, a "generic kernel build" (minus custom modules and blobs) that's supposed to work on any recent device. Note, this is not a "mainline" Linux kernel at all, it's still very much a downstream fork with lots of custom patches. But it too is supposed to enable testing and development in a unified way, regardless of the actual device.
GrapheneOS made an unforced error by exaggerating the situation. ("Boy who cried wolf"). When you're generic and obviously false in your criticism, it makes it easy for the company to counter it. "Google is killing AOSP" catches eye, but it is sooo easy for the company to counter.
What is going on is frustration. GrapheneOS has been relying on Google's good faith effort on providing binary blobs to Pixel in addition to AOSP to make their OS. Google was under no obligation to give that, and they stopped doing it for whatever reason.
To make things worse, GrapheneOS mentions legal/anti-trust blah blah blah, which means no engineer will touch / comment / help in the matter, and it gets routed to legal blackhole.
How is he exaggerating the situation? What is false about the criticism? Are you referring to a previous time where they cried wolf? I read through the Twitter thread and GrapheneOS seemed pretty even keeled and above board about it to me (even if that is uncharacteristic)
Graphene's claim of "AOSP is dead" is easily verifiable.
> This also marks the availability of the source code at the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). You can examine the source code for a deeper understanding of how Android works, and our focus on compatibility means that you can leverage your app development skills in Android Studio with Jetpack Compose to create applications that thrive across the entire ecosystem.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/06/android-16...
This was posted 2 days back.
If you want to define "AOSP is not dead" as "there exists a source-available AOSP repo that is not ground-up buildable for any real world device without losing major features like SecureBoot", that's fine, but that's not the definition being discussed.
Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.
If the Linux Foundation sold itself to Microsoft, ceased publishing kernel sources or binaries, and declared henceforth Linux would exist as WSL and nowhere else, it would be reasonable to say "Linux is dead" even if something with a subset of that functionality, named "Linux", still existed.
> Absent device trees, AOSP as of the Android 16 release is a subset of the utility of Android 15. If one sees the use of AOSP as mainly relying on the now absent functionality, then declaring "AOSP is dead" is not unreasonable.
There are a million devices out there that build on AOSP that are not Google Pixel. This is a Pixel news, not AOSP news.
And every single one of those devices is missing features of AOSP, notably secure boot.
Google pixels were until recently the only phones able to run AOSP with 1:1 feature parity. And now there are none.
But you don't have any ability to run AOSP on any devices? Free as in literally unrunnable?
AOSP feels incomplete without there being some flagship way to use it.
It is the literal source code. You can read it, study it, distribute it, modify it. And I'm pretty sure the license allows you to sell it.
That's really really permissive.
They are talking about the device tree which has not been released with Android 16. So no way to run a custom kernel on actual hardware, unless that hardware is open. AOSP is a car without an engine now.
I guess I can also paper my walls with it...
That's "source available" not actual open source. If you can't build it and run it, you can't verify that it builds correctly.
He is not exaggerating the situation he is lying. There is no basis for his very clear and serious claim that AOSP is dead.
How would you more accurately characterize current situation with Android 16?
Now maybe GrapheneOS will expand to support more than just pixel devices, which, IMO, it already should be doing.
The hardware support is nice, but even without it it's still vastly more secure than stock android.
IIUC, GrapheneOS cares about being forensics-proof very much. And for Android phone forensics without consent, almost 0% of work are done after the boot chain ends. So it's all about firmware.
Non-Pixel devices usually require you to just give up secure boot, in this case a GrapheneOS install could be even worse than stock Android.
[dead]
Google is one of two monopolists. Weird to defend them here.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/if-its-worth-...
Bold move using a post about absolute factual correctness in all situations to defend the current US administration.
The point is that you should try to be factually correct without worrying about what it means you're defending. (Well, you don't have to if you don't want to, but it's at least a reasonable way for someone to behave.)
> If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
It's weird to write this in June of this year (giving the author his edit).
> then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put minorities in camps.
If this was on my 2025 bingo card I think we could have crossed it off a few times with ICE detention facilities and the prison in El Salvador. I don't think it's a requirement that you round them all up, it's plenty enough to simply target someone because of they're in a minority group which is what's happening. He did try to do that, the courts intervened. It's not a lie to not accept someone's framing or motivated reasoning on an issue.
I'm sure you can find plenty of outlandish things said about this admin, why pick the one that, to the people saying it, already happened?
"It's not happening"
"Yes it is"
"Well it's not that bad"
"Here are the names of people who have died"
"Well that's not EVERYONE, like someone said it was"
"Yes, I concede, it was only like dozens of people, you certainly have the high-ground in this debate about why we shouldn't have all these dead people"
... I feel the author has missed the point, which has led to an argument that is horrible and, I would say, wrong. Fact-checking is important but, to most people, whether it was 6 or 10 people murdered is not the substance of the debate - the original point is that we probably shouldn't have this guy going around murdering people.
If you then wade in to the debate and your only contribution is to try and make that argument X% less strong then yeah, that really is pretty cringe. If the purpose of the debate is to convince people that Joe Criminal is a horrible rotter that should never again see the light of day, and your aim is to make that argument less persuasive, then you are literally defending him. You may even be right to do so (say, if 10 murders leads to a punishment of horrible tortures and 6 just hanging), but don't pretend that's not what you're doing.
> If this was on my 2025 bingo card I think we could have crossed it off a few times with ICE detention facilities and the prison in El Salvador.
Isn't this the motte and bailey thing though? "Putting minorities in camps" has the implication that they're being put into camps because they're minorities. It's meant to invoke the thing the 20th century fascists did where if you're a member of the group you go to the camps, and moreover if you go to the camps you never come back.
Meanwhile ICE is detaining people because they're suspected of being in the country illegally, and then deporting them.
They suck at it, as usual, so some of the people aren't actually in the country illegally, but most of them are, and then when the government screws up the courts slowly get around to sorting it out. Which is a process that has maybe been in need of reform for quite a while now -- in particular it would be nice to see the government paying for its mistakes more often, and for the "unscrew this up" process to take less time -- but those aren't novelties only now being introduced, they're longstanding problems.
> "Putting minorities in camps" has the implication that they're being put into camps because they're minorities.
Right, and how do you do this and get away with it? In every single circumstance in history, how was this done?
You accuse them of some crime, skip the "prove they did it" part, and then put them somewhere where they can never contact anyone ever again.
Okay - now what is the Trump administration and ICE doing? Because, to me, it sounds a lot like that.
Now, I will admit - there's some plausible deniability here. You're correct that ICE is ass and they make mistakes.
What, I think, takes it over the edge is the hostile and adversarial approach of the Trump administration. The DOJ has refused to comply with some orders (lawful orders!) and the administration has doubled-down when they've made mistakes. Trump has even joked about having the power to bring back people from El Salvador, but choosing not to use that power. When you accuse random people of being part of MS-13 and just kind of shrug when courts say "no, bring that guy back" it gives the impression that you're intentionally trying to ruin people's lives.
There's tolerance for mistakes built into the mind's of Americans, but when mistakes are constantly underplayed, rug-swept, or outright lied about, we all get a little nervous. If the Trump Administration wasn't so hell-bent on burning as much good will as possible, we wouldn't be having this conversation on if people are being disappeared.
I don't understand the contention as I don't participate in the disinformation. ICE kidnaps people without showing documentation on who they are or why they're being kidnapped. They quickly move the people they capture to another facility in the US hundreds of miles away. Then, they send them to El Salvador, a hostile place, or a country they've never been to. This process occurs without seeing a judge to even double check the abducted person is who ICE claims they are. Let alone any actual due process. What's the contention?
Also, despite the insane cruelty that seems to be the process, both Obama and Biden deported more people than Trump.
You misquoted the author. What he said was:
> then eventually we escalate all the way to the point we actually escalated to, where people have said in all seriousness that Trump might try to put minorities in camps *and murder them*.
I think the author is fair to say that that's an exaggeration of what most people suggested Trump would do.
I'm not defending them here? I'm saying we need to be specific in our criticism, which Graphene didnt do in their claim.
What would be unspecific about slagging another project claiming to be open source where their build target is trust me, bro.
So hypothetical if Google are in the right, no one should defend them because of their monopoly / duopoly status?
> Without the Pixel hardware repos (which include the device trees, driver binaries, and more), custom Android ROMs will have a hard time developing their OS updates. This might also have implications for security (vulnerability) researchers.
This concerns me as a GrapeneOS user.
Yup, especially given what they posted: https://x.com/GrapheneOS/status/1932596516390072669?t=Tw_clE...
Aw man… GrapheneOS makes owning a smartphone bearable. I hope this isn't the beginning of the end.
I really haven't kept up with third party roms for smartphones in a while. I take it graphene is a major player? Last one I heard of was lineage os. I guess I probably need to start looking as my pixel 5a has probably lapsed security updates
GrapheneOS is the security-first Android distribution. It tends to drop support for older devices not long after official driver updates stop, because it's harder to ensure top-notch security in that case. The Pixel 5A is in "extended support", which is to say deprecated.
LineageOS is the broad-support Android distribution. Its current version supports all Pixel devices. Third parties have even built recent-ish versions for ancient devices (e.g. Android 13 on the Nexus 5).
while lineageos and derived roms like /e/os are doing a good job supporting old smartphone models and temporarily saving them from thr landfill, they are struggling to support less than 5 year old models that aren't google pixel and fairphones.
The google pixel line were the only smartphone you could buy new on a brick and mortar shop on monday almost anywhere in the world and have it running on a custom rom on tuesday and graphene was leading the way in pushing privacy and security at its maximum while other rom maker are making a lot more concessions.
LineageOS still is king to save old devices but grapheneos definitely is a major player because some people like me did chose second hand google pixel with the sole purpose of being able to run graphene.
Ironically, running a google smartphone was the best way to live a life without sending data and rely on google services.
A major player amongst the tiny world of user-centric privacy-focussed third party Android based OSes I guess. Their major selling point — aside from privacy and maximal degoogling — is that you could take a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and have it work with not too much trouble. No elaborate study of a plethora of devices needed, and the device is supported for a comparatively long time.
The Pixel 6 I have will be hitting its end of life in October 2026. I had wished to be able to simply get a newer Pixel and just carry on.
> graphene is a major player?
No. It is not. Lineage and a lot of others are major players.
They just have different focus. GrapheneOS cares about being secure. Others cares about being, well, custom, and "privacy", "privacy" as in "noooooooooo I don't want to install google stuff jfc", instead of being secure against random threat actors.
"and a lot of others" a lot of others is GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is likely the second largest ROM after lineage.
Without GrapheneOS im probably going to iPhone. Been using Graphene for years, its so light and simple without all the Google cruft. Pixels with Google is not for me anymore.
Another one for the google graveyard. There's no benefit at this point to owning a pixel if you can't control it. I'm going to trial iPhone again and try to live with the few downsides, and the many upsides.
Sounds like "No, AOSP is not dead. You can still run it in an emulator if you want. Have fun..."
> For years, developers have been building Cuttlefish (available on GitHub as the reference device for AOSP) and GSI targets from source. We continue to make those available for testing and development purposes.
I'm a complete noob regarding AOSP, but if someone with more knowledge of the ecosystem reads this: Are those alternative reference targets actually useful for custom ROMs and would allow updating roms for Android 16 on Pixels as well, or is this a smokescreen?
This is such a shame. As a Pixel 6a user, I was always bothered by the battery situation of the phone but happily ran GrapheneOS on the device since buying. Recently the model had a battery combustion incident and now this. And there I was thinking of getting another Pixel phone down the line.
GraphenOS was the only reason to buy pixel.
A key takeaway from this situation is that "alternative Android ROMs" are merely remixes of the original Android effort, and not genuine alternatives standing on their own. Absolutely at mercy of Google. Similar to browsers, how we only have like 3 engines for the myriad of browsers that we have. I am a graphene user currently, and I guess Graphene is safe on the current devices, as long as Google and the maintainer does security updates for them, we will just not get Android 16 at worst. And have to figure out what to use after the security support runs out in <7 years. So there is plenty of time still, no matter how they rock the boat.
Ah so I guess this is the reason that GrapheneOS just works on Pixels? Maybe after the initial hurdle this change has introduced will actually lead to a wider device support once the necessary changes are better understood. Let's hope.
edit: missed a word
In part. The stated reasons[1] are: (1) best hardware security features, such as memory tagging (2) quick patches (3) many years of official device support.
[1]: https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
Or it leads to GrapheneOS not supporting any new devices.
Back in the day I was maintainer of a CyanogenMod device. Back then you could pull the device trees and basebands and proprietary parts off the OTAs and phones directly after rooting them. Has that changed? LineageOS still exists. I haven't been in that scene for... over a decade but is Lineage freaking out to this extent? Yes, it takes effort to maintain a port and it's not as easy, but how much of GrapheneOS is actually implemented in the kernel vs post-init things (which are easy to modify).
Warning: Complete shots in the dark here so take with a truckload of salt
Watching Google's actions on Android over the past many years, they are clearly inching in one strategic direction, and that is toward being more iPhone like (i.e. locked down, user hostile, user distrusting, etc). There might be a few "two steps forward, one step back" points like the new Android terminal, but it feels like clear directional momentum away from user capabilities. It's an absolute shame too, because Google products could be hacker's delights (I mean owner-hackers, not grey/black hat).
In their defense they are far from alone. Since Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
The net result has been that I've become almost entirely disinterested in mobile phones and all the IoT things, which is a huge personal loss. It's not just disinterest, but is turning in to active hostility. I've started to hate my phone because of many of the things it can't do now (that it used to), though thanks to the proliferation and expectation of "always connected" I can't get away from it without suffering professional or social consequences that aren't worth it. It's become a required piece of equipment to function in everyday life, because of other parties. If I could go back to the days of a single landline phone in the house with maybe an emergency cell phone in the car, I truly think I would.
It didn't (and doesn't!) have to be this way Google. You have the market power to change this, and you wouldn't even have to do all that much. I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I just hope that the rising generation of hackers will hear our stories from the glory days when compute was empowering to the owner of it, not restricting.
> I get that big money interests (like DRM) are constantly pressuring you to remove user control and give it to them, but if you just said "no, our users are more important" they would just have to take it because they can't turn away 45 or 50% or whatever of the US market and 80+% of the global market.
I'm not so sure of that, at least in the US anyway. Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
The only way out is regulation - laws that mandate devices be open, and alternative app stores, side loading, root access, and alternative OSes are supported by order of law.
> Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.
Consider what happens if they actually do this. Millions of people have that phone platform and aren't going to buy a new phone for at least a couple years. Switching phone platforms is a large time investment for most people because all your stuff is on that platform's cloud services etc.
Meanwhile most of that stuff doesn't need a phone. You're watching Netflix on your big screen TV rather than your tiny pocket device most of the time, aren't you? Your bank has a website. So if it stopped working on your phone, you wouldn't immediately buy a new phone, you would just use the website. But now the streaming service and the bank are immediately getting millions of user complaints that their app is broken.
Either of the major platforms could also use any of the malicious compliance schemes they use for other things. Find some over-broad or unreasonable contractual provision in the "must supply DRM" agreement that you don't like anyway, point to it as a justification for making a change to the DRM system in the brand new version of the OS, and disable the DRM in the older versions of the OS that are on 95% of existing devices, blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
Then the users don't have to switch platforms, they "only" have to buy a new device and can avoid the platform transition cost. For the ones who do, the vendor gets to sell more devices. For all the ones who don't, the DRM pushers still get millions of user complaints and a strong incentive to release the app without the DRM in it.
And if they do release the app without the DRM in it, now the new devices don't need the DRM either ("we found a vulnerability in the later version too and had to disable it as well"), and now the users have no reason to switch platforms over it so the DRM can stay gone forever.
This is the same problem the incumbent duopoly causes for all other app developers. And that's bad -- the duopoly should be broken up -- but it does currently exist, and it could, if it wanted to, use that to do something good. (You might also consider what would happen if they both decided to lose DRM at once.)
> blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.
I think you're vastly overestimating customers' willingness to listen and care about whose fault it is. In practice, if Netflix (or whatever other app) suddenly stopped working on Android phones, people using Android would complain about their phones being broken whilst their iPhone-using friends continue to use the app just fine.
The media companies know that they will win that game of chicken every time. It would take a concerted effort across tech companies to really take them down, and nobody is interested in waging that war because the cost of simply implementing DRM is too low for it to be worth the struggle and the risk.
> Apple proved that a closed and locked down model wouldn't affect sales (in fact you can use marketing spin to actually convince some people who are plenty tech savvy that they are better off having their own access to their device removed, a feat of mental gymnastics I still can't understand), the whole industry has moved heavily that direction.
This is part that is unfortunate. You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system, and would freely allow a corporation burning money to make improvements to it.
Instead what you see is an odd (and counterintuitive) behavior of saying alternate app stores are bad, side loading is bad - mostly because of Apple's unique PR/Marketing spin.
> You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN)
The hacker types are the riff-raff the venture capital firm put up with on their website about making money with software.
Whilst there are some seemingly unpaid Google defenders here today, I am always surprised how many people come out of the woodwork to defend whatever Apple chooses to do.
Ever since iOS and ipadOS came out, I haven’t had to do tech support or run malware removal software. A lot of my youth was wasted on that nonsense, and I see better uses of time.
Does that then mean Apple can do no wrong and every design decision they make serves the specific benefits you enjoy in their products?
Good for you. If that's the bar you're using to judge a company, I'm sure you defend your utility company (they supply electricity to your house!!), government (paved the roads for you), the car company (built the car for you to take you places).
I'll see on a thread defending Airbus and Boeing next.
The problem with Android is that it’s something of a bad compromise. That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing, and unfortunately nobody in the industry with any kind of power is doing anything to try to fix that situation. I’m not even really sure that it can be fixed so long as smartphones are based around custom ARM boards. Attempts at truly open ARM-based smartphones all have a laundry list of problems mostly thanks to compenent vendors that won’t play nice with drivers and documentation (or if they do, it’s with SoCs so old as to not be remotely competitive).
Following that, I may as well benefit from an overall smoother user experience, better app selection, etc on iOS. It’s not open and doesn’t pretend to be.
I’m keeping my eyes open for a smart device analogue of x86 desktop PCs, though. It might be powered by an open RISC SoC design or maybe someone finally figures out how to make x86 work well in handhelds, I dunno, but the current situation isn’t it.
> The problem with Android is that it’s something of a bad compromise. That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing,
You used to be able to do exactly that with Nexus & Pixel. That you still chose to buy something that doesn't let you do anything just proves GP's point.
Yeah, because that’d be limited to only Dell Inspirons and Latitudes for laptops. Half the point of using Android (or Windows or Linux) was to not have to be bound like that, so if that freedom is gone and you don’t like the OS for other reasons you’re not left with much of a desire to use it.
Isn't that literally Linux? You had a choice between the XPS Developer Edition or System76 and... that was about it for official support from anyone
If you’re looking for preloaded with first party support, yeah options are limited. If you’re installing Linux yourself however, it’s much, much more universal than Android is. It’ll run on just about any x86 PC manufactured in the past 20 years and run well on the majority of them.
I don’t really need first party support though, as long as the OS in question has that kind of universality. I can grab Fedora or Mint or whatever and it’ll run more or less perfectly on any generic PC box I happen to have with a little effort.
It’s a much better situation than what we have with Android where outside of model-specific ROMs like Graphene, whether or not you can run a ROM on your phone depends on the model specific build (which has a decent chance of having been uploaded by a high schooler) existing and continuing to get updates. It’s a mess.
> That one can’t just drop whichver ROM on whatever device undermines the whole thing, and unfortunately nobody in the industry with any kind of power is doing anything to try to fix that situation.
You're right, but Google could do this (and probably the only one who could do it).
> You'd expect hacker types (folks who hang out here on HN) would be 100% behind an open-source operating system
Nope
I work on embedded security which is why there is no IoT shit at home.
I am forced to be tech support for my family, which is why they have iPhones and why i support locked-down hardware - less pain for me removing sideloaded shit than when they had Android devices.
I am bored of maintaining things - i just want them to work, which is why my WRT54G is gone and I use UniFi gear.
And I am tired of "slightly annoying, but i am supporting open source", i just want my laptop to wake up from sleep every time and last a while day, which is why I use a MacBook.
If it was open source IN ADDITION to doing everything else i want, sure. Being open source by itself is NOT a feature i am willing to pay for with any inconvenience. And being locked down IS a convenience when you are managing devices for people with no digital hygiene (aka: family)
And if you were the one locking down what the phones could run, instead of the duopoly?
I was the one maintaining my WRT54G and my Linux laptop. Took too much time. That is the point.
Kinda dupe
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254540
A question for any Android folks in the thread: how performant is Cuttlefish? Would I get good performance if I ran it in KVM on something like a Raspberry Pi 5? I've been thinking about a design that runs some robotic services natively, with a user-facing Android inside of a resource-constrained VM.
Android can run natively on x86_64. The ART folks spent quite a bit of time getting this to work.
A lot of our CI targets run android in this configuration.
Understood. I'm actually thinking about a product design for an aarch64-based industrial controller.
I'd want to run all of the machine interfaces directly on Linux, but am interested in using Android for everything user-facing. Could I get away with running Cuttlefish in KVM (on an aarch64 SOC) and get OK performance? I'm thinking that it could be a good way to keep the important stuff isolated.
You might also consider waydroid for that
Only one way to find out. :)
I've been a cyanogenmod/lineageos user for many years on different google nexus/pixel devices. Will this impact this in the future?
Can anyone explain how Treble and GSIs fit into this situation? Can GrapheneOS or other distros build GSIs that will run on Pixel devices?
I'm wondering how a "reference target" could be "independent of any particular hardware." Is it some kind of virtual device? How do developers run it?
Seang is referring to Cuttlefish, which is indeed a virtual Android device that can be run on PCs.
Statements like...
Seang Chau on Wednesday evening posted that broadly “AOSP is NOT going away.” More directly to developers, Google has said it will remain “committed to AOSP updates.”
...are not precisely responsive to questions about build targets. Something like "There's an emulator you can build for," or "You can build for a Raspberry Pi" would be useful or informative, or tell developers why Pixel is no longer a reference device and why there is no apperent replacement.
So Android is now no better than iOS - and Apple has privacy. Any HN'ers out there with an iPhone but no other Apple devices? Do you face any limitations or so forth?
I'm not sure the release of Google Pixel phone binaries is what made Android distinct from iOS. I'm pretty sure I still cant choose what software runs on iOS outside of Apple saying so, and that's one of the largest distinctions that's brought up. If Apple were to change that, then I'd fully agree.
> I'm pretty sure I still cant choose what software runs on iOS outside of Apple saying so
Do you mean sideloading/custom stores (at least in the US)? That's a good point.
However, the lack of the binaries makes the situation with the OS effectively the same. Once the device is EOL it's e-waste.
> However, the lack of the binaries makes the situation with the OS effectively the same. Once the device is EOL it's e-waste.
Agreed, I'm definitely disappointed in this. The coupling of the hardware and software makes the Pixel phones worthless outside of Google's supported android version for it. I'd love to see some kind of consumer protection laws against this, mandating at least some level of usefulness of the hardware outside of the vendor sanctioned OS.
It isn't no better than iOS. It is less better than iOS than it used to be. Much of the OS is still open source, and it is still more open than iOS.
It is a concerning direction, but it isn't so bad yet that I will switch to Apple's closed ecosystem.
One limitation is for example when an update goes wrong (rare, but can happen). You need a MacBook or anything else running MacOS to restore the device. Or might have to go to an Apple Store. Otherwise, no real limitations.
I run an iPhone but my main personal laptop is an old T480 with FreeBSD. I do have a spare MacBook Air flying around just in case though.
> You need a MacBook or anything else running MacOS to restore the device.
Does iTunes for Windows no longer do restores? It did in the past.
IIRC, the microsoft store version is incapable for doing full restore from a recovery state. You need the "windows" .exe version from itunes.com
Well I can run Debian and terminal emulator at good speed on my Android.
Sigh, it was only a matter of time. But they are not helping themselves down the road when they are broken up into pieces. Let's just hope if they do get smashed into pieces that mobile breaks off and they aim to please the techno community that has made them who they are today.
Too head strong, why is it these product managers build to break, just to build again.
Related:
AOSP project is coming to an end
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44254540
Okay so we just need another company to release a nice phone and release the device tree right?
[dead]
Just put GNU/Linux on a phone already.
Has already been done, many times over many years, by both companies and enthusiasts. If you want to look at the latest developments in the space, I'd recommend following the development of postmarketOS and Jolla / SailfishOS.
Ah, thank you!
The device tree files are the data which configure the Linux kernel how to interface with the hardware...
People already do and it's not very good.
It's the year of the linux smartphone!
Lemmie guess, in six month we hear Google is killing Pixel.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
In a better world.. goog could be as helpful towards grOS as aapl towards asahi. But "anything that doesn't detract from selling hw is fine" can't make it into goog's once-aspirational "knowledge economy" business calculus. (Legal considerations contribute further inertia)
I think though, "write-only" third-party contributions are a necessary evolutionary step towards a more balanced ecosystem, so lack of an open reference could lead to the needed experimentation, both legal and technical
I've not kept up with Asahi, but how is Apple helping Asahi? My surface level understanding was Asahi was reverse engineering everything and Apple is offering 0 help/support.
Depends on your definition of "help".
Apple doesn't support Asahi specifically but did build in the capability to boot another OS and intentionally does not block it.
But as of the M4 Macs, Apple is preventing the Asahi team from learning how the drivers work with a “bug” in the bootloader: https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/114278224116678776
Eh, not surprising.
If adding a capability to boot another OS is seen as a big gesture, Google providing an entire operating system source code should be a bigger deal yes?
One is cracking open a door (Apple) and the other is opening the door wide, and welcoming you into your home.
Google doesn't provide "entire operating system source code", it provides some parts, while other they keep closed. Also they are continuously removing parts that are essential from AOSP (that are either open or closed).
Removing support for Pixel devices makes AOSP even less useful for developers, because belief that VM will be a good replacement for real hardware test environment is a fairy tale next to sleeping beauty.
So no, they don't provide "entire operating system source code", what they provide is a caricature of open source project. So maybe they should call it COSP.
I agree with you. I was just responding to the Asahi comment in isolation.
To play devil's advocate though, Darwin is technically open source?
>welcoming you into your home
Didn't mean to imply that Aapl can't be accused of perfidious behaviour on the sw side, but the erstwhile welcomes mean that Goog's betrayal, when it happens, even a minor one that doesn't kill the biz, hurts a lot more?