Google is tightening control over Android under the guise of ‘security,’ but this crackdown on sideloading is a direct hit to digital sovereignty and FOSS. I’ve written about why this matters for our privacy and the future of open platforms. What do you think—is this the end of Android’s ‘open’ era?
So Android is open source, right?
What is to stop the community from just making and releasing their own android version, and be done with it?
Read GPL v3 and why it was introduced in the first place. Code being open source won’t do much.
Yes, Android is open source. But the thing is, Google’s clampdown on sideloading isn’t just about the OS code itself. It’s really about controlling the whole app ecosystem and making it harder for people to install apps outside of Google’s own channels.
Sure, folks can fork Android and make their own versions — that’s been happening for years with projects like LineageOS. But the tricky part is keeping all the apps working smoothly without Google’s proprietary stuff like Play Services. Without that, a lot of apps just don’t behave right, and the user experience takes a hit.
So basically, just having Android’s code open isn’t enough to keep it truly open and easy to use. The real control is in the ecosystem around it, and that’s what Google’s tightening grip is all about.
it’s got an open source base layer; but it’s got enough closed source layers on top of it to make the open source part alone useless for today’s mobile environment.
nevertheless, the things like graphene, lineage, postmarket, etc. are efforts to make that base layer effective and they will soon be your only options if you want to use android without having to provide your gov’t issue ID so that your actions can be tracked for “terrorism”