Unfortunately, Android has made changes which will make it much harder for us to port to Android 16 and future releases. It will also make adding support for new Pixels much more difficult. We’re likely going to need to focus on making GrapheneOS devices sooner than we expected.
This is some really bad news for the privacy and security focused Android OS. I don’t know if this is a Graphene specific problem or it will also impact others custom ROM such as CalyxOS.
They think this situation is a result from the loosing anti trust case Google is battling against that would require them to split from Android.
They said harder, not impossible. This is not news to really worry about just yet. Nothing is in the users’ control. Only Google, Android, and GrapheneOS can do what they can and will.
I see. I don’t understand all the esoteric technical details but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what’s what and why and how. I’m sure they’ll do all they can. I recently moved away from iOS and it’d be shame to go back, to say the very least.
But all that said and shared, can’t Google simply disable Graphene from doing all that it is doing or can do with the AOSP? They’ve had that power for a long time, no?
This is literally illegal. The Linux kernel is licensed under GPL, which requires all distributed modifications of it to be distributed with full source code. The Linux kernel running under the Pixel is not an exception, and they just removed source code of their modifications, which isn’t allowed.
Just the kernel is GPL, the rest is not. It’s a similar situation to Konqueror which is/was GPL but Safari and Chrome and Edge are proprietary because all the code they add later is not under GPL.
“We’re going to be moving forward under the expectation that future Pixel devices may not meet the requirements to run GrapheneOS (grapheneos.org/faq#future-d…) and may not support using another OS. We’ve been in talks with a couple OEMs about making devices and what it would cost.”
Just to add to this further this applies to all custom operating systems for Google Pixels not just GrapheneOS.
It was also confirmed by the General Manager of the Android platform that AOSP won’t be going anywhere despite the Pixel build trees being missing for the Android 16 release.
We’re seeing some speculation that AOSP is being discontinued. To be clear, AOSP is NOT going away. AOSP was built on the foundation of being an open platform for device implementations, SoC vendors, and instruction set architectures. AOSP needs a reference target that is flexible, configurable, and affordable – independent of any particular hardware, including those from Google. 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.
and let’s calm down because Graphene officially stated that they will still be developing it, it will just be a bit harder, in fact as we speak Android 16 version of GrapheneOS is on Beta.
And we will see what the news will be with their OEM collab thingy they’ve been hinting at.
