This concerns me as a GrapeneOS user.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does iTunes for Windows no longer do restores? It did in the past.
It is a concerning direction, but it isn't so bad yet that I will switch to Apple's closed ecosystem.
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.
> 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.
AOSP feels incomplete without there being some flagship way to use it.
That's really really permissive.
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.
There are a million devices out there that build on AOSP that are not Google Pixel. This is a Pixel news, not AOSP news.
Google pixels were until recently the only phones able to run AOSP with 1:1 feature parity. And now there are none.
Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
> 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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
The hardware support is nice, but even without it it's still vastly more secure than stock android.
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.
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.
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.
I'll see on a thread defending Airbus and Boeing next.
The hacker types are the riff-raff the venture capital firm put up with on their website about making money with software.
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.
You're right, but Google could do this (and probably the only one who could do it).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.
A lot of our CI targets run android in this configuration.
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.
AOSP project is coming to an end
edit: missed a word
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Too head strong, why is it these product managers build to break, just to build again.
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.
> 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?
PaulHoule•22h ago
bitpush•22h ago
Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative.
gsf_emergency•22h ago
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
bitpush•21h ago
seabrookmx•21h ago
Apple doesn't support Asahi specifically but did build in the capability to boot another OS and intentionally does not block it.
bitpush•21h ago
One is cracking open a door (Apple) and the other is opening the door wide, and welcoming you into your home.
gsf_emergency•12h ago
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?
seabrookmx•12h ago
To play devil's advocate though, Darwin is technically open source?
sobkas•6h ago
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.
philodeon•21h ago
spookie•13h ago