Gist: “Evidently, starting next month, all external code contributions to AOSP will require approval from two Google reviewers before they can be submitted.”
Gist: “Evidently, starting next month, all external code contributions to AOSP will require approval from two Google reviewers before they can be submitted.”
Google’s tight grip is because of Google play services, not AOSP. Without Google play services AOSP is useless for 99% of people.
Not quite: Google is quietly but very definitely busy gutting AOSP of anything nice and up to date. The dialer for example is becoming hopelessly outdated. And the reason for that is because they’re trying to transition as many nice, free default AOSP services to their non-free, functionally better but Google Play Service-tied equivalents.
The problem with that is that nobody really has the resources to counter their efforts and come up with good open-source alternatives to what Google is slowly removing or letting rot in AOSP. As a result, AOSP is slowly becoming more and more unappealing.
Of course that’s exactly what Google wants: they milked open-source for all it was worth to drive the wide adoption of Android, and now it’s in their way. They would like nothing better than to kill off AOSP tomorrow but they can’t do that. So instead, they’re boiling the frog slowly until it’s too late to do anything about it by the time it notices that the water is too hot.