TL;DR

  • Google has made it harder to build custom Android ROMs for Pixel phones by omitting their device trees and driver binaries from the latest AOSP release.

  • The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.

  • While Google insists AOSP isn’t going away, developers must now reverse-engineer changes, making the process for supporting Pixel devices more difficult.

  • Feyd@programming.devEnglish
    1032·
    4 months ago

    The company says this is because it’s shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called “Cuttlefish” to be more neutral.

    This actually probably make sense, but they could still be cool and have pixel drivers be open source in a different repo if that was the only reason.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
      59·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, just that this has shit to do with the stated reasons. Google hasn’t been an open source ally for quite some time now

    • passepartout@feddit.orgEnglish
      17·
      4 months ago

      Would be great indeed, but “more neutral” in this case seems to mean vendor agnostic by abstracting the hardware away and have anything run on a closed source google container.