this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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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.

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[–] Supernova1051@sh.itjust.works 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

devil's avocado: this move has saved many people's cherished photos from disappearing by having them auto save. before Google photos I'd run into cases (I used to do home IT support) where people had years of family photos disappear because they didn't back them up properly. Having to communicate what happened was never fun.

is Google photos perfect? No, but it's a great solution for people who don't want to manage their data.

[–] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, but that shouldn't explicitly opt in, and they shouldn't marry that product to Gmail and Google Drive if they are going to push it to enable by default.

Again, it's really insidious. They push it so aggressively I had to disable it on my personal device twice, and I can't just not use Google Photos app because it's tied to the camera itself on pixel phones.

[–] tiramichu@sh.itjust.works 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I agree with you, it's insidious.

Given you've got a Pixel phone, you can save at least yourself from this problem by running Graphene or Calyx on it.

[–] ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 1 points 5 hours ago

I'm not worried about me. I can manage. But I had to intervene and make it a Project for my immediate family. Which is always unfun, because who wants to expose all their personal data that way, especially photos.

Crazy that Google just screwed over GrapheneOS like this.