230
Breaking: Google will now only release Android source code twice a year
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Android
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Writing code for a website and writing code for a platform that supports many hardware devices with different architectures are very very very different software engineering tasks. And this is before discussing BSP's.
Your assertion about the difficulty of this process is not tethered to reality nor informed by experience with OS or hardware support. I make no claims about any other points you made.
Have a good day, friend.
They might not, but I do have experience as a developer for the operating system for a manufacturing robotics company, which had a large array of different hardware configurations to support, some stretching back to 1982. I actually managed the build system for the company (with branch management handled through Perforce, though I've done plenty in GIT since).
It's absolutely not as hard as you're making it sound and they've shown for years they can manage it just fine. This follows on the back of several other anti-consumer announcements such as the side loading lockdown and their removal of entire chunks of AOSP like device trees and such. This is absolutely just to lock out custom ROMs and they're giving the most thin veneer of an excuse.
They're still managing all those branches internally. Absolutely nothing is stopping them from doing, I dunno, a preview branch or whatever. Other large open source projects, including complex operating systems, manage it just fine.
I agree that I have minimal experience with this. :)
I simply don't trust what Google says and I assume that their being less than honest by default.