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It appears Google has stopped publishing device-specific source code for Pixel phones (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/android@lemmy.world
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As noted by the news release from CalyxOS and Mastodon thread from GrapheneOS, Google did not release the Pixel device-specific source code alongside their Android 16 AOSP release like they usually do. I think many of us, including myself, are hoping this will be published in the near future, but considering they moved AOSP development behind closed doors earlier this year, it's more likely Google has stopped publishing this section or their code altogether, making development of custom ROMs for Pixel devices significantly more difficult. Sad news for the Android ecosystem, and for open source in general.

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

Read their comment and I'm left scratching my head. Their role in security with the straight android phone (not the /e/OS version) is simply pushing security patches as/when they get them from the Android team, as they're using straight Android. Security is handled by Google for Android, not them. When it comes to /e/OS, no idea how good/bad it is, but apparently Graphene has some beef with Murena (the people who make it), at least according to their comment.

Not at all knowledgable about mobile kernels and drivers to comment on the rest of it. I do know Fairphone 5 uses an unusual CPU normally used for SoC as that was the only CPU that was both good enough to run Android reasonably while simultaneously providing very long-term driver updates (they're aiming for a minimum of 8 years of updates).

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago*

    I can't speak to beef, but there is more to Android security than what Google provides. That's what Graphene is for, to make Android even more secure through hardening various attack surfaces and introducing other completely new security features. If that weren't the case, Graphene wouldn't be necessary on Pixels because Google does monthly security patching for them.

    It's also at the firmware level, which Google does not provide except for on their own hardware, and on top of that Google phones are some of the only ones capable of providing some security feature at the hardware level. This seems to be the main thing the Graphene team is trying to point out.

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