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Android 17 QPR1 is the first release since Android Honeycomb (3.x) adding new APIs for app developers without a release to the Android Open Source Project. (grapheneos.social)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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Android 17 QPR1 is the first release since Android Honeycomb (3.x) adding new APIs for app developers without a release to the Android Open Source Project. The new APIs are currently exclusive to the Pixel OS and aren't available to other Android OEMs.

https://developer.android.com/sdk/api_diff/37.1/changes

Non-Google Android OEMs and AOSP-based projects can ship yearly and QPR2 releases. There are also security backports to those releases. Security preview access is needed to ship patches without months of delay. We've had that since before our Motorola partnership via another OEM.

We already ported our code to Android 17 QPR1 since before it was released on September 15th but don't have permission to release it yet. We're working on backporting Pixel firmware, kernel drivers, userspace drivers and HALs from Android 17 QPR1 to Android 17 for now instead.

Pixel Update Bulletin for September 2026 has additional patches to standard Android platform components used by non-Pixel devices. These patches are relevant to non-Pixel devices but haven't been made available via the September 2026 Android Security Bulletin or preview patches.

Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing. Other OEMs will get these patches in December 2026 via Android 17 QPR2. We can ship them early by reverse engineering the code instead.

It would be interesting to know if Google's legal team is aware they're giving Pixels months of early access to new Android features and bug fixes including certain important security patches. Pixels being given this competitive edge over Google's OEM partners is very dubious.

Google is also once again failing to comply with our GPL source requests for weeks. We requested CD1A.260905.001.A1 sources on September 1st and were only provided access today. The kernel build IDs are the same for 17 QPR1 Beta 9 and 17 QPR1 so we have that already at least.

We could have shipped an Android 17 QPR1 update already since our port was completed. Instead, we have to deal with ongoing pain until Android 17 QPR2 is released in December 2026. This will not be an issue for Motorola since we'll have official firmware and driver code provided.

It will be far easier for us to support upcoming Motorola devices than Pixels. Qualcomm will hopefully expand MTE support beyond the highest end flagship SoC soon so we can expand to more than flagships. Pixel 11 didn't remove it from hardware, only firmware, so that's good news.

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[–] 20 points 1 month ago (5 children)

It's always weird when a company starts to self-destruct.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Especially Google with Android. Closing off Android is baffling. Did they not learn anything from the last 30 years?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago

    I mean yeah, they learned that they can weaponise open source to make everyone dependent on their software and then move more and more features to a proprietary layer they control with every update. They did it with Chrome, they're doing it with Android too

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    • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    And Android should have been moved to a foundation to be come a community project outside of Google.

    It’s too bad GrapheneOS is so hellbent on pushing Android because this would be a great time to promote work on an Linux mobile distro, like PostmarketOS.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    i maintain that the most sensible thing would be to develop a minimal linux "shim" that just runs an android VM, then you no longer have to develop ROMs for every specific device and you can start slowly porting features over to the linux side of the whole shebang.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    How would that help exactly? /gen

    As I understand it linux phones are most commonly android, but with a linux container layered ontop. Mainly because phone firmware is so incredibly hard to not only reverse engineer but even extract as a blob to work with any modifications. So your stuck maintaining separate ROMs just for the firmware, with minimal work involved to port ASOP itself

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    • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    I'm not buying Pixels because they run Android. I'm buying them because they run GOS. My current devices should live long enough that it's the last hardware I had to buy from Google.

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    [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Hopefully Vegeta doesn’t try to fight these phones

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    [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    The OpenAtom Foundation might have an opportunity here -non-profit behind OpenHarmony the basis for HarmonyOS and others-, at least in some parts of the world any ways.

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    41 comments in c/linux@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 73 points 1 month ago (15 children)

    I've said this many times and it's always on my mind. Google is a terrible steward for Android. We need alternatives that are viable and don't came with huge dealbreakers.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (14 children)

    Hopefully Graphene is developing a hard fork of AOSP with Motorola, so they don't have to be reliant on Google

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (5 children)

    don't hope too much, they have admitted they are vibing it

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  • [–] 19 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    They specifically aren't vibing it though.

    As they say it's useful to find vulnerabilities which is true.

    And as far as code they said:

    Frontier models are very good at finding bugs but it requires an experienced developer to babysit it and extract the useful portion of the output. Important bugs are often found but mixed in with a bunch of low quality output.

    Which is the opposite of vibe coding.

    It's fair to dislike any LLM usage. But it can have value. But it's often coming from unethical entities like OpenAI and Anthropic etc

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    I think this is the distinction of uses I canost get behind. If you find an attack using any tool, whether that be a CVE, a script kiddy, or an LLM, then you can go on to understand how the vulnerability works and patch it. This leaves the understanding part to the programmer, but not the arduous task of trying to find problems. If you use vibecoding to do the actual fixing you never have the understanding of how the code works and therefore what the changes will actually do.

    LLMs can be useful in a lot of ways, but they should never replace thinking and understanding. Just like you do need to memorise some things but not others, there are cognitive tasks you don't have to do all the time but others you really have to in order to actually be a good programmer. If you outsource thinking you stop doing it and get weaker at it. If you outsource meaningless tasks or use systems to reduce the need for them that is actually useful for freeing up your mind for tasks which cannot be automated.

    So in my view using these tools to find bugs in code can be useful. Knowing that if a bug is found it may not be disclosed to you by the tool because the provider of the tool wants to keep some bugs hidden is something people should consider, I mean that is exactly what the NSA has been going for decades with zero day exploits in various operating systems and platforms, why would they not do so now?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

    Though, I recently found out Motorola has license plate reading cameras and supposedly works with ICE. Which is gd gutting to hear.

    https://wpde.com/news/local/flock-vs-automated-license-plate-readers-what-are-they-and-who-are-they-for-surveillance-ice-dhs-motorola-federal-government-court-lawsuit-artificial-intelligence-ai

    https://www.motorolasolutions.com/en_us/video-security-access-control/license-plate-recognition-camera-systems.html

    https://callmc.com/ai-transforming-public-safety-lpr-assist-ai/

    Edit: From a reply below, this may be a different company? Looking into it now.

    Edit: Looks like the cellphone company, Motorola Mobility LLC, is currently wholly owned by the, now Chinese company, Lenovo. So, certainly appears to be different organizations. Glass someone caught me on that.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Wrong Motorola. There are two different companies.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    Fuck. Guess I need to seriously reconsider

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    • [–] 40 points 1 month ago (16 children)

    Yet, the GrapheneOS devs will continue to insist that Linux isn't viable because of "security". Well, how useful is AOSP going to continue being with Google holding it hostage?? It sure seems to me that spending effort to make mobile Linux more secure and usable would be a much better long-term strategy than to keep developing for a dying, hostile ecosystem.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 month ago (12 children)

    The way i understand it, what Google did in Android is no joke, and definitely very hard to implement on a small team that basically works on just fine tuning your existing code. Birthing all this onto Linux is quite an undertaking, and it would need hardware partnership agreements.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (11 children)

    what Google did in Android

    Like almost everything Google has done, android was bought by Google. Admittedly, it's been quite a while since then and I couldn't tell you how much can be attributed to the original team vs Google's input.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

    Yes, and the biggest thing Android has going for it in terms of security is the fact that everything runs under a strict sandbox and permission model.

    You could absolutely build a cohesive, secure Linux system using Flatpak to acheive something similar. It will still have rough edges and holes, but if GOS devs put in the same amount of effort into making Linux secure as they have with AOSP, we could get it to where it needs to be.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Again, agreed, but hindsight is 20/20. I'm not sure if when they started in 2016, they would've believed that by this time, things would be going so badly. That said, I suppose we all really should have assumed they'd be enshittified as soon as google removed "Don't be evil" from their policy in 2018.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    For me, it's been pretty obvious that Android was going this direction for almost a decade, but any time people bring up mobile Linux, the GOS devs still bend over backwards to defend building for the dying AOSP ecosystem and speak ill of the security of Linux.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Yes. But for usability, the biggest thing Android has going for it is nothing technical, it's a ridiculous amount of apps to do literally anything you want and billions of existing users, which means more bugs are found and fixed. The mainline kernel Linux phone ecosystem does not have this and it's a bit of a hurdle.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

    Yes, and that's why we should put effort into making mobile Linux have those things. A team of talented developers like the ones that GOS has could go a long way toward that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I wish it was as easy, but remember, Microsoft, despite having an actually decent mobile operating system (the people I know who had Windows phones generally liked the UI), could not compete because they were too late to the market.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    Sure, but that was an entirely different world. 2011 was pre-Snowden leaks and before people ever considered what the modern era's tech giants would be doing. Google's motto was still Don't be evil and very few but the most privacy-conscious people disbelieved them. People had more skepticism of Microslop, but this was before the public had Windows 8, 10, or 11 pushed on them. There wasn't really a market for privacy-friendly mobile OS because the modern, smart mobile OSes had only existed for a few years at that point and the general public had not yet been majorly betrayed by Google, Apple, or M$ at that point.

    The modern era of tech has been so terrible that even politically uninvolved and privacy unaware folks are frothing at their mouths about datacenters & surveillance cameras and showing up to city council meetings to actually do something about it.

    Still, I don't expect mobile Linux to dominate, even when it's ready. But there are plenty of people who are asking for it, beyond those that you would assume.

    Another key difference between Windows Phone failing and the hypothetical chance for mobile Linux to succeed is that Linux has the largest pool of software developers to pull from and an unfathomable amount of software that won't even need to be manually ported to work on phones (some will, but most modern software use portable graphics libraries like GTK, Qt, etc.,).

    Contrast that with Windows Phone being a bespoke, locked-down ecosystem with Linux having developer tools that more open, easy to integrate, and better documented than any proprietary walled-garden ever did.

    Getting apps for mobile Linux won't be an issue like it was for Windows Phone except for cases like banks and other draconian companies. And those are important exceptions, but those can be overcome just as Linux gaming has. If those companies refuse to build for us, then we will build for ourselves, and they will be forced to cooperate when we become undeniable.

    And even if you don't share my optimism for what future mobile Linux adoption might look like, I think we can agree that regardless of mobile Linux's "market success", people are going to build it anyway because people will always build cool stuff just for the love of the game. I just wish large teams like Graphene would consider divesting from AOSP and start putting some effort into mobile Linux in the long term.

    Edit:

    Sorry if that sounded goofy. I had drugs for the first time. They do really interesting stuff to your cognition! It may affect the way I write 🙃

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Yes, corporations buy up small businesses and startups. In this case all they got seems to be the Android name and an idea to make a phone OS? AFAICT the project was neither open source or based on the Linux kernel until Google took over.

    I'm not trying to whitewash Google here, they did that pretty well themselves in open sourcing Android development. That's given them a 20+ years alibi to be complete arseholes in pretty much any other part of their business — and now they're clamping down on Android, too.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    Android is not the problem here. In fact I love Android very much. What I don't like is Google.

    AOSP and Google need to be seperated. While Linux mobile would be nice, phones work differently than PCs and I don't think Linux will just "work" like it does on desktop. There's a reason why it's so far behind. Popularity and viability. I just don't think it's worth it.

    Android is amazing. It's secure, great, snappy and it's still very open. However I do NOT trust Google that they will not fuck up the freedom aspect of it in the near future.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    Okay, as I'm sure you know, Android is built on Linux, so saying something like Linux wouldn't work on phones is quite an odd statement. And Linux on PC's wasn't always "it just work". It's taken a long time and hard work to get it to where it is. And it's "just" code, there's no reason whatsoever that with a lot of sweat and elbow grease it can be a good user experience (see Sailfish OS). The desire and need for a non-Android OS has been quite low until recently.

    I do agree that moving AOSP stewardship to someone else would be for the best and the easiest option for everyone involved (except Google I guess).

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Agreed. It's time to have a truly open source OS. I didn't know that they had that opinion, but it doesn't surprise me. They seem extremely... determined is probably the nicest way I can put it.

    I used to be enthusiastic about graphene, but between this and a few other things, I'm not sure pursuing using graphene is really worthy of my time, if only because of the devs' attitudes, or at least the attitude of whoever is doing their communications.

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    • [–] 16 points 1 month ago

    I didn't realize we were getting so close to the future

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    [–] 3 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Google have been years seeing how far they can push linux GPL.

    At this rate android will end up being closed source.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    I have an even worse feeling about the LLM code in the kernel...

    Considering that the big AI vendors do deals in behind the scene, Google is going to ask for same favors to try and retroactively relicense LLM slop code.

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    • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    Starting to read this title had me in completely the wrong headspace and trying to recall any android 3 at all. Furthest back I could remember was 8er.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Android 3 did exist, but it was only released on tablets around 2011-12

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Dragon ball, man. I was thinking dragon ball.

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    • 13 comments in c/android@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 51 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    Come on Linux phone devs. I'm rooting for ya.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

    We all are, but it's going to be a long time and my concern is that it won't be soon enough. It was convenient that Windows finally crossed the enshittification Rubicon just as Linux was ready for mainstream adoption. But mobile Linux is far, far, behind anything else. Although I do think that immutability and flatpaks are a good foundation.

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    • [–] 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

    is it possible or plausible for grapheneos to just simply fork android officially and break control from google?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Possible? Yes. Plausible? No, mainly due to the massive ecosystem that Google has built and the fact that maintaining compatibility with newer versions of Android without actually rebasing on top of that newer Android version would be an insane amount of work.

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    • [–] 21 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I thought about switching to Graphene a while back but asked a question about this in another thread. As tempting as it was, it seemed like the entire project hinged on Google updating AOSP. Stopping that to fuck over Graphene is exactly the type of piece of shit asshole behavior I would expect from Google.

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    • 2 comments in c/opensource@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I can only hope that Graphene working with Moto will eventually lead to a fork of Android by Moto.

    Of course I think that would require Moto absorbing Graphene first, as the Graphene team lacks the management/leadership capability (and the funding, legal teams, etc) to do this (no criticism of Graphene intended, it's just a huge thing to attempt, and Google will certainly attempt to "dissuade" such things).

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    • 1 comment in c/linux@sh.itjust.works view that post
    [–] 12 points 1 month ago

    Yeah they've turned into apple, need to move on

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    1 comment in c/hackernews@lemmy.bestiver.se view that post
    [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    just two years after I buy a fucking pixel for GOS long term and it has been stuff like this one after the other. I've known this project since it was called copperhead.

    I just can't

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