Google's new developer verification requirements starting September 2026 will force ALL Android app developers to register with Google - even those avoiding the Play Store entirely. F-Droid, the tr...
Above all, the organisation behind it must be or become sufficiently robust, like GNU/Linux, in order to take up the torch, but that requires a lot of financial backing.
It’s not impossible, but in my opinion it won’t happen right away and is likely to take time to implement. Once that’s done, the only issue left will be installation (for users, that is).
As far as I understood from Graphene, when Google released the source code for Android 16, they also stripped all the reference code for Pixel devices.
Historically, Google would ship the code for Pixel and a software emulator as “reference designs”. Now, it’s only shipped with the emulator.
The Graphene Team needed to reconstruct the pixel code from the Android 15 release. Fortunately, the divergence between Android 15 and 16 was minimal, but I’m certain the division will widen as time goes by.
Android can be forked at any time
Above all, the organisation behind it must be or become sufficiently robust, like GNU/Linux, in order to take up the torch, but that requires a lot of financial backing.
It’s not impossible, but in my opinion it won’t happen right away and is likely to take time to implement. Once that’s done, the only issue left will be installation (for users, that is).
… except for the binary os blobs, that’ll need to be reverse engineered to run it on… well… any real hardware /s
but these are firmware and drivers from the hardware manufactures and not the OS
As far as I understood from Graphene, when Google released the source code for Android 16, they also stripped all the reference code for Pixel devices.
Historically, Google would ship the code for Pixel and a software emulator as “reference designs”. Now, it’s only shipped with the emulator.
The Graphene Team needed to reconstruct the pixel code from the Android 15 release. Fortunately, the divergence between Android 15 and 16 was minimal, but I’m certain the division will widen as time goes by.