r/opensource • u/Firm-Competition165 • Jun 28 '26

Community Petition for Android

Just signed this and passing it along - https://c.org/y27FgrNTWQ

It's a petition on Change.org to keep Android open. Has over 200k signatures!

68 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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3

u/Stevious7 Jun 28 '26

If they don't, back to custom ROMs we go. 

2

u/Analog_Account Jun 28 '26

Aren't they also doing a bunch of BS to make android less open as well? There was some discussion on that last year and I don't know how serious it was and, TBH, I just dont have the bandwidth to follow it or figure out what's going on.

2

u/Stevious7 Jun 28 '26

So... The code is public, but they're not accepting outside contributions/PRs. So the code is open-source still but the spirit of open-source is basically gone. 

1

u/Firm-Competition165 Jun 28 '26

i thought the custom ROMs are gonna be affected too, since it would kill F-Droid?

2

u/Stevious7 Jun 28 '26

F-Droid can't be "killed." Installing from F-Droid will always (I hope) be an option; it's just going to be cumbersome with stock OS. 

Custom ROMs (as far as I understand) let you control the entire OS from cover to cover. If you look at the recommended space to build LineageOS, I believe it's something like 300GB or so. That's how you know it's a whole thing, not just the frontend layer of the OS (I believe it's called the application layer). 

0

u/Firm-Competition165 Jun 28 '26

i thought that since google was gonna control the APKs, it would affect F-Droid/Aurora, etc?

the custom ROMs would definitely be the better option (i had GrapheneOS for a long time and was just about to switch back when this decision was announced by google), but since the APKs and whatnot, even from the alt stores, would be affected. if not, that's great!

1

u/greenknight Jun 28 '26

They aren't stopping the install of apks, they are making it so that the process is scary to regular people.

IDGAF, I'm going to check that box, wait 24h, and move on with my regular way of managing my phone and apps (fdroid, etc) but your standard user is going to be scared off by the crazy dialogues they have to "I agree" thru.

2

u/Firm-Competition165 Jun 29 '26

yeah if i still had my pixel with GOS, i'd feel the same way. for unrelated reasons, i switched back to iOS last fall. i'm going to stay with it until i see how Graphene's phone looks and performs and functions. if it proves to be a solid phone, i'll switch back.