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Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
(www.neowin.net)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2025
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Why do you think they're making this arbitrary change?
Because Google have been wanting to be closed source for years, which is why nearly all their new features since they released the Pixel have been PixelOS exclusive and not in AOSP.
They don’t care about killing custom roms, that’s just a side effect of them going closed source for their Phone.
What do you think the benefit of closing sourcing their software is if not to stifle competition?
It means they can do way more features without giving away precious IP, and it also just reduces their workload. They don’t need to keep giving out their code for free. It makes their job harder.
AOSP projects are not and never have been a threat to Google. They aren’t trying to stifle them - that’s just a byproduct of not giving away their code anymore. Giving it away gives literally zero benefits to them. It might only save them 0.01%, but that’s a lot money.
As someone whose job runs several FOSS projects, I think you're making up the fact that it adds meaningful workload.
I think that, for all intents and purposes, protecting IP is equivalent to stifling competition.
I think giving away code benefits the entire Android ecosystem, which might be the largest data mining operating Google has. I fully believe that's of nonzero benefit.