For years now, Android has been developed in a way that allowed the public to look in on Google’s work, but that’s now changing as Google has just confirmed that it will start to develop the operating system entirely in its internal branch.
The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) has left most of Google’s work in developing Android as an operating system visible to the public eye. But, starting next week, Google is moving that work behind closed doors.
Google confirmed to Android Authority that “all Android development will occur within Google’s internal branches,” the publication says. This is a shift from how Android has been developed for a very long time, but also aligns with more recent moves Google has been making. For a while now, Google has been developing most parts of Android behind closed doors in its “internal branches,” with the “AOSP branch” only having certain other aspects of Android’s framework (including Bluetooth, kernel, and some other core components). As such, it’s been quite a while since the current state of AOSP is at the same level as Google’s internal builds, leaving developers and others to wait on Google to make a public release to get all of the new changes.
With this change to move everything to its internal, private development branch, Google isn’t changing the speed at which these new builds arrive. Rather, this will potentially streamline the process and prevent conflicts when merging the branches.
This does not mean that Google is making Android a closed-source platform, but rather that the open-source aspect will only be released when a new branch is released to AOSP with those changes, including when new full versions or maintenance releases are finished.
In the end, users of Android almost certainly won’t see any changes from this new structure. App developers will also likely be unaffected. The biggest impact may be on the tidbits caught from AOSP that make their way into the public eye, such as the recent appearance of “Pixel 10” in an AOSP commit. That may be for the best, as those small tidbits can often be misconstrued or overhyped, leading to confusion later on.
A formal announcement of this change is apparently coming “later this week,” with the change itself happening next week. We’ll update this post when Google makes further details available.
Follow Ben: Twitter/X, Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
