A notable mention is https://ubports.com/en/ which is different from postmarketos in a sense that ubports uses old kernels with heavy patches. That means: good support for things, but difficult future.
PostmarketOS uses the newest kernels and tries to integrate their patches into mainline kernel, so that the reliability is maintained with all kernel developers.
While I’m a fan of GrapheneOS, I think it could still be considered “tied to Google” both due to it being based on Android, and also because it only runs on Google Pixel phones. Graphene focuses more on security, then on privacy, but not so much on reducing our dependency on Google’s software and/or hardware.
Yeah those are things on my mind too, especially since Google moved Android behind closed doors.
My understanding is that AOSP is still and will continue to be a thing. That’s Android. What Google has done though is put more and more new capabilities into Play Services, which are not open, rather than AOSP.
I hope someone will correct me or add better nuance though.
No. The latest changes by Google means all incremental work is now no longer visible to the public until a release is done. For most people and developers this shouldn’t make a difference.
As an example lets say I implemented features A, B and C and then did a release to v2. Before the changes you would see A get added, then B then C and then the release. With Google’s changes you will see nothing for a while and then all of a sudden see A, B, C and the v2 release all at once.
What reason, they are doing this?
In the current world when they are done with a release they have to reconcile their internal trunk (main branch) to the external trunk which is the one that everyone can see. This is because currently google do some development internally while other development is done on the public trunk. This reconciliation process can be annoying due to things like “merge conflicts” (ie. A disagreement between two versions of changes about what the final change should be). By doing all work on the internal trunk it should make this reconciliation process much simpler.