GrapheneOSMar 29, 2025

Android has always taken the approach of it being developed in private and then having the full sources and commit history published for each stable release. This approach used to be the norm for open source software many years ago, but now most projects do a lot of their development in the open.

Commit history being available also didn't used to be the norm many years ago but rather only tarballs for releases. It's very important for them to provide it and they're still going to be doing that.

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025
Certain sub-projects were developed in the open as part of the public Android Open Source Project repositories in the main branch but the bulk of the work was done in private. They maintained both a public main branch and an internal development branch and had to merge back and forth between them.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025
Recently, Google announced they'll be shifting most of the small subset of the OS developed in the AOSP main branch to being developed internally instead. The full commit history will still be available when stable releases are published as it for the majority of AOSP developed that way already.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025

AOSP main was not where most of the OS was developed and would get most of those changes merged into it shortly after each stable release.

AOSP main also doesn't correspond to Developer Preview and Beta releases, which are separate branches and what we need for porting before a Stable release.

Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025
The small subset of the OS developed via AOSP main moving away from it won't have a major impact on GrapheneOS. It did not provide us with early access to the code we need for porting GrapheneOS to an upcoming release before the day it gets released. That already required having partner access.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025
Android is remaining open source and simply being slightly less open about the development of certain components. We won't be able to see the commits as they're made for that small subset of components anymore but rather need to wait until they publish the full commit history for stable releases.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025
In contrast with Android, Chromium is developed almost entirely in the open and we can port and test all of our changes to the upcoming releases before there's a Stable release. This is very helpful and makes maintenance much easier for us. Doing this for Android already required partner access.
Show threadGrapheneOSMar 29, 2025
We've already been in the process of figuring out how to get partner access in a way that will be reliable and long term. There was only one year where we had early access to a new major release. We haven't had it for several years and we still manage to get the yearly releases out in a couple days.
Show threadfrankie (auto-rebootable)Mar 29, 2025
@GrapheneOS
So, it doesn't really affect GrapheneOS development? 
WaitwutMar 29, 2025
Show threadGrapheneOS
@frankie It doesn't have a major impact on it. They moved in the wrong direction from what would help us but having access to the main branch didn't help us much since very little was developed there and it got most of the changes AFTER stable releases when it gets merged from the stable release into main. We did get to backport some bug fixes for components developed in the open but most of them weren't. We sometimes backport fixes from the DP/Beta releases without having sources though anyway.
Mar 29, 2025 at 3:55pmWeb