Not correct. Google has begun releasing new version of old things directly into Play Services or as separate new apps, letting the open source version bit rot.

One example is the location stack. They have moved into it play services and added a few features, but the open source one is now going to bitrot. 4.4 has now a new closed source launcher, and I'm sure the old GoogleHome.apk will go bitrot in a couple years.

If you get AOSP today is quite far from an Android device. Surely it's better than nothing but the distance is widening every month as Google keeps going down to this closed source way. In another couple of years AOSP would probably be irrelevant if you also don't subscribe for the Google apps when you build your device.

Not true. Google updated a lot of stuff for AOSP 4.4, such as the e-mail app (which I also thought would never be updated again), the Download app, the Gallery, the photo editor, and a few others. The point is that Ars author's theory hasn't come true yet, and it's actually be contradicted by the KitKat version in many ways.

Look just what a big upgrade the photo editor in the open source gallery received:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/11/03/android-4-4-kitkat-comes-...

> the open source one is now going to bitrot

There's something deeply hypocritical about complaining Android is not open source on the basis that Google is not working on the components themselves anymore, giving you free updates. If you actually sincerely care about open source your concern is exactly the opposite of that: the community must be able to take the source and build upon it. Google has brought us light years, billions of dollars of investment along the road to where we have a beautiful, highly optimized, slick operating system available completely for free, even to Google's direct competitors. And your complaint is now that you're not getting fed free updates to all the exact components of the OS at the rate you want? And therefore all that was given to you is worthless, "rotten", not even worthy of the name open source?

This just sounds so entitled to me.

From a purely FOSS POV, Google never tried to build a community around Android. They develop it privately, and code-drop it when there is a release. Not even their partners (generally) get to see it before the public release. Without a public roadmap, the only kind of significant user contribution to the project is bugfixes (which are still welcome of course).

But notice that the problem is not "the rate of free updates", but rather the fact that Google is moving more and more development into the closed-source part of the operating system, while still trying to maintain the market line that the "operating system is free". But which operating system is free? If you install AOSP on your phone (assuming you can and manage to go through the hurdles) you end up with a phone which is completely different from stock Android. That is my complaint: the difference between AOSP and the so-called "pure Android experience" (as on a Nexus) is widening more and more.

You say Android is available for free to "competitors". But as a matter of fact, AOSP (not Android) is available to competitors, and only those that are not part of the OHA. If you are a member of the OHA (so if you are an Android vendor of any significance), your contract says that you cannot fork Android; not only that, but you cannot even produce/manufacture a forked Android device as a supplier for an unrelated company outside the OHA (which is why Amazon has problems producing Kindle Fires, since all major manufacturers are also trying to sell consumer devices based on Android).

Moreover, if you fork AOSP, not only you don't have access to the Play Store, but many (most?) .apk won't even work on your device, since they rely on the proprietary Google APIs which are not part of AOSP. And this, again, is a widening ongoing process, so more and more (rather than less and less) existing .apk found on Play Store are incompatible with AOSP.

I think the way Google cleverly designed the whole "AOSP vs Android" licensing is way more than a standard freemium model; it's a model in which nobody pays, a part is open-source, and still it's close to impossible to create a forked consumer device that uses AOSP and benefits from the existing ecosystem.

The markets in which AOSP is really making a different (in my experience) is the B2B embedded device market, which is not in direct competition with Android devices, and where AOSP is quickly moving to become the de-facto Linux embedded distro. I work in that field, and I'm grateful to Google for AOSP, as it's really making the whole market progress faster than ever.

> If you install AOSP on your phone (assuming you can and manage to go through the hurdles) you end up with a phone which is completely different from stock Android

It honestly sounds like you have never installed AOSP yourself. I do it all the time and quite often use the device for a bit without any "Google". The experience of running barebones AOSP is way, way closer to stock Android than anything you will buy from an OEM. I even sometimes do it and forget to install the Google apps because it is so similar you cannot actually tell the difference until you try to use something like Gmail or Google Now. The idea that consumers buying branded phones are somehow being deceived because they think they are getting stock Android but Google has somehow slipped proprietary code in is laughable when you look at what the OEMs do in comparison.

I would challenge you to get hold of a Nexus and flash plain vanilla stock Android (to make things easy, use CM 10.2 and don't put Gapps on there). These are built from source directly derived from the AOSP, by people who are NOT members of the OHA and have no special relationships with Google, manufacturers or anyone else. You will find you can set up your email, calendar, pretty much everything you need, with the exception of Maps is available. It may make you feel better about things.

In my view, what is happening lately is that Google is drawing a sharper boundary around what is open source Android and what are proprietary Google services. The OS is remaining open source, as a hard condition. Things that belong in the OS are staying there and staying open source. But the layers above that - things that are rightly and properly user space apps - are only delivered as part of the OS as a convenience. Making better versions of those - possibly better versions than can ever be made open source, either because they depend on proprietary / live Google services (eg: maps) or because they use licensed or patent encumbered code - is fair game.

I thought the entitlement was google's when they used open source development to build their closed tools and betatest their api/protocol.

Of course the entitlement is theres because they convinced OSS devs to write code for them for free under the "do no evil" moniker.

So now if they want to keep their toolchains, they have to continue maintaining the oss-side google service apps to regain access to the tools they help built.

I think this is called bait and switch, and it's probably the #1 pattern used by big technology firms today. It's so easy to "switch" with IT. Carrot-stick pattern worked well for Microsoft, because they owned the only stick and most the bait, but no longer. I guess without a monopoly, the only way to secure customers is to fool them.

Apple did the dame thing basing OS X on unix kernel. Google is just following the lead. The only part that the OSS community was fooled on was the hypocrisy of Google

> One example is the location stack. They have moved into it play services and added a few features, but the open source one is now going to bitrot.

The location stack has not moved into Google Play. The location sensor APIs are still AOSP code. Address resolution and other things have always been tied to Google services, so that geofencing and Google Maps specific APIs are in Google Play Services is not surprising nor unexpected.

> 4.4 has now a new closed source launcher, and I'm sure the old GoogleHome.apk will go bitrot in a couple years.

The previous launcher from 4.3 is still available in AOSP. The new Google launcher has high integration with Google Now, but we've already seen that the launcher space has a thriving amount of competition and an open source launcher is totally do-able.

> If you get AOSP today is quite far from an Android device. Surely it's better than nothing but the distance is widening every month as Google keeps going down to this closed source way. In another couple of years AOSP would probably be irrelevant if you also don't subscribe for the Google apps when you build your device.

This is the core point. Its not that AOSP gets less free over time, its that Google-specific code and services get more functional over time compared to AOSP components. Since Google controls code commits for the main Android project, it means people have to fork and generate alternatives like Replicant is trying to do.

The KitKat version of GoogleHome.apk is already beyond bitrot; it's "an empty shell that forwards all requests to the [proprietary Google] search app" (which manages the home screen in KitKat), per ArsTechnica:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/google-just-pulled-a-...

This leaves it unclear what you get for a launcher with an AOSP build of KitKat, but it certainly is drifting farther from the official Android experience.

Arstechnia hasn't done enough research.

You can (and I have) fetch the new Launcher from AOSP, compile it and run it very easily as a separate application. The Google Experience Launcher is a closed source Google app based on this which integrates Google Now.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Laun...

>which integrates Google Now

I now know which app I'm ditching once I get a 4.4 device.

Fair enough.

I'm a huge fan of Google Now so hopefully I can continue to use it if I decide to switch to a custom launcher.

>4.4 has now a new closed source launcher

Not correct. Launcher3 is open source.