AOSP Source Releases Are So Late Developers Disassemble Libraries to Report Bugs

duttonw

Google not releasing won’t help now in the ai age….

slim

It's time to fork it

yieldcrv

every generation of control freak eventually gets tired of Android as the features that actually have market traction get merged into iOS just hang up the hat and never look back

jackdaniel

corporate incentives turned into a laughing stock :p

reddalo

The new Google motto seems to be "be as evil as you can". We need an Android alternative, something that respects users' freedom.

userbinator

One character: a plain compare loop. Correct. Not surprisingly, I get slight hints of Claudism in the text. AI "opening" the source of software is one of the best things I've seen going for it so far.

mentalgear

I wonder if they use already / what their experience is with "REA Reverse – Engineer Anything" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028275 ).

kodebach

I can't prove it, but I still think this is (partly) due to a recent EU regulation majorly backfiring. I can't remember which one it was, but one of the recent regulations mandates that devices get updates for a certain period. Within that period a manufacturer must provide each update for all their devices in a short timeframe. The intention was to prevent flagships getting updates immediately and lower end devices having to wait months. However, due to some (also well intentioned) wording about open source, the release of the source code is counted as the first release of an update and starts the timer. I'm pretty sure Google is delaying public AOSP updates to give their partners (mainly Samsung I suppose) more time to finish building their updates on top of AOSP.

pjmlp

Good look with NDK issues, having the source code available would not help much anyway. NDK seems to be handled like a 20% project in terms of allocated resources, I bet it has not more that like 2 FTEs, given its progress since Android 2.1.

typ

Given the current trajectory of all things, I think that the drawbacks will outweigh the benefits for a project like AOSP due to the changing economics. The reduction of SBOM (and therefore the attack surface) will be far more beneficial than the saving of work from hundreds of imported dependencies. The trend of vertical integration will likely happen in software sooner or later.

raverbashing

Is it just me or Google has a lot of those silly bugs, where it seems nobody is thinking for 2 seconds on what they're actually doing?

NooneAtAll3

just fork the android already, ffs

Retr0id

It'd be mildly amusing if this led to someone doing an AI-powered decompilation of AOSP.

evan_a_a

Bit of a hyperbolistic title. The core of the bug report doesn't require disassembly of the library. The bug author just went the extra step to do a root cause investigation, which of course requires light reversing work.

dethos

We need a third option. Be it SalfishOS, Ubuntu Touch, Nura, or whatever picks up with a sizable community. We just need to start developing and investing in that one. It won't be perfect, but it will offer an alternative and control to the users.

senfiaj

AI is starting to successfully decompile binaries, unless the binary isn't purposefully obfuscated, I guess it's almost "open source".

kogasa240p

Wouldn't it be better to start focusing energy onto projects like PostmarketOS (now Nura)? Sure the Linux phone space on the hardware side is a bit barren, but there are options and you don't really need top of the line specs to get something working; you could even use an SBC with a cellular modem peripheral to have a cellphone replacement.

lrvick

Soon it will all be reverse engineered including all the proprietary binary blobs, and Google will not be able to do a thing about it.

lenerdenator

Remember when everyone was thinking of Google as a trustworthy partner in free and open-source software? Man, the early '10s were wild , man.