Android's AOSP Moves Further From Google's Strict Guidance

Today the folks at AOSP (Android Open Source Project) at Google revealed their newest move to make the "OSP" part of AOSP far more real. Google owns Android, yes, but they've also kept the Open Source Project bit a reality since the very beginning. This week the developers at Google released a tool that'll make it far easier for 3rd-party (read: non-Google) developers to lend their skills to the development of AOSP, and potentially play a part in guiding what takes priority in Android development, and when.

"AOSP has been around for more than 10 years and visibility into the project has often been restricted to the Android Team and Partners," said Jeff Bailey, AOSP, Android Team. "A lot of that has been rooted in business needs: we want to have fun things to show off at launches and the code wasn't factored in a way that let us do more in the open."

A demo of GSI running on partner devices made possible through Project Treble took place at the 2018 Android Developer Summit. According to Bailey, the work the team did to make that demo a reality "provided the separation needed, and has also made it easier to work with our partners to upstream fixes for Android into AOSP." To make this process as easy as possible, the Google AOSP team released their Continuous Integration dashboard to the public.

This Continuous Integration dashboard currently includes such targets as AOSP_ARM64, build_test, NDK, and SDK. This is the newest tool with which developers from all backgrounds can check the development of AOSP as it makes sure all AOSP trees are "in a continuously releasable state."

If I did not know better, I'd imagine this was a sign that Google was pushing AOSP because they plan on replacing Android with their Fuchsia OS. But that'd be too intense to imagine, wouldn't it?