alt Hacker NewsYeah, and that's utter nonsense. Noone is really stepping up to develop Android beyond repackaging it.
If Google decides to remove a feature, GrapheneOS and other forks will end up without it too. If they stop publishing security patches, the forks end up insecure too.
It's just like all the Chrome "forks" when ManifestV2 died. None of them survived for more than a few versions until maintainers lost interest.
Calling any of these Google free is downright lying.
ok, that's probably not the popular opinion, but a reasonable argument.
i think though that the chrome manifestV2 support example is not really applicable to your argument though. chrome still exists, and the removal of a feature is not the same thing as stopping to release sources altogether. if google had stopped releasing chrome sources then some chrome forks with v2 support would still exist. same i believe would be true if google stopped android releases.
same goes for security patches. a lot of effort in forks now is put in keeping up with android (and chrome) releases. if those releases stop then the effort would be able to shift towards security patches. would it be better or worse? hard to say. depends on the resources the forks would manage to gather to do the work.