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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Android is "fully open source" except that Google writes 99.999% of the code in secret. Rarely they will accept a pull request but there is zero transparency into that process.

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When I go to their public code review app [0], it looks pretty active. The last 100 changes listed there were modified in the last 24 hours!

Which parts are they coding in secret? (Honestly, I don't know, please help me understand)

[0]: https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/q/status:open

One thing to note, more and more of what constitutes the android user experience is being pulled into the Google Play Services app which is closed source. A big part of the reason why is that it gives Google a better negotiation tool to use with carriers as they have to license the use of the Google Play platform and that isn't really optional in modern Android right now. AOSP has been left behind not in support but in more and more features of "Android" being closed source. Another huge benefit is that tons of bug fixes that would have required coaxing carriers into supporting a software update on the phones can now be applied just by patching Google Play Services and rolling it out as an app update.

That sucks but it's not relevant to google having released a new version and carriers ignoring it.

Why does Google still rely on the carries, even though they know for years, that they don't have interest in updates. They could easily implement an update mechanism for the core of Android, like they do for App-Updates as well.

When i buy a Laptop from HP, Dell, Lenovo or any other OEM, i still get Windows updates (even if i don't upgrade to the latest Windows version). I would really like to know why it is not possible for Google to implement such an update system? Blaming carriers is easier i guess.

That's exactly what they are doing, although perhaps for two-fold reasons. More recent versions of Android move more and more core stuff into the Play services. This enables Google to push updates to core services like normal app updates. It also ensures that a lot of core APIs are covered by services only available on phones licensed with Google.

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