Android 17 QPR1: New APIs Without Publishing the Source in AOSP

GrapheneOS developers have drawn attention to an important detail in the Android 17 QPR1 release: it is the first release since the days of Android 3.x to add new APIs while not publishing them in the open Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

Android 3.x is the Honeycomb branch, aimed at tablets, whose source code Google likewise held back at the time and did not make openly available right away. Since then the company has stuck to the practice of publishing new platform code in AOSP, which allowed third-party projects — including custom ROMs and forks like GrapheneOS — to work with the system's current interfaces.

The GrapheneOS observation indicates that this continuity has now been broken: part of the platform's new functionality is becoming available to app developers through APIs, while the corresponding source code does not make it into the open repository. For projects built on top of AOSP, this means they lose the ability to immediately reproduce or verify the implementation of the new features.

The remark was published on the GrapheneOS account on the Mastodon network and drew a notable response in the community. The original post provides no details about which APIs exactly are affected or how Google explains this decision.

Source: Hacker News