Haha. OG conspiracy theory time! I was gonna say this breakup will never happen, but I could totally see it being a plutocratic quid pro quo to split Android from Google and set up an entirely new entity to start charging for the OS or closing it off as a pixel exclusive — something Google couldn’t do without major backlash and probably lawsuits, unless the government “forced” their hand and compelled them. The controlling shareholders would remain the same, and the government would get to act like it’s taking legitimate action, fighting for the working class, against monopolies.
I think Android is big enough to be immediately forked. There’s many existing forks already, if they tried to take it private many companies would be invested in a new “Android core” being developed upstream - it’s one of the few situations where open source can work, because businesses would throw money at an org that keeps them competitive
But I’ll be hopeful but pessimistic about a Google breakup. It would be huge, it would be real change
Android has been largely gutted and depends more and more on google play services, with few exceptions like some AOSP-based roms like lineageos, iodeOS, etc
Any guesses on how this would affect Android and Firefox?
I’m not 100% on how the Android business works so I’m not sure how important Goggle’s involvement is.
Firefox relies on Google’s ‘default search engine’ bribe quite a lot, and they might not be able to offer that anymore(?)
Haha. OG conspiracy theory time! I was gonna say this breakup will never happen, but I could totally see it being a plutocratic quid pro quo to split Android from Google and set up an entirely new entity to start charging for the OS or closing it off as a pixel exclusive — something Google couldn’t do without major backlash and probably lawsuits, unless the government “forced” their hand and compelled them. The controlling shareholders would remain the same, and the government would get to act like it’s taking legitimate action, fighting for the working class, against monopolies.
I think Android is big enough to be immediately forked. There’s many existing forks already, if they tried to take it private many companies would be invested in a new “Android core” being developed upstream - it’s one of the few situations where open source can work, because businesses would throw money at an org that keeps them competitive
But I’ll be hopeful but pessimistic about a Google breakup. It would be huge, it would be real change
Android has been largely gutted and depends more and more on google play services, with few exceptions like some AOSP-based roms like lineageos, iodeOS, etc