Expanding Fuchsia's open source model
I don&#x27;t understand the cynicism here. Android&#x27;s fragmentation was the original sin that lead to fragmentation and the new that we&#x27;ve seen for years, until Google semi-fixed the mess with a) Play Services (short term) and b) Project Treble.<p>Google were so convinced of the value of open source that they didn&#x27;t anticipate that almost all OEM&#x27;s would rather ship their Android forks than to stay close to upstream. If they hadn&#x27;t intervened, Android as a platform would be useless by now and app developers would need to implement various ways of handling notifications, storage access, etc just to ship their apps to a broad audience of device owners, Samsung would&#x27;ve never upped their update game and there wouldn&#x27;t be 2-3 versions of Android on the majority of devices, but more like 5-10, depending on how many manufacturers would&#x27;ve survived in the market.<p>Android still allows for easy side loading of applications, there are still major independent after market Android versions out there, you can develop for Android in various languages, using a huge selection of IDEs and there&#x27;s open source alternatives to Play Services that Google neither litigates against nor seems to actively fight against. Google didn&#x27;t even manage to gain any relevant market share with their Pixel line of devices, of which most run Android. They could&#x27;ve done a lot of nefarious things by keeping newer Android versions Pixel exclusive until they publish the source code to OEMs, for example. Instead, they are making it easier to quickly move an existing Android code base to the latest version by abstracting away a lot of the complexity (project treble).<p>Is Google still primarily am advertising company that tracks its users? Of course. Do they have their own motives to keep Android at the top of the mobile OS market? Of course. But a lot of the comments see evil scheming where Google probably had to act quickly to ensure that Android has a future and that developers didn&#x27;t lose interest in the platform in favor of iOS.