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Comment by grapheneos | Hacker News Reader

QPR1 and QPR3 are now Pixel exclusive since Android 16. That means the new APIs for app developers added in Android 17 QPR1 are Pixel exclusive until Android 17 QPR2. There hasn't been a case of new APIs for apps not being open source or not being available to every OEM since Android Honeycomb (3.x).

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Seems like that's anti-competitive behavior, holding back security updates except for Google's own stock users.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282190165630051

> It would be interesting to know if Google's legal team is aware they're giving Pixels months of early access to new Android features and bug fixes including certain important security patches. Pixels being given this competitive edge over Google's OEM partners is very dubious.

Is Google under any legal obligation to continue releasing software updates to their competitors in the first place? Maybe there are some contractual obligations in place (I remember back when Google first started making their own hardware, other Android OEMs got very, very nervous, and Google was bending over backwards to appease them, so it wouldn't surprise me), but aside from that I don't see why they'd be under any obligation to keep releasing code to others for free. Android isn't GPL, and even if it were I believe Google owns the copyright, right?

The only way to fully free Android from Google's hands is a hard fork. Graphene OS probably doesn't have the resources for that on its own, but all the other Android OEMs put together might. Frankly I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened yet, but I do seem to remember Google having some anticompetitive clauses in their license terms for GMS which may be preventing this... not sure if those are still in place.

That might be valid (but not really) if those other OEMs actually didn’t delay the features and bug fixes themselves.

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