The article uses phrases like "completely broken", "awful", and "<delay> wouldn't be a surprise". Which might be true but it's not helping.
Google has betas for QPRs and yet this was not caught. It makes you wonder if Google is dogfooding the devices themselves or at least the devices that are not the latest gen and have 16GB memory.
The other issue is that it often takes weeks or months to fix show-stopping issues. Compare to e.g. Apple who rolled out a fix for Apple Watch 12/Ultra reboots or the iPhone 18 Pro Face ID issues within a week.
There are seriously things wrong in their process if they don’t catch these bugs and/or fix them quickly. (Or the other possibility is that they are understaffed.)
Google pushed out bugged code ostensibly breaking millions of phones, mine included. They have the means to fix it in a short amount of time like GrapheneOS devs did, but they won't do it, so GrapheneOS took the initiative.
That's part of the motivation behind HugOps: the people working on fixing a thing are only rarely the people who are responsible for the system that caused the breakage.
South Korea and multiple other countries have already found the Google Mobile Services licensing agreements to be illegal, so it's an objectively true statement to call it illegal. Samsung has been largely freed from the restrictions due to the court decisions in South Korea combined with their market share, which is good, but also incredibly unfair to other Android OEMs.
GrapheneOS was initially collateral damage for Google's anti-competitive behavior but in the past couple years they've shown they feel threatened by us and are very actively trying to hold us back. It's not everyone at Google doing it but it's enough of them including the people in control.
I'd suggest that Google aren't your primary audience for this kind of post: it's folk like me, who are quite keen on the idea of GrapheneOS but don't actually use it yet (I actually bought a second-hand spare phone last week with the ulterior motive of trying GrapheneOS on it, we'll see...). What do you want your average reader to think about you, from reading what you've written?
I should add that this post (that I'm directly replying to) comes across to me as very much more appropriate than the original blog post, even as it's in many ways a lot harsher. It's putting Google's behaviour in context, rather than drawing comparisons between your own abilities and their poor performance.
You don't need to drag Google down in order to look good; there are many reasons why what Google (and especially their management) have done is bad for society (and not just for you) and also many reasons why what you're doing is excellent on its own merits, not merely compared to Google.
There were a small number of complaints prior to us moving the release introducing the issue to Stable. There were very important security updates in the updated firmware/driver code and we decided we needed to release it despite that. It took several days for most people's setups to build up enough memory usage to start triggering it. It started impacting a lot more people after a while and we realized it was a severe issue we had to address ourselves instead of waiting for Google to do it.
Google likely had the same reasoning for pushing it out to people to get many other issues including security bugs fixed despite a major known regression. We did not have time to avoid the situation in advance. We had to either delay driver/firmware security updates or ship it and then fix this afterwards. The problem is that it typically takes them at least around 4 to 6 weeks to ship a fix for even a critical issue. They've sometimes managed to do it in 3 weeks in extremely critical cases. It's unusual for them to move that quickly and it takes them longer to do kernel changes userspace ones. Once we figured out the issue was, it was quickly fixed and we started builds for a release in the same day.
It takes a long time for us to build a release for 21 different devices despite having build machines for it due to each having a specialized build with only what they used and their CPU architecture, etc. and we actually need 42 builds due to security preview releases. We plan to make incremental builds reliable enough to use those for production but it requires great care and potentially ongoing CI testing of reproducible builds to make sure incremental builds haven't regressed. If memory wasn't so expensive, we could buy a bunch of hardware to upgrade or replace our existing 4 local build machines for official releases.
Whatever your 'reasons', the consequences are the same. Of course you know that "announcement on our forum for our userbase" can spread much more widely than that.
To lead successfully, we can't just do what we want and ignore the consequences. A leader's job is to get the best consequences.
They're trying to limit how many devices can be sold with GrapheneOS by Android OEMs, reduced the number of AOSP releases from 12 to 2 per year with 10 of those now being Pixel exclusive, removed Pixel support from AOSP, unsuccessfully tried to cut us off from early access to security patches which are now allowed to be shipped early by OEMs while under embargo (which we do), are trying to convince app developers to ban using GrapheneOS via the Play Integrity API and even recently funded an AI slop paper with misinformation about GrapheneOS falsely claiming it missed security patches that it did not based on an entirely false premise that it has diverged from AOSP in a way that it hasn't and has to port patches to a diverged fork of the OS which isn't how it works. More info at https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=49946698.
Many of the things Google has done to hinder open source projects based on Android are illegal and they continue doubling down on it despite a lot of regulatory and legal actions already taken against them.
* If GOS is justified in their criticisms and tone, and expresses them, and it harms GOS's relationship with Google (problematic as it is), then it causes GOS harm.
* If GOS is not justified in their criticisms and tone, and expresses them, and it harms GOS's relationship with Google (problematic as it is), then it causes GOS the exact same harm.
So if you're thinking about justification, you are distracted - it doesn't matter. 'What is best for GOS' is the only question, and what is best is very likely to not antagonize the company and its employees when GOS is at their mercy entirely. What is best is to find a way to work with them and form as solid a bond as possible (and have a plan B if they screw you).
We all have to work with people we don't like and who treat us poorly; that's life when you have higher priorities.
The Android team is barely allowed to talk to us or the general public anymore, so what relationship is there to preserve? They'll very likely handle this whole issue with near complete silence towards the media and everyone else. A fix will eventually ship and they'll very likely never acknowledge it beyond a sentence in the release notes, will never explain what went wrong and won't commit to doing better in the future. They likely won't do better but rather worse since they keep doing more cost cutting including layoffs.
Maybe that's partly due to GOS's behavior toward Google and its engineers. For example, maybe there would be more workarounds and back channels otherwise.
> The future of Android is as an independent company forcefully split away from Google.
You are putting a lot of eggs in that quite uncertain and unlikely basket (given how impossible it is to predict the future and also the very wide range of possibilities). Splitting Google hasn't happened yet, anywhere, despite many attempts.
If they do split, there's no reason to think Android will be independent: It could be part of a larger subset of Google, even 'old' Google. It could be sold to another large company - many would love to control half the world's phones, if only to guarantee their applications are easiest to use and competitors can be disrupted (e.g., Meta or Microsoft could benefit enormously - and Microsoft could finally extend its OS business to phones).
Even if independent, why would Android act the way you hope? Who will run it - who will its shareholders and managers be? Likely current many Google shareholders and managers would be part of the spin-off. There's no reason to think they - or even completely new people - will be more supportive of FOSS; they could go the other way.
GOS is amazing. I don't know you so likely this is off-target to some degree - my apologies: Many engineers have learned, through defeat or success, that they need more than great engineering to get their passion into people's hands and change the world. Just as essential - more essential (lots of poor engineering is widely used!) - are great business skills. There's no shame in it: very few people can do it all (who is both a great engineer and great business manager?), and none have time to do both.
I hope someday the world knows 'Graphene' and a billion use it. It's one of the most important projects around - how else can typical end users have a chance at privacy? Good luck!