[izacus]

GrapheneOS is a Google OS - it's a slightly modified Android developed by Google and continues to be dependent on Google for updates.

(Murena /e/OS is similar. No, slamming the downvote button won't make either of them any less Google dependant OSes.)

[em-bee]

you are being downvoted because the article considers de-googled versions of android acceptable. and neither are dependent on google in the sense that even if google stopped publishing android source altogether they could continue to develop the versions they already have. that's the whole point of Free Software and Open Source.

[izacus]

Yeah, and that's utter nonsense. Noone is really stepping up to develop Android beyond repackaging it.

If Google decides to remove a feature, GrapheneOS and other forks will end up without it too. If they stop publishing security patches, the forks end up insecure too.

It's just like all the Chrome "forks" when ManifestV2 died. None of them survived for more than a few versions until maintainers lost interest.

Calling any of these Google free is downright lying.

[em-bee]

ok, that's probably not the popular opinion, but a reasonable argument.

i think though that the chrome manifestV2 support example is not really applicable to your argument though. chrome still exists, and the removal of a feature is not the same thing as stopping to release sources altogether. if google had stopped releasing chrome sources then some chrome forks with v2 support would still exist. same i believe would be true if google stopped android releases.

same goes for security patches. a lot of effort in forks now is put in keeping up with android (and chrome) releases. if those releases stop then the effort would be able to shift towards security patches. would it be better or worse? hard to say. depends on the resources the forks would manage to gather to do the work.

[jasonvorhe]

Isn't Brave still shipping it?

[izacus]

No, you can't install any 3rd party ManifestV2 extensions in Brave. Neither are they shipping any changes to the browser engine that Google doesn't maintain.

E.g. they tried to implement dark mode website conversion and decided it's too hard to do anything that Google themselves don't do.

[jasonvorhe]

Thanks!

[em-bee]

yes, but only for those extensions that the brave team maintains because all other v2 extensions are likely no longer maintained at all: https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

so in general the problem is not with supporting v2, the problem is that except for a few special extensions that need v2 features there is no point because all those v2 extensions out there will either be ported to v3 or they will be unmaintained.

the maintainers of chrome forks with v2 support lost interest because the developers of v2 extensions stopped maintaining them.

[jasonvorhe]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that detail.