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From: Jeff Layman <Jeff@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.mobile.android
Subject: Re: What can't you do on Android WITHOUT a Google Account set up in
 the OS?
Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2025 21:04:37 +0000
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On 02/01/2025 10:46, R.Wieser wrote:
> Jeff,
> 
>> However, Android is said to have 12 million lines of code. Is it really
>> known to anyone outside Google what all of them do?
> 
> Which is exactly why a sane person would not want to go and try to
> de-google-ify it, and starting with a clean version would be a better idea.
> Yes, I applied logic there.
> 
> Also, the parent spoke of "android" after which I tried to make him aware
> that Googles android is something different than android.   Yet, you speak
> of "android" as if googles version of it is the base one.   Do you have any
> support for that ?

Well, Google didn't invent Android, but if you look at 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#History> 
you'll see that Android Inc started in 2000 and was going in the wrong 
direction for 4 years (being developed as  an OS for digital cameras). 
They changed for a year to try to develop it as a mobile OS, but had 
almost gone bust at one time. Google bought them out in 2005. The rest 
is history.
(There is a slightly different account for the earliest years at 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history#Overview>, but it 
is not significantly different).

Effectively, unless you're going to suggest that the 20-years old 
pre-Google Android is what Graphene and others developed their OS from, 
it can /only/ have come from stripping down Google's Android.

> And by the way, I do not even think that the people inside Google know what
> all of it does. :-)

I don't disagree, but that's what happens over a long development time. 
However, nobody else is better placed than those inside Google to know 
what Android does. And that's what  concerns me - who knows what 
"innocent" code they've included that nobody else knows about? Have 
Graphene and others /really/ looked through all the code and know what 
it does?

On an unrelated point, I was surprised to see that GrapheneOS uses 
automatic updates only. There's no choice - their OS is updated whether 
you want it or not. That's not what I would have expected.

-- 
Jeff