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Google confirms it's 'combining' Chrome OS and Android into a single platform
(www.androidauthority.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Android
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Same with MacOS and iOS. They're doing the same shift Apple has done over the last 25 years. Build on open-source, and slowly pivot to closed-source binaries. The perception of openness lags for a very long time until people finally realize it has just become more proprietary limited crap.
Not really as there is no Apple equivalent to AOSP
Incorrect. MacOS and iOS both started out as Darwin, the Mach microkernel, and FreeBSD. 25 or so years ago, Apple had open repos and package managers to install standard Unix tools, and the core of the OS even used things like cron to schedule tasks. You could even configure MacOS to not launch the GUI and run it command-line only. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
Over time, Apple slowly turned everything into Libraries, Extensions, and Frameworks, and slowly closed-source everything application-by-application. The same way Google is doing with Android.
And if you missed the memo, there is no Google equivalent to AOSP. They killed it in March, because they are doing the exact same thing.
Google can't kill AOSP as it is under the GPL. They will always have to release the source code. Even if a lot of the apps have been abandoned the core system will still be GPL. I don't see them changing that any time soon as it would mean a total rewrite of the OS from scratch which would be insane.
Android also is designed to run on lots of different hardware unlike Apple. I don't really see the comparison.
Apple's OSes are also designed to run on lots of different hardware. Intel, PowerPC, ARM, nVidia, AMD, Apple GPUs. It is just all hardware Apple (mostly these days) designs. There's no reason to talk about what hardware they run on. We're talking about their parallel roadmaps to closing off the OS development from users/open-source, and how both are doing the exact same transition, Apple's is just a quarter century in the making.
Google has already been doing what is necessary to close Android for years. Example: The AOSP texting app they abandoned years ago. Google Messages is now the messaging app. Fully closed-source. No requirement to ever open it. They also used RCS as an excuse to close off the third-party messaging app arena. No third-party app can use RCS on Android now.
Play Services, Assistant, Chrome, YouTube, YouTube Music, GBoard, all their applications are being separated and the "old" version phased out. Some things will remain open-source, likely, like the Chromium bits of Chrome, but even that they've already forked their secret Chrome sauce.
With a hybridization of ChromeOS and Android, this will further accelerate Google not having a need to care about the existence of AOSP. Eventually, they'll just abandon it entirely.
If you use an AOSP-based OS like Graphene right now, you can see the remnants of the AOSP apps. Peeps on projects like Graphene do some massaging to keep them usable, but they're basically apps frozen in time to aid companies in proof-of-concepts and not part of what one would call consumer-facing Android today.
Vendors like Samsung and Lenovo pay to have early access to the Android source, so they'll still get early access for device development, but it is a 100% pay-to-play model. Likely with NDAs. Which again, is exactly what Apple does.