this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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It's important to note that this is them moving in-development branches/features "behind closed doors", not making Android closed source. Whenever a feature is ready they then merge it publicly. I know this community tends to be filled with purists, many of whom are well informed and reasoned, but I'm actually totally fine with this change. This kind of structure isn't crazy uncommon, and I imagine it's mainly an effort to stop tech journalists analysing random in-progress features for an article. Personally, I wouldn't want to develop code with that kind of pressure.
Why would you want people to test your software on all sorts of random hardware when you could just pay people to test it on a smaller scale!
C'mon, that's what PR's, RCs, and betas are for
Lots of people make a PR very early though, just to keep track of development and have a space to jot down thoughts and ideas, and get feedback during.
Would you really want everyone in the world looking at every end of day commit before you've refactored it into something vaguely passable?
Honestly, it has been fine. Almost nobody really pays attention to anything they don't care about, and most people who do care tend to be pretty helpful.
Heck, I'll sometimes make a
wip.difffile and scp it back and forth between work and home machines just because the code feels not ready for other eyes.While I'm way too lazy to do that myself, I respect you for the skill and effort.
😅 it's not often nowadays, I'm not fresh meat at work anymore so I feel less insecure these days lol
Who tf looks at feature branches unless it's particularly relevant to them or they're reviewing a PR?
It's not like they merge half-baked features straight to master every day lol
So what exactly are we losing?
You can't review changes in the next build before it's actually released?
Currently you can still keep up with the master branch. PRs are merged a fair bit more often than new builds are made.
Ah and nobody outside of Google can contribute to Android development. I believe up till now if you found a bug you could fix it and open a PR? No?
When that code is used on devices all over the world for many very important tasks, yes.
Why do you feel that Vs when merges happen?
I'm not a fan, but I understand it and am generally okay with it. I still wish it all happened in the open like Linux.
Not only that, the Android Police article mentions they had a lot of trouble merging the internal branches and the public branches, so I’m guessing as time went on they’ve diverged more and more.