It's a post about google screwing up their process and also pushing a bad update to a ton of people, and other people cleaning up their mess. I'm glad "open source is working" but that's a small part of the picture and I don't see why that would remove the point of the blog post.
There's no way to contribute this upstream. Google removed support for Pixels from the Android Open Source Project with the release of Android 16. We obtain the kernel driver sources through tarballs without commit history by making GPLv2 source requests. This is one of many ways Google has become increasingly hostile towards Android-based projects not certified by Google.
Android 17 QPR1 is also a Pixel OS exclusive release of Android not available to ship by other OEMs and not released as part of the Android Open Source Project. We have Android 17 QPR1 firmware, drivers and HALs since we can obtain all of the kernel sources and we largely switched to using the Pixel OS builds of the userspace code for Android 16 and later. It's one of the problems which will be solved through our partnership with Motorola where they're not only going to be providing everything we need but also helping us port and maintain GrapheneOS for their devices. This is quite the contrast with Google making it increasingly hard to support Pixels.
Prior to Android 16, each monthly and quarterly release of Android used to be pushed to AOSP. Those are now Pixel OS exclusive and there are only 2 releases per year for both Google's OEM partners and AOSP-based projects to use. Google also ended the AOSP main branch where large portions of Android were developed in public. This all makes it far more difficult to contribute anything upstream. It also makes it quite clear that those contributions are unwelcome.
Android's security preview system for security patches where patches are shared with OEMs and allowed to be shipped without sources months in advance is another way things have become more hostile. We have access to the security preview patches and are the only OS fully shipping the patches in advance. GrapheneOS gets most of the Android Security Bulletin patches months before the Pixel OS or other OEMs. Samsung is also shipping a subset of these patches early. Neither Google or Motorola are the ones providing the patches to us, but we're still required to follow the rules by not releasing the sources early so we have 2 separate variants of each GrapheneOS release with and without the patches. We used to have security partner access from Google granted by the head of the Android security team at the time, but Android's business team found out and had it revoked. We stopped reporting as many vulnerabilities upstream after this happened. Why should we share what we discover with them when they don't share it with us even when they do with other OEMs?
Play Integrity API device and strong integrity levels combined with heavily pushing adopting it in Android Studio and the Play Console is the elephant in the room. It bans using GrapheneOS despite it being far more secure than any of what it permits using. Google has made it clear they wouldn't allow us to get certified even if we were willing to follow all of their highly anti-competitive and anti-privacy restrictions in the Compatibility Definition Document. Google also has the Play Integrity API integrated as an opt-in store listing filter for Play Store apps which developers are encouraged to adopt.
Google also appears to have explicitly asked their engineers to stop communicating much with open source projects based on AOSP and others. There was a regular meeting set up between open source projects based on AOSP and Google engineers which was cancelled and the person who set it up then left the company. Nowadays, we can contact people there as we used to and get little in the way of a response. We contact them about actual issues all the time and are met with radio silence. We can use their regular issue tracker where they'll close most of what we report as WONTFIX without even trying to understand what we're talking about.
Google also funded and participated in publishing AI slop paper with blatant misinformation about GrapheneOS falsely claiming it has missed security patches it hasn't. The first security patch on their list of hallucinated missed patches was literally reported by us to Android in one of the first Android security bulletins. Google has yet to acknowledge our valid complaints about the paper. Someone working at a company we're working with filed a formal complaint with the IEEE.
GrapheneOS was not created as an anti-Google project and we made substantial contributions upstream for years. We were on good terms with their security team including leadership and many of their engineers for many years. Google has changed and so has Android. It's only reluctantly kept as an open source project, likely because they realize there would be major regulatory and legal action against them for not following their word and doing a rug pull. They did do that rug pull for Pixels despite selling the Pixel 9a and earlier as Android Open Source Project reference devices and committing to 7 years of updates for the last 2 generations sold as AOSP reference devices (9th/8th gen) and 5 years for the prior 2 generations (7th/6th gen).
Google has become a very poor steward of Android. Many of Google's Android OEM partners are increasingly unhappy with the overall direction of Android towards more control and restrictions from Google. Samsung has been given special rules without the same anti-competitive restrictions imposed on other Android OEMs due to their outsized market share and court victories in South Korea. For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota. It can and is being worked around and there will be devices sold with GrapheneOS as the stock OS without Google restricting how many can be sold.
> For example, non-Samsung Android OEMs aren't allowed to directly sell devices with GrapheneOS and Google will only permit it within a quota.
Wow, that is so cheap of Google. That company has lost all it's values and deserves to die.
They built their empire with open source projects including Debian, KDE's KHTML (Webkit predecessor), Linux kernel, MySQL etc. But now, these leeches won't even allow OEMs to use different flavor of Android.
A few years ago, you were constantly banning me and others from your IRC and Matrix channels simply for being critical of Google, which drove many users away from your project. You thought Google would reward your loyalty, but now you find yourself in a situation you were warned about by many people for years. How ironic.
The post mentions bare metal so it’s possible they found a partner to collocate with in a few of the big regions globally.
Regardless, they also call out that what they offer is only an enhancement and if you use it as the only way to access your smarthome then you are not really using the software as intended.
We will see in 12 months if the migration was worth it. Nabu Casa is starting to push harder into B2C so we shall see if the product can keep up with the demand.
You’re missing the point entirely. Some other home automation platforms require a cloud/subscription to function at all. It has nothing to do with running on AWS or Azure or insert hyperscaler.
Link is completely optional and does not affect the functionality of home assistant. You can run completely offline without a subscription of any kind on your own hardware if you so choose.
I find the downvotes without comment fascinating. Everything I posted was relevant and completely factual. I can only assume it’s people that have literally no idea what home automation is and what cloud is in this context. Cloud doesn’t and has never meant hyperscaler, and where it is hosted is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
Sadly way overpriced for what you get. You can achieve the same for free with a Cloudflare tunnel. It’s great that this service supports the development of home assistant but the pricing is just silly.
In addition to dedicated support, as part of their free Cloudflare tunnels.
Sorry for being snarky, but given the tone/point of the announcement is anti-big tech it's funny to complain that the pricing is so high compared to big tech.
Taken on its own, for the price of a nice coffee a month you also support Home Assistant development and get something in exchange. Pretty good value.
Cloudflare offers 10GB of free R2 storage. HA has a backup plugin for Cloudflare R2.
HA already has many plugins for doing voice processing locally or through other cloud providers (freely or cheaply)
A cloudflare tunnel would also give you direct access to WebRTC streams, just like being at home. HA Cloud just offers relay servers so you don't have to directly connect.
If you want to give HA money, go ahead but there's nothing truly compelling it offers that I couldn't get elsewhere for much less.
Do you mean critical? They are expert in AI ethics, it’s pretty much their job to look for problems in the field. I’m not familiar with them but the posted article covers facts that are undeniable
companies are stupid then, because it's obviously good for them. You're maybe thinking about how trademark lawyers pursue use of it but that's for tactical reasons not because it isn't great marketing
Losing a trademark to a generic word can make marketing a lot harder, though. A company often needs a new brand then, because everyone else can use their old brand in the marketplace.
It would be fascinating for Alphabet to lose Google the brand to being a generic word. (To be fair, it is something that maybe should have happened already.) Kagi or DDG or someone could use a domain like google.new or google.tech to easily retrain old habits of some users. What is Alphabet going to do in that case? If Google is no longer a trademark but a generic word, do they focus on having the "Alphabet Brand Google" or "The Original Google, by Alphabet"? Either way, that's harder to market and maybe easier to build a fresh brand than fight the generic terminology.
Someone tried to make them lose the trademark. They kept it in court because people literally mean search on Google when they say Google. They don't mean search in general. And that's fair, I don't say Google as a verb now that I use Kagi for search.
I know people that have used it that way in a while. Myself included: I certainly say that. I haven't intentionally used Google the search engine in years, but I use it at the generic term for an internet search.
An accusation wrapped as a genuine question. Bravo.
Let me turn this around to you. Do you think your timelines on Reddit/X are indicative of the tech scene of {London,China,India,Indonesia}? What makes you think you know of every popular project out there?
They are doing a very sensible approach of not trying to be the top AI researchers around, and either hiring or using commodity stuff on their products trying to find an application.
That's what basically all big techs should have done. And Oracle too.
Again, I have no idea if they found any good use for it on their applications, but they are the only one integrating it right.
