When you buy a Samsung Galaxy S24, you are not running "Android." You are running , a deeply forked, heavily modified operating system that happens to share a kernel with AOSP.
To ask "who owns the Android software" is to ask "who owns a river." The answer depends on whether you are talking about the water rights (Google), the fishing rights (OEMs), the boat rental (Users), or the ecosystem (Community).
Google has released a new Android version (e.g., Android 15). The deadline is tight. The Software Owner analyzes the diff between the old codebase and the new AOSP source. They must decide: Do we rewrite our custom features to fit the new architecture, or do we fork the code and maintain it ourselves? This is technical debt vs. time-to-market.
Android Software Owner !!hot!!
When you buy a Samsung Galaxy S24, you are not running "Android." You are running , a deeply forked, heavily modified operating system that happens to share a kernel with AOSP.
To ask "who owns the Android software" is to ask "who owns a river." The answer depends on whether you are talking about the water rights (Google), the fishing rights (OEMs), the boat rental (Users), or the ecosystem (Community). android software owner
Google has released a new Android version (e.g., Android 15). The deadline is tight. The Software Owner analyzes the diff between the old codebase and the new AOSP source. They must decide: Do we rewrite our custom features to fit the new architecture, or do we fork the code and maintain it ourselves? This is technical debt vs. time-to-market. When you buy a Samsung Galaxy S24, you