The Changing State of Openness in Android (froscon2026)

In this talk, I want to give an overview of the changes that Google has introduced in the past twelve months in the Android ecosystem and how they are affecting Android users, device manufacturers, custom ROM maintainers and the open-source community in general. Furthermore, I want to explore the possibilities of how the community can and is already adapting to the changing landscape. Last year, Google announced the introduction of Android Developer Verification and upcoming restrictions for Android Application sideloading on Android-certified devices. This caused a wave of opposition in the open-source community and led to the creation of the "Keep Android Open" initiative. Projects like UnifiedPush, have seen an increased interest and ideas for a Unified Attestation framework are emerging. Apart from that, there are further changes that Google has made to the development process of the AOSP that affect AOSP developers and custom ROM maintainers, like LineageOS or GrapheneOS. For example, the Pixel phone was dropped as a reference device from the AOSP tree and the count of security patch releases was reduced. In this talk, I want to discuss these examples, along with other developments that have occurred over the last twelve months. Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 about this event: https://programm.froscon.org/2026/events/3609.html