The state of AOSP Userspace
Written on March 5, 2025 by ._______166
Hello,
With the release of Android 15 QPR2 Today (5 March 2025) I decided to try to explain what has been happening with AOSP Userspace apps (e.g. calendar, clock, messages e.t.c.) in recent years.
If you were to build AOSP (not lineage or graphene) today you would see that most of the userspace apps are either broken or have not been updated (visually in most cases) since around 2016.
I am not the first person to say this but since around 2017 google has been taking the AOSP apps (take the calendar and messages as examples) and has been fixing and improving them but making them proprietary and essentially abandoning the AOSP apps.
So since 2017 google has been one by one 'improving' the userspace apps and making them proprietary and then later deprecating them! (see calendar, desclock, dialer and messages repos in the AOSP source tree).
Now most custom roms (e.g. lineageos or grapheneos) now either maintain these apps themselves or replace them entirely, meanwhile most phone manufacturers just use the google apps.
It is sad that these apps now have just been 'left to rot' in AOSP and I hope that someday google at least fixes them.
With the release of Android 15 QPR2 Today (5 March 2025) I decided to try to explain what has been happening with AOSP Userspace apps (e.g. calendar, clock, messages e.t.c.) in recent years.
If you were to build AOSP (not lineage or graphene) today you would see that most of the userspace apps are either broken or have not been updated (visually in most cases) since around 2016.
I am not the first person to say this but since around 2017 google has been taking the AOSP apps (take the calendar and messages as examples) and has been fixing and improving them but making them proprietary and essentially abandoning the AOSP apps.
So since 2017 google has been one by one 'improving' the userspace apps and making them proprietary and then later deprecating them! (see calendar, desclock, dialer and messages repos in the AOSP source tree).
Now most custom roms (e.g. lineageos or grapheneos) now either maintain these apps themselves or replace them entirely, meanwhile most phone manufacturers just use the google apps.
It is sad that these apps now have just been 'left to rot' in AOSP and I hope that someday google at least fixes them.