The Dialer and SMS apps are being removed from AOSP.
Still not using your OEM shitware, Google
For messaging app I don’t think it’d be a huge deal, I could see ROMs just shipping with something like Silence or some other open messaging app, since there’s a lot of them. Dialer is the one I could see being an issue. I think what’s most likely to happen is there’s going to be a new go to open source dialer app specifically made for this purpose. It’d make more sense than every ROM making and maintaining their own dialer, except maybe the big ones like Lineage and Graphene.
I definitely agree that this will be an issue, especially as they do more and more stuff like this. This specific change I think will actually be better in the long-run. I find the community made apps for this sort of thing tend to be better than the default AOSP ones anyway.
For the long term though it says some negative things about Google and their intentions for AOSP, wonder what will happen as they retire more and more features of it. Maybe there will be an AOSP fork which is made to kind of replace AOSP, I could kind of see that happening. Something that aims to stay updated with the new code, but also tries to break away from as much dependencies as possible.
These are just some of my thoughts/theories.
I tend to see big tech pulling shit out their asses like this every other week. Slowly trying to gain more power of end user, where the end user has no choice but to use said product.
That is why i love open source projects and I think what you said is gonna happen. If google keeps on this negative intentions for AOSP, then for sure people will be fed up about it and fork to create their own thing. Besides, like u said, many messaging app, but i never saw a dialer app before 🤔 maybe they do exist, if not i am sure someone will create them.
I’ve only ever seen 1 open-source dialer app and I think it’s called “Emerald Dialer” I’ve seen some more on the play store (through aurora store) which are not open source. I imagine people didn’t see a need to make a new dialer app, the default AOSP one always seemed to suffice. Messaging apps on the other hand, have many features which someone might want to add, whether that be more customizability, more privacy or some other thing.
Silence hasn’t been updated in four years. I’m not sure I trust it to patch any future vulnerabilities.
The rest seems like a non-issue though. Plenty of open source apps to put in by default.
Ah, thats fair, didn’t know that silence hasn’t been updated in awhile. But was mainly just using that app as an example, but I know there are tons of open-source messaging apps to bundle in. I think it’s very likely you might see a “choose your default messaging app” at install, where you get to choose from a list of like 4 to have installed.
I already used Silence and Simple Dialer. Worst case I go PostmarketOS on my Pinephone.
