Android has come to dominate the global smartphone marketplace, and a large part of why this has happened is thanks to its open-source nature. Any phone maker can put Android on its phones with no licensing fees, and its adoption has also spawned a massive app ecosystem, so unless you’re a trillion-dollar company like Apple, going a different way isn’t sensible.

But is the Android operating system on your phone really open source? The short answer is, technically, “yes.” However, the phone in your hand is less open-source than proprietary.

Your Android phone isn’t as open source as you think

Eww, it’s covered in closed-source code

The core Android OS is the AOSP or Android Open Source Project. This is the repository of Android’s source code. That’s the programming code the OS is written in. Like all open-source projects, having this code allows you to see inside the software and modify it in any way you like.

Nothing stops you from compiling the code from the AOSP and installing it on whatever hardware you like, assuming you have the developer skills to make it work.

But AOSP is only a small part of what ships on a phone from companies like Samsung or OnePlus. They add custom interfaces, applications, hardware features, drivers, security, and more. AOSP really is just a barebones framework that others can build on, and in almost all cases, what manufacturers layer on top isn’t open-source.

The Linux kernel is open, but manufacturers don’t have to open everything

The fine print is brutal

Android is based on the Linux Kernel, which lies at the heart of millions of devices all over the world. The Linux kernel is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which requires anyone who distributes modified versions of the kernel to make those modifications available as source code.

That’s why phone makers publish their kernel tweaks and other code. It’s a legal requirement. However, the version of the GPL under which the Linux Kernel is licensed allows hardware makers to lock down their devices. To prevent anyone from modifying or replacing the software. Something that’s known as “tivoization.”

The term comes from TiVo DVRs, which complied with the GPL by releasing their modified Linux source code, while simultaneously preventing customers from installing modified versions of that software on TiVo boxes. There is a newer version of the GPL with anti-tivoization terms in it, but Linus Torvalds (who maintains the Linux kernel) has decided to stick with the older version of the license. This makes sense because without those protections, hardware makers would choose something else.

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Google has gradually moved more Android features out of AOSP

It’s sneaky but effective

Google is the maintainer of the AOSP, and so it has decision power over what’s merged into the code and what isn’t. Over time, Google has moved more and more of the features that used to be open-source into the proprietary sphere.

Many of the features people expect from Android actually come from Google Play Services rather than the operating system itself. Location services, Play Protect security scanning, Find My Device, backup services, push notifications, and many developer APIs all rely on Google’s closed-source software.

Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | GrapheneOS

There’s a logical reason for this, of course. This allows Google to update and maintain these components independently of the AOSP. Otherwise, we would have to wait for phone makers to each make their own Android updates before people get the improvements to these crucial components. However, moves like making sideloading less convenient are all part of a general pattern to make Android less open, little by little.

App developers increasingly rely on Google’s proprietary APIs instead of the open-source platform alone. As a result, many apps either lose functionality or stop working entirely on Android distributions that don’t include Google Play Services.

This might not sound like a big deal, but if you’re making a privacy-focused or de-Googled Android distribution like GrapheneOS, the fact that many app developers rely on Google’s APIs for security and app integrity means that some apps will simply refuse to work on these devices. Most people won’t want a phone that can’t run their banking app or any other software that relies on Google security tech, so it’s effectively a soft lockout from having a truly open-source Android option for the masses.

Open-source Android still exists—it just isn’t what most people buy

So, technically, open source Android exists, and you can have it right now. But it’s really there for the benefit of hardware makers, not users like you and me. If you’re creating a handheld gaming device or a Blu-ray player, you can totally use AOSP as its backbone and write your own software to layer on top of it.

But making an Android device that can compete with the Googled-up proprietary versions that ship on commercial phones? It might as well not be an open-source project at all for the difference it makes.