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There is no such thing as non-Google Android. At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.

It's the same as the situation with Chrome/Chromium. There are a million "de-Googled"/"privacy focused" alternatives to Chrome all using the same engine, and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.

by microtonal4 hours ago|

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At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.

You are making an orthogonal point. Yes, Google maintains AOSP. No, that does not mean that AOSP OSes that are not in Google's Android program (calling it that to avoid semantics games) have to adopt this change. If you want to hear it from the experts: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116103732687045013

by paxys4 hours ago|

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Unless these different Android flavors all have the resources to indefinitely rewrite AOSP and remove all Google code they don't agree with - no, they pretty much have to adopt the changes (see the earlier Chromium example). And if they do somehow manage this after a point all the patching basically becomes a fork, which is exactly what I started the conversation with.

by microtonal3 hours ago|

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I see your point, but it all hinges on when you consider the changes to be a patch set and when a fork. I don't think there is a very clear definition, except I don't think most of these projects would call themselves AOSP forks.

At any rate, this particular Google anti-feature does not require a large patch (or maybe none at all).

by Tharre3 hours ago|

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> and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.

That's just objectively wrong, both Brave and Opera still support manifest v2 and are committed to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Even Edge apparently still has it, funnily enough.

by paxys3 hours ago|

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Nope, actually "both Brave and Opera still support manifest v2" is objectively wrong.

Brave does NOT support manifest v2. They have instead hand picked exactly 4 manifest v2 extensions (AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix) and have hard-coded special support for them. They quite literally say in https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/ that all other v2 extensions will go away from Brave once Google fully removes support for them (which may have happened already, since it was posted a while ago).

As for Opera (https://blogs.opera.com/news/2025/09/mv2-extensions-opera/):

> MV3 extensions are the new standard and will offer a more stable and secure experience. Opera itself will shift to an MV3-only extension store.

by Tharre3 hours ago|

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> They have instead hand picked exactly 4 manifest v2 extensions (AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix) and have hard-coded special support for them. They quite literally say in https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

You're misreading that page, they have special cased the hosting of those 4 extensions, because they do not have their own addon web store and are relying on Chrome's instead. You can still install any manifest v2 addon manually, not that there are going to be many outside of those 4 that care about v2.

As for Opera:

"Today, we reiterate what we said back in October 2024: MV2 extensions are still available to use on Opera, and we are actively working to keep it that way for as long as it’s technically reasonable."

by paxys3 hours ago|

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> for as long as it’s technically reasonable

Read: for as long as Chromium allows this via a flag.

by iririririr3 hours ago|

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which begs the question, why ublock origin is not native on all browser yet?

addons for firefox were at first a way to test features. we only have devtookls because one person wrote an addon copying ie6 dev tool. next Firefox release it was part of the core browser.

by anonzzzies3 hours ago|

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Get a large phone vendor to get a flagship phone with Graphene or so on the market. Otherwise nothing will happen. Even starting with the smaller ones like Blackview would do something. But almost no one will do that because users are said to want android; like my parents care... But they will care of course when their banking app stops working... That is the real issue imho.