As has become tradition for Ars at Google I/O, we recently sat down with some of the people who make Android to learn more about Google’s latest OS. For 2019, the talk was all about Android Q and this year’s big engineering effort, Project Mainline. Mainline’s goal is to enable Google (and sometimes OEMs!) to directly update core parts of the OS without pushing out a whole system update. If that sounds technical and challenging, well, it is.
These are always great reads, and a welcome new tradition.
If I read this right, more system stuff is moved towards the Google Play Store. Wouldn’t this make it easier for Google to mine data and to stop projects as LineageOS in its tracks?
What I’m more concerned about is how they’ll change storage access.
https://www.xda-developers.com/android-q-storage-access-framework-scoped-storage/