Google officially ends support for the AOSP Dialer and Messaging apps and will remove them from the source manifest.
I spotted this change last week but didn’t think it was a big deal (because it isn’t), but since it’s now being picked up on by news sites, let me explain why.
Last week, Google added a README file to the Dialer & Messaging apps’ source code that says the following:
“This app is not actively supported and the source is only available as a reference. This project will be removed from the source manifest sometime in the future.”
This means that:
a) Google is no longer actively supporting these apps, so in a future release, they could stop working if any breaking changes are made.
b) Once they’re removed from the source manifest, AOSP builds by default won’t include a Dialer or Messaging app.
While that sounds like a big deal, it won’t impact AOSP-based projects (“custom ROMs”) much at all. The AOSP Dialer & Messaging apps were barely being updated already, so most AOSP-based projects forked them long ago and developed their own improvements on top.
Not only that, but improvements submitted upstream to these projects were rejected on multiple occasions, according to some members of the LineageOS project, who maintain their own Dialer & Messaging apps upon which many “custom ROMs” use instead.
So Google’s README just states something the custom ROM community has been expecting to happen for a while. Not that it makes the news any less disappointing, though, because it means that AOSP will soon be an operating system without a default dialer or messaging app.
It’s been clear that Google’s focus is on its first-party Phone & Messages apps distributed as part of GMS. OEMs are expected to either include Google’s apps or build their own, and anyone forking AOSP has been expected to do the same – before informally now formally.
CHUCKYSCARNAGE 