Google Deals Blow To Custom ROMs On Pixel With Android Open Source Project Update

There's some trouble brewing ahead for developers of custom ROMs for Pixel phones. In the midst of a reorganization about how the Android open-source project is run, Pixel ROM devs have been caught by the truck of unintended consequences.

Android 16 was released this week, and as usual its source code also popped up, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. So far so good, except this time around Google did not release the device trees or the kernel source history for Android 16 on the Pixel handsets. A device tree is a collection of configuration files and related materials, all describing a specific device's hardware layout, peripherals, and custom hardware.

This makes it harder for Pixel custom ROM devs to do their thing, as they now need to work out this data themselves by reverse-engineering from Android 15 and previous releases. It's worth noting that this ...