Google's AOSP apps are horribly out of date, so some developers are pushing to get Google to update them for the good of the ecosystem.
issuetracker.google.com/issues/1507651
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Launcher3 is a very positive example where the open source app is well maintained and serves as the basis for Google's launcher and those implemented by various other vendors.
There are not many bundled apps in AOSP and several are very unnecessary and should just be removed.
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Apps like Contacts and Dialer are needed to provide base OS functionality. On the other hand, Email is entirely unnecessary as part of AOSP. Making an email client is best left to other open source projects and it should just be removed. Some other cases are more problematic.
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Calendar, Music and QuickSearchBox are only still included because they provide standard functionality that's required for app compatibility. However, they're abandoned and have been stripped down to minimal sample apps. In some cases, they stripped down the compatibility tests.
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For example, AOSP used to have a primitive text-to-speech implementation via PicoTTS. It was unmaintained and never worked properly on 64-bit unless it was built as a 32-bit app, and having unmaintained, sketchy native code exposed to untrusted input is also a scary prospect.
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So, instead of maintaining it or replacing it with something else, they weakened the Compatibility Test Suite by making it accept not having a text-to-speech implementation and conditionally testing it only if it's provided. PicoTTS was removed and AOSP has no included TTS now.
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I sketched out the concept of a backup service provider with seed-based encryption and pushed to get it implemented. Calyx funded the work on it and it worked out well: calyxinstitute.org/projects/seedv. There are a dozen more things like this that are needed to fill various gaps in AOSP.
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Lack of providers for the AOSP text-to-speech, geocoder and supplementary location services are nice examples. In some cases, there are community projects implementing missing pieces, but they're rarely secure, robust and usable implementations like SeedVault. Need to do better.