The operating system that powers every Android phone and tablet on the market is based on AOSP, short for the Android Open Source Project. Google develops and releases AOSP under the permissive Apache 2.0 License, which allows any developer to use, modify, and distribute their own operating systems based on the project without paying fees or releasing their own modified source code. Since beginning the project, Google released the source code for nearly every new version of Android for mobile devices, typically doing so within days of rolling out the corresponding update to its own Pixel mobile devices. Starting this year, however, Google is making a major change to its release schedule for Android source code drops: AOSP sources will only be released twice a year.
Google told Android Authority that, effective 2026, Google will publish new source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. The reason is to ensure platform stability for the Android ecosystem and better align with Android’s trunk-stable development model. Developers navigating to source.android.com today will see a banner confirming the change that reads as follows: