Google will now only release Android source code twice a year

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:

“Effective in 2026, to align with our trunk-stable development model and ensure platform stability for the ecosystem, we will publish source code to AOSP in Q2 and Q4. For building and contributing to AOSP, we recommend utilizing android-latest-release instead of aosp-main. The aosp-latest-release manifest branch will always reference the most recent release pushed to AOSP. For more information, see Changes to AOSP.”

In the past, Google would release the source code for every quarterly Android release, of which there are four each year. Thus, the company is now reducing its source code releases from four times a year to twice a year, focusing its efforts on the Q2 major update and Q4 minor update which both bring developer-facing changes.

A spokesperson for Google offered some additional context on this decision, stating that it helps simplify development, eliminates the complexity of managing multiple code branches, and allows them to deliver more stable and secure code to Android platform developers. The spokesperson also reiterated that Google’s commitment to AOSP is unchanged and that this new release schedule helps the company build a more robust and secure foundation for the Android ecosystem. Finally, Google told us that its process for security patch releases will not change and that the company will keep publishing security patches each month on a dedicated security-only branch for relevant OS releases just as it does today. (For more context on Google’s security patch release process, check out this article.)

This is a developing story. Check back for more updates!