While I’m plenty suspicious of Google as we all are, here’s two more trivial interpretations from software corpo perspective.
The Android OS isn’t an infinite sink of work. As systems, frameworks, libraries are developed to fill use case gaps, fewer and narrower gaps remain. Think how Windows, the OS, hasn’t changed fundamentally since Windows 8/10. Android has reached similar level of maturity for some time now. This means there’s less work to do and the pace of source code changes slows. In that context it makes sense to keep fewer branches and release less often.
The other interpretation is simply that Google might be removing workers from the project, thus being unable to maintain the current release schedule.
While I’m plenty suspicious of Google as we all are, here’s two more trivial interpretations from software corpo perspective.
The Android OS isn’t an infinite sink of work. As systems, frameworks, libraries are developed to fill use case gaps, fewer and narrower gaps remain. Think how Windows, the OS, hasn’t changed fundamentally since Windows 8/10. Android has reached similar level of maturity for some time now. This means there’s less work to do and the pace of source code changes slows. In that context it makes sense to keep fewer branches and release less often.
The other interpretation is simply that Google might be removing workers from the project, thus being unable to maintain the current release schedule.
It’s likely both.