> This doesn’t seem like a good idea because there are Android people and iOS people
Android Automotive (the "base OS" that's not even really "Android" in the way that you think of it from phones; the impression I have gathered is that it is a separate embedded Linux sharing only a few parts and iterating in a different pace) that Ford is moving to still supports Apple CarPlay as well as it supports Android Auto (the Apple CarPlay competitor). It's another fun place where Google's branding strategy confuses way more than it helps by having very similar names for very different products, in this case Android Automotive !== Android Auto.
But yeah, the other complaints are valid: Android Automotive is still so new we have no idea if Google is truly in it for the long haul or if that's another badly named brand eventually likely to end up in the graveyard. I don't think we know how much data Google will be monitoring from it either.
As long as Google will pay to recall and repair the truck the day they stop security updates, and also guarantee that it makes zero connections to their servers, the arrangement you describe is no worse than the status quo.
Why would Google pay for something Ford is entirely responsible for? Ford is rolling a customized version of Android Automotive, as all car OEMs are. Do you blame Google for Samsung not updating their phones?
> I must have mussed the part where Dell compiled the Windows OS source code and created their own OS.
We don't know yet how much Ford plans to/is working to customize Android Automotive, just that they said they are customizing it. It may be pretty likely that they only plan to customize it about as far as Dell or Samsung do as the two above examples: change some logos, some default wallpaper, auto-install some different apps. None of those require recompiling Windows or Android from source (respectively) today, and there's reasonable assumptions that Google would intend Android Automotive to be similarly customizable by car vendors in ways that cellphone vendors customize Android today, so the analogy to Samsung may be very directly comparable.
> Additionally, do you blame Debian when Ubuntu isn't updated?
I have in the past. At one point when I was regularly using Ubuntu there were several apps that I couldn't easily install because the chain of blame was directly: the right library version for a dependency is not in Ubuntu's distribution; it's not in Ubuntu's distribution because it's not yet in Debian Unstable because it was causing problems in Debian Canary though that may have been because of other things Debian was trying to integrate around it. In such a case, that's definitely Debian's fault that Ubuntu wasn't updated in the way that I wanted it to be at that time. That's not flawed logic at all. Since then Ubuntu has done a lot more to isolate itself from Debian integration issues and the PPAs and Snap communities have done even more to expand what's possible without needing a full distro upgrade, but that doesn't mean there haven't been times when it was directly useful to point a finger at Debian rather than Ubuntu for an update problem.
Android Automotive (the "base OS" that's not even really "Android" in the way that you think of it from phones; the impression I have gathered is that it is a separate embedded Linux sharing only a few parts and iterating in a different pace) that Ford is moving to still supports Apple CarPlay as well as it supports Android Auto (the Apple CarPlay competitor). It's another fun place where Google's branding strategy confuses way more than it helps by having very similar names for very different products, in this case Android Automotive !== Android Auto.
But yeah, the other complaints are valid: Android Automotive is still so new we have no idea if Google is truly in it for the long haul or if that's another badly named brand eventually likely to end up in the graveyard. I don't think we know how much data Google will be monitoring from it either.