I remember getting my first Android phone and feeling a sense of empowerment. This Google-branded rectangle put the world at my fingertips. It did what I wanted and then got out of my way. It made life easier and more convenient.

Now despite boasting bigger batteries, faster processors, and higher-resolution cameras, our phones make us feel powerless; as if we must fight our devices to get anything done. There’s a constant barrage of notifications, and by the time you have dealt with them, chances are you have forgotten what you wanted to do in the first place. Then there is Gemini, Google’s artificial intelligence bot, which won’t leave you alone. Press the home (middle) button for half a second too long, and it pops up, offering to “assist” you.

What was once a useful tool has now become an instrument of torture, designed to extract as much money from consumers as possible. And to keep it that way, Google is quietly locking away its phones’ source code to make it as hard as possible for people to build better alternatives. While Google awaits the repercussions of being convicted of running an illegal search monopoly, the tech giant may have inflicted far greater harm on people through its control of Android than it has by monopolizing online search or advertising.

Things were not always so bad.

Android, the world’s most widely used mobile operating system, started life as open-source software. Anybody could look at the underlying code, modify it, and freely share it with others. This was great because it allowed people to choose what was best for them.

Let’s say you don’t like Google constantly spying on you and selling your data to advertisers. You could try installing LineageOS, which is an open-source, privacy-respecting version of Android.

Perhaps you are environmentally conscious. Two years after you bought your phone, the manufacturer stopped providing updates, but you want to keep using it instead of making it e-waste. LineageOS again comes to the rescue. It has a large community of open-source developers who support devices long after manufacturers have abandoned them. Or you might be a lawyer, a therapist, or a journalist; someone who needs to handle a lot of sensitive and confidential information. In that case, you would use GrapheneOS, a highly secure version of Android that hackers can’t easily break into.

Perhaps you just want to reduce your phone use. You might use a Light Phone, which does not allow social media or gaming at all. It too runs a custom version of Android.

But Google, which acquired Android in 2005, does not like it when you have options. The company has effectively made a prison where it can spy on you, control your user experience, and make more money off you.

To that end, it has been gradually eroding Android’s open-source capacity in the last decade.

For example, it recently released the source code for Android 16 without the device trees and drivers for its Pixel phones. Device trees tell the operating system what hardware is present in the device: camera, display, speakers, Bluetooth, and so on. Drivers provide instructions for how to use these components. Without them, your phone is just an expensive paperweight.

In March, Google said that it would develop Android behind closed doors. Previously everyone could see the code as it was being written. Developers working on alternative versions could grab this prerelease code, make their changes, and test them on actual devices. They could release their versions just days after Google. Now they must wait for months until Google dumps the code alongside the stable release. This greatly delays the development cycle for competitors.

In 2023, Google deprecated the open-source Dialer and Messaging features and made future versions proprietary. This means that others must build their own software to make phone calls or send text messages from scratch. Over the years, Google has moved many crucial features, such as the camera, keyboard, and push notifications, from the open-source project to its closed-source black box. Competitors must now spend their scarce resources on reinventing the wheel rather than implementing new features.

Being open source helped Android compete against the iPhone and swiftly dominate the global smartphone market. Manufacturers could quickly adapt it to their devices and sell at lower prices than they could if they had to make their own operating systems from scratch. But now that it has captured the market, Google is rolling up the ladder behind it to keep competition at bay.