The phrase “open source software” immediately elicits yawns from most people. However, it’s an integral part of any electronic device.

According to howtogeek.com, “If a program is open-source, its source code is freely available to its users. Its users – and anyone else – have the ability to take this source code, modify it, and distribute their own versions of the program.”

This means that you have much more control over the program. For example, if you didn’t like the how snapchat was after the update that completely changed how it looks, you could modify it so that it looks like the old one, and use that. While this would take a certain amount of technical expertise, users without any programming knowledge would benefit as well. Open source software has a significant portion of the user base finding and fixing bugs, and generally runs smoother.

Google was a longtime advocate for open source software. It has created over 2000 separate projects, and written over a million lines of code in open source projects. Many of these projects have limited applications, but many of these apps are well known. The most ubiquitous of these applications is Android. According to statista.com, 88% of all cell phone users were using android, as of 2018.

However, Android didn’t start because of Google’s generosity. It was announced as a competitor to ios (apple’s mobile software) in 2007, when the first iphone came out. Google was scared of Apple’s dominance of the smartphone market because it could allow them to “shut out” google of the mobile internet.  According to Arstechnica.com, “Android was the ‘moat’ around the Google Search ‘castle’—it would exist to protect Google’s online properties in the mobile world.”

When android was launched, Google wasn’t the titan that it is today, and had absolutely no experience in mobile software. As a result, it was launched as an open source project to garner more interest. Today, as there are nearly nine times as many android users than apple users, this is no longer a problem.

As a result, Google has slowly started taking back android. While keeping the source code open, Google has stopped updating key features, such as search, music, calendar, keyboard, and the camera.

If this trend continues, the monopolization of smartphones will become more prevalent. With said monopolization, the innovation of technology and software by smaller developers will cease to exist as they try to compete with the tech giants. As a result this could stunt the growth, streamlining, and improvement of software altogether, ultimately stunting the growth of society as well.