It's a strange time to talk about Android protecting users. Android recently changed the security update system in a way which massively downgrades security and puts users at risk. Commercial exploit companies and governments can easily obtain access to broadly distributed partner previews. Adding 4 month delays for patches is atrocious.
In June, you folks claimed AOSP wasn't going anywhere:
x.com/seangchau/status/19330…
You then proceeded to not release the July or August monthly updates to AOSP followed by not releasing the September quarterly update. You officially communicated to the media and said AOSP releases were continuing followed by 3 months of not pushing releases to it. Why should people believe what you say about sideloading?
We're seeing some speculation that AOSP is being discontinued. To be clear, AOSP is NOT going away. AOSP was built on the foundation of being an open platform for device implementations, SoC vendors, and instruction set architectures.
AOSP needs a reference target that is flexible, configurable, and affordable – independent of any particular hardware, including those from Google. For years, developers have been building Cuttlefish (available on GitHub as the reference device for AOSP) and GSI targets from source. We continue to make those available for testing and development purposes.