They've been moving more and more out of AOSP into their Play Services for a good while now. However I suspect OP was referring to their announcement that they'll require developer verification, and apps to be signed with a certificate they issue, for any app install on a verified device (read any device sold with the Play Store). Long story short, no more building and distributing APKs without Google knowing who you are and that your app exists.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-android-security.html

Not all at once, but I feel like since the beginning more and more stuff has moved to closed source components like the Google services framework. Even the launcher used to be open source and that's not maintained now in favor of closed OEM (including Pixel) ones.

slowing down AOSP releases (why Graphene is looking into other phone options). Google is also trying to enforce developer signatures on apps, which would give google the power to kill small developers on 3rd party app stores and ruin sideloading, as you would have to go through google to be verified to make apks.

these are a few example that has popped up in the past year.

I don't think so but it seems you two are mixing Android and AOSP.

Android is owned by Google. AOSP is not.

I might be wrong on this but it seems to me they're replacing in Android, the OS shipped with many smartphones, parts that have open licenses, i.e. parts from AOSP. Like they are replacing open parts of code with privative parts of code.

They don't need to, they just need to develop their own components and ship those instead of AOSP's. Bit by bit, "Android" becomes proprietary because google's components are the ones that are force-fed to the users.

They dont acturally need to change the liscense at all, despite what most people think (and would logically make sense) AOSP is acturally downstream from Android. So basically as we're seeing right now if Android doesn't want to release the source code for something they just need to not push it to AOSP. It has been over two months already and Android 16 QPR1 still hadn't been upstreamed to AOSP nor are they legally required to (they are legally required to publish kernel sources which they have failed to do).