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Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

androidpolice.com

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#41

I really hope this happens and that it's not just an ASOP fork and is successful outside of China. It'd be great to have a real, third, alternative operating system that has major support. I'm sick of both Android and eyeProducts. KDE Plasma is supported on barely anything. PostmarketOS is doing amazing stuff; very commendable -- but we still don't have usable OSS drivers for any mobile radios. I honestly liked Micro…

I have used Sailfish OS on a smartphone and it's awesome so far. I love it.

Russian govt is using it in their offices. I hope more countries seek out alternative OSes.

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#42
post #2

> It will work with Android apps and web apps as well I guess it is fair to assume at this point that they based it on the OSS part of Android ? Let's see if they manage to solve the Play Service pickle also. A lot of application assume you have them, I don't know if a lot of dev' are going to repackage their app "play-service" free for one vendor (wouldn't be surprising for popular app tho').

> Let's see if they manage to solve the Play Service pickle also. A lot of application assume you have them [...]

What are those even good for? In the end a smartphone is a little computer running some kind of Linux and we should be able to have a standard cron to deal with recurring tasks. Not some fancy service to do things I don't want it to do. This whole App ecosystem is going really wild and not for the best, I think.

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#43
post #33
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have to reverse engineer an open source operating system...

At this point Android is as open source as Windows.

Please point me at anything that resembles source code that I can compile to produce a bootable variant of Windows.

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#45
post #41

I really hope this happens and that it's not just an ASOP fork and is successful outside of China. It'd be great to have a real, third, alternative operating system that has major support. I'm sick of both Android and eyeProducts. KDE Plasma is supported on barely anything. PostmarketOS is doing amazing stuff; very commendable -- but we still don't have usable OSS drivers for any mobile radios. I honestly liked Micro…

I have used Sailfish OS on a smartphone and it's awesome so far. I love it. Russian govt is using it in their offices. I hope more countries seek out alternative OSes.

The Librem OS looks killer too:

https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

https://itsfoss.com/librem-linux-phone/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#46
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put restrictions on free software, isn't it then by definition non-free?

You can violate things like ITAR with open source, and the ITAR rules will take precedence. There are a lot of ways you can restrict FOSS software - even fully FLOSS DOD codes are not supposed to be obtainable from places like Iran and North Korea.

Checking up on the "Crypto Wars," my reading export regulations led to a surprise: only a few types of crypto were re-classified from a munition to something with no restrictions. High-assurance security (EAL6/7) and customized security, among other things, were still munitions. Undoubtedly, they left that in there in case they wanted to restrict availability of high-security products in a future where they became effective for foreign users. The other thing it implied is that DOD (esp NSA) knew the cryptosystems they were approving would be bypassable in most cases.

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#47
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not entirely true either, as the ban only applies to the US and ARM is a British company, with a Japanese parent company, so there's no conflict. They just can't use Qualcomm chips. As for Fabs, they can't still use TSMC, Samsung, and the numerous smaller companies in mainland China.

Wait, why not Samsung? They're still based entirely out of South Korea, right?

There's quite a few outside of China per this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#48
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the time being I understand that the ban doesn't actually stop Huawei from using ARM chips - it stops ARM from co-operating to help them build their own chips, e.g. their Kirin line of processors. So either they could just fork their design and stop keeping in lock-step with ARM (while maintaining a level of compatibility) or just start sourcing parts from third parties.

Not entirely true either, as the ban only applies to the US and ARM is a British company, with a Japanese parent company, so there's no conflict. They just can't use Qualcomm chips. As for Fabs, they can't still use TSMC, Samsung, and the numerous smaller companies in mainland China.

That's not how US sanctions work, if you want to deal with the US in any way you have to comply with their sanctions, this is why US sanctions on Iran even unilateral ones are effective.

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#49
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point Android is as open source as Windows.

Please point me at anything that resembles source code that I can compile to produce a bootable variant of Windows.

I think the GP was trying to say: just as Windows isn’t OSS, neither is Android anymore because of all the proprietary blobs and the Play Store

Re: Huawei's alternative OS to Android set to roll out as early as fall

#50
post #20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> em, I don't know if a lot of dev' are going to repackage their app "play-service" A lot of devs will repackage their apps if it means reaching a market, what 10x the size of the United States (Europe and Asia) ?

How viable is it for someone outside China to sell apps in China? I got the impression that it is pretty difficult.

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