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Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

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Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#81

Post by entropea »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #69
pfortuny wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Nobody said they are the friends here. Just that Google is not.

In this case I guess there are no friends, only enemies?

The corporation will put its best interests before anyone else's. Doing something like this where 99% of the world won't know or even care is likely in their best interests no matter how unethical its actions are. There tend to be very few true 'friends' because of it. People are normalized to this corporate dance and keep expecting less and less for more.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#82

Post by striking »

pfortuny wrote: post #57
kartan wrote: post #26

> Problem: The Firebase Android client library is proprietary, meaning FOSS apps can not use it. Apps that do not comply are reported to the user as "using too much battery". This is a standard on the industry. From 1999: https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... It doesn't matter how much money Google is going to have to pay in the future as a fine for this practice. The amount of money that th…

So, if I understand correctly, the GPL prevents you from using a non-free library in your code? (Asking honestly: I have tried to find this elsewhere but the FSF page on the GPL is rather ... convoluted). If that is so, then this is obviously a killer and quite seemingly arbitrary requirement. Your MS example is quite good.

Your code is no longer completely FOSS when you do that. It depends on a binary blob that you can't see into.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#83

Post by bloak »

userbinator wrote: post #10
geofft wrote: post #2

You can still write free software that uses it and produces a not-entirely-free artifact when compiled, though, right? (Is there a distribution restriction on the artifact, or is it impermissible to link it with GPL apps, or something?) I'm curious if the free software apps are compelled not to link it to preserve the free software status of their code, or just voluntarily refusing on principle (which is laudable, to…

Thought experiment: write an application that automatically downloads and combines code with all sorts of legally incompatible licenses to create an application and installs it on an Android device. If personally doing it is legal (and basically unenforceable), what about making it easy for others to? Besides, unless you're a "radical Stallmanist" (for lack of better term), chances are you have a mix of proprietary a…

That would definitely be a dodgy thing to do. In general, law courts are interested in the net effect of what you're doing rather than the technical details of how you did it, and what you'd be doing in that case is equivalent to distributing the Frankenstein application yourself.

Describing in a blog post how to build the Frankenstein application is perhaps perfectly all right, but somewhere between there and the hypothetical application you described a fuzzy line would be crossed.

There's another fuzzy line relating to whether code is combined or not. Code that goes into the same statically linked binary is definitely combined, I presume. What about code that communicates via a REST API or a standard protocol? Perhaps it depends on the attitude of the communities that produce the code. The Linux people seem to be happy with non-free kernel modules in a way that some people wouldn't be.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#84

Post by imtringued »

extropy wrote: post #59
squarefoot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never did. Releasing the source contributed creating the developers ecosystem we have today. What Google fears more than the Armageddon would be someone making a truly FOSS operating system capable of running on Android devices, and they prevent that by keeping device drivers and firmware tightly locked.

IMO Android is working towards having a compatibility layer so that drivers can be freely shared across distros. Look up Project Treble.

That still requires cooperation from the SoC vendors. If they aren't interested then Treble will go nowhere.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#85

Post by DiseasedBadger »

gwicks56 wrote: post #68
pfortuny wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the question resides mainly on the GPL. Other licenses like BSD/MIT do not care what you do with the code or what you use to run it, AFAIK.

I don't get it. The Telegram GitHub says: "Since one can't use Google's push messaging in a FOSS app", but I can't work out why? Lots of FOSS apps on GitHub, mine included, use Firebase. It had never occurred to me it might be an issue.

If you use a gpl library, what you make with it must be distributed under the gpl.

You cannot distribute firebase blobs under the gpl. Ergo, you have used a gpl library to make something not gpl.

Which is illegal.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#86

Post by pfortuny »

striking wrote: post #82
pfortuny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if I understand correctly, the GPL prevents you from using a non-free library in your code? (Asking honestly: I have tried to find this elsewhere but the FSF page on the GPL is rather ... convoluted). If that is so, then this is obviously a killer and quite seemingly arbitrary requirement. Your MS example is quite good.

Your code is no longer completely FOSS when you do that. It depends on a binary blob that you can't see into.

Yes, yes, but I guess BSD-licence-using developers do not care too much about it.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#87

Post by izacus »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #51

So to summarize, to save battery all notifications on Android (since two versions ago) have to go through a single notification service (rather than each app having the option of continuously running in the background and maintaining a connection with its own notification service). Recently Google killed their GCM notifications service in favor of Firebase Cloud Messaging, which (unlike GCM) unfortunately doesn't hav…

> But this seems rather unlikely to me. Are they saying that an application running continuously in the background uses the same amount of battery as an application that's not running at all? Or am I just misreading that statement?

I don't see how that could be true - Android has seen massive battery life improvements after introduction of Doze which forces apps to sleep and stops the from constantly waking up radio and main ARM core. FCM is the only service that can wake up the device remotely and includes throttling code. Before these changes Android had severe idle battery life issues (which were happily mocked by owners of locked down and proprietary iOS devices on this very website) since multiple apps waking up radio for notifications/synces caused radio/cpu to run pretty much constantly. It's worth noting that just doing a radio ping can increase power consumption by as much as 100x for next few minutes.

Maybe the Telegram report ignores the fact that they aren't allowed to wake up the device anymore. If you're measuring in isolation it's easy to make a case for "not making a difference".

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#88

Post by jchw »

I was confused for a moment because I thought the Firebase SDK was open source.

Interestingly, though, the Android version appears to be only partly open source. I did not find an explanation as to why some of the source is not available, it is mentioned on the Github repository but not explained. In any case, I don’t see the code for Cloud Messaging in there.

It may not be that it is done out of secrecy, though. A cursory glance of the iOS SDK shows what seems to be the full iOS portion of Firebase Cloud Messaging:

https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/tree/master/Fir...

Though that also raises its own question: doesn’t iOS effectively enforce APNS, and all third party providers actually must go through that? I imagine going through a single provider really can improve battery life. Each push provider needs to background fetch.

FWIW, as far as I know, FCM and APNS are both free to use indefinitely. I’ve always found this a bit perplexing since I can’t even really fathom how many messages an app like Facebook or Twitter would push per month. I wonder what the odds are of this ever changing. The cynical viewpoint could go either way.

At face value, this really does seem problematic for open source projects. Can a GPL app link to (the non-open parts of) the Firebase SDK? My guess would be no.

Hope this can be resolved :( There’s some really great stuff on F-Droid, like Amaze file manager.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Android. I don’t even use Android phones anymore.)

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#89

Post by izacus »

megous wrote: post #35

Can this fall under system library exception? For example if you're building mingw32 based GPL C app, you're linking to all kinds of windows system libraries and there's no need for them to be under GPL. If this notification library is available to anyone on Android and is part of the Android system platform, can it be the same, like some DLL that does notifications on windows?

No it doesn't, because the code that receives push notifications isn't part of AOSP.

Re: Android now forces apps to include proprietary code for push notifications

#90

Post by simonh »

pfortuny wrote: post #57
kartan wrote: post #26

> Problem: The Firebase Android client library is proprietary, meaning FOSS apps can not use it. Apps that do not comply are reported to the user as "using too much battery". This is a standard on the industry. From 1999: https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i... It doesn't matter how much money Google is going to have to pay in the future as a fine for this practice. The amount of money that th…

So, if I understand correctly, the GPL prevents you from using a non-free library in your code? (Asking honestly: I have tried to find this elsewhere but the FSF page on the GPL is rather ... convoluted). If that is so, then this is obviously a killer and quite seemingly arbitrary requirement. Your MS example is quite good.

If you are the creator of the GPL software you can do what you like, link Firebase to it, distribute the app and release your code as GPL. You're effectively 'granting yourself' a proprietary license to use your code and a GPL license for everyone else to use it.

However it means nobody else can release their own apps (with notifications) on Android based on your code, or anyone else's GPL code. As soon as they link to Firebase and distribute they will violate the GPL by distributing a binary of someone else's GPL code with a proprietary library attached.

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