google had a very good reason to move services outside AOSP, to update them without relying on carriers.
they could release billing API v3 w/ 90% compatibility in day 1. this is how they could workaround fragmentation.
as an android dev, i love being able to read framework source code for better design, performance and less bugs. that is all really matters imho.
Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
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Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#12Open always wins, until it conflicts with your business interests. "Open" used to be the oft-repeated advantage over iOS in the early days, I wonder if that will slip away from the narrative like "SD card slots", "removable batteries", and "real keyboard" did.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#13What's really annoying is when the Google apps start becoming worse to make Google more money. I never open the app store without wanting an app, but it constantly tries to sell me books and movies and stuff like that. They even have separate Google apps for reading and movies, so shoving it in the app store is just a money grab making my usage more difficult to shove some ads in my face. Were these apps open source people could just fork, but we're stuck going along with Google until they mess up so bad it makes sense to switch over entirely to Amazon App store, Samsung Apps Seller, etc. and the equivalent for everything else.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#14> Android has arguably won the smartphone wars, but "Android winning" and "Google winning" are not necessarily the same thing. This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation. Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
> This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation.
> Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
That's effectively what it says in the article: "It's easy to give something away when you're in last place with zero marketshare, precisely where Android started. When you're in first place though, it's a little harder to be so open and welcoming. Android has gone from being the thing that protects Google to being something worth protecting in its own right."
i.e. Android is doing what it was designed for - protecting Google's presence on the mobile web - but with such a dominant market position Google found that it ceased to be solely a means of protection, and actually an asset in its own right. It's in that extension of the original aim where the interests of Android as an open source project and Google as a for-profit company do not match up.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#15"In an ocean with great waves, whales fly into the air unnoticed, but in a calm pond, even the tiniest minnow makes a ripple." -confucius When the iPhone debuted, no doubt Google sensed the impact, and Apple's ability to create an effective closed ecosystem had already been proven with iTunes. I believe that Google wanted to undermine the market long enough to understand it. True enough, "android winning" was not the…
> whales fly into the air unnoticed
Is this the origin of the Twitter fail-whale?
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#16Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.
I'd fully support their modules that connect to the cloud servers being open source / GPL / etc, but to expect them to open them up to unauthenticated requests is untenable and leaves them way open to abuse / lack of rate limiting / making the service a bad time for all involved.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#17> Google does everything in-house. The company gets Maps and all of its cloud services basically for free. This statement is utterly false. In-house does not mean free.
All of its Maps data and many of its APIs already existed for Google Maps on the desktop. Within the mobile space, and relative to a mobile-only competitor, Google's access to that data is effectively free.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#18Open always wins, until it conflicts with your business interests. "Open" used to be the oft-repeated advantage over iOS in the early days, I wonder if that will slip away from the narrative like "SD card slots", "removable batteries", and "real keyboard" did.
History doesn't really support this. Even Linux had to get some corporate backing (initially Red Hat, Suse, and the like), and later Canonical and others before it really took off.
Open source has proven to be a long term survivor, but not a winner.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#19> While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. That's right, joining the OHA requires a company to sign its life away and promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.
...
> This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices.
That is fairly incredible, I'm surprised it is not an anti-trust/competition issue.
Re: Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary
#20Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains. I'd fully support their modules that connect to the cloud servers being open source / GPL / etc, but to expect them to open them up to unauthenticated requests is untenable and leaves them way open to abuse / lack of rate limiting / making the service a ba…
> Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.
It also consists of witholding access to those APIs if a company uses a competitor service:
> Another point of control is that the Google apps are all licensed as a single bundle. So if you want Gmail and Maps, you also need to take Google Play Services, Google+, and whatever else Google feels like adding to the package. A company called Skyhook found this out the hard way when it tried to develop a competing location service for Android. Switching to Skyhook's service meant Google would not be able to collect location data from users. This was bad for Google, so Skyhook was declared "incompatible." OEMs that wanted the Google Apps were not allowed to use them. Skyhook sued, and the lawsuit is still pending.