101–110 of 121 posts
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maybe I'm dumb but I'm missing the part where Android is a proprietary trademark.
The term Android is not trademarked. Even the bugdroid is released under a cc-attrib license. Funnily, the term 'droid' is trademarked and licensed by lucasfilm/disney mostly.
I just came back from China, in which most of the phones I used did not have Google Play, or Play Services, and had replacements for everything. If you try to use an phone with Google Play in China, you need a VPN, since if the app calls things like location services, it'll get blocked, for example, Taxi hailing apps could not retrieve the location, however with a native-phone, they work. Needless to say, the experie…
I'm not sure if I am understanding it well. Does the EU have an issue with Google Chrome coming pre-installed with Android? In that case, shouldn't Microsoft face the same penalties since IE/Edge comes pre-installed on the Windows OS? I believe that these pre-installed apps can't be uninstalled (because it might happen that you end up with no browsers on your phone), but would making the app uninstallable solve this…
The difference is the monopoly that Google has obtained in Europe with more than 80% market share. Similar to how Microsoft was fined for making the internet explorer the default on their platform and thereby dominating the market (windows) a decade ago, Google is likely going to be fined and forced to open their monopolistic platform to fairer competition. The thinking behind this is that you can't have terms that p…
But is it the default the largest seller of android phones is samsung which makes all its own apps as default on its android phones. It even has its own appstore.The best possible outcome I could see from something like this is the opening up of the Play Store ecosystem to third party Android forks. The contention is over Google licensing Android branding and its proprietary apps running on top of the AOSP and requiring them all be shipped together. The problem isn't the OS itself, it is the Play Store hegemony and the fact you cannot reasonably ship an Android phone without…
>. The problem isn't the OS itself, it is the Play Store hegemony and the fact you cannot reasonably ship an Android phone without it - nobody would buy it. isn't this what amazon does?
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And various interests building products based on Android will fund it or directly contribute. Note: Development on Linux happens.
Yes, and it's totally the year of the Linux desktop....not. Look, I love Linux as much as the next guy - and I plodded along with Slackware, then Ubuntu, then Arch as my main machine for many years. Heck, I even used Gentoo as my main box for a while. But let's be completely honest - Linux on the desktop compared to say OSX, or Windows, or even ChromeOS - doesn't even hold a candle, in terms of cohesive UX design, us…
I would suggest Android is a much more consumer focused product, whereas Linux has been a much more IT focused product, and their development priorities reflect that.
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Details are in the EU's press release: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm The key points: > requiring manufacturers to pre-install Google Search and Google's Chrome browser and requiring them to set Google Search as default search service on their devices, as a condition to license certain Google proprietary apps; > preventing manufacturers from selling smart mobile devices running on competing op…
It's the second and third points that I take issue (with Google) on. The first seems a reasonable way to try to ensure that if manufacturers want to benefit from the ecosystem Google has built they have to provide users with the experience Google intended. Less than that can reflect poorly on Google if the manufacturer provided ecosystem integration is lackluster or even intentionally restricted. The other two points…
Like you I do potentially have a problem with the second point - depending on the details. I think Google has good technical reasons to take measures to prevent fragmentation of Android. Incompatible ecosystems arising would have very real negative consequences for the very competition that the EU is trying to protect. (as in, the only reason there IS competition amongst Android OEMs is because there IS an OS with strong compatibility protections). What I don't think they can do is level those protections at a whole company level - you can't say "Acer can't make a variant of Android if they are also shipping a phone with Google Services". Now I would be OK with it if there's real potential for harm to the ecosystem - if Acer is shipping the phones which are incompatible and claiming they run "Android", for example. But if they clearly fork it as a separate OS, put out their own SDK with separate APIs etc. then Google has no business telling them not to do it. So even this one I could go either way on depending on the exact details of the circumstances.
I just came back from China, in which most of the phones I used did not have Google Play, or Play Services, and had replacements for everything. If you try to use an phone with Google Play in China, you need a VPN, since if the app calls things like location services, it'll get blocked, for example, Taxi hailing apps could not retrieve the location, however with a native-phone, they work. Needless to say, the experie…
I'd go back to a feature phone rather than locked into Xiaomi. Even with access to the Google apps it's a disaster area
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maybe I'm dumb but I'm missing the part where Android is a proprietary trademark.
The term Android is not trademarked. Even the bugdroid is released under a cc-attrib license. Funnily, the term 'droid' is trademarked and licensed by lucasfilm/disney mostly.
Google quote: "Android™ should have a trademark symbol the first time it appears in a creative."
Brand Guidelines http://developer.android.com/distribute/tools/promote/brand....
Yes, I do know who you are -- in fact, we have met -- but Google should not be using Android™ if it's not trademarked ;-)
In the US here. I just went from being an iphone user of long standing to a android user mostly because I want google apps over at least iphone apps. Especially the map apps. I did install firefox asap on my nexus 6p but I use chrome and firefox both. I love the bundle. I was happy with the iphone bundle but I did not love it. My youngest daughter is very happy I came over to the darkside. She has been an Android use…
You can get all the google apps in the iphone
You can get Google's apps, but isn't the same thing. Their apps are a lot more polished on Android. In particular for Gmail the difference has been night and day. On iPhone I don't even bother with Gmail, I just use the default email app.
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All? At first, lower quality? I think you massively underestimate how much investment is required to produce even a basic search engine, let alone one that eventually catches up to what Google has produced. And that's just search. Now throw in Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, etc ... these are international collaborations for a reason.
There are plenty of replacements for all of those except Android. Multiple browsers, various mapping companies (including OpenStreetMap), multiple email providers, multiple browser vendors. There's also Bing, and the various ancient abandoned former greats of search: Altavista (now Yahoo), Lycos.