121–130 of 164 posts
I'd be really happy if this leads to app developers making apps that can work without Google Play Services.
If you don't want to use google play, you can download the APK from any number of apk mirror sites and install the app yourself manually.
Warning: Personal opinion, so treat it as such. Regardless of this being mandated or not, they are sacking the best Android flagship representative thus leaving the market open to others. Huawei is huge outside US and their latest phones are a better purchase than Samsung, more performant but most importantly they age slower which is a critical thing for an Android device.
This has been mandated by a US government decree. The US president has declared a "National Emergency" which gives him this kind of power. They have placed Huawei and 70 linked partners on a trade blacklist saying Huawei is a danger to national security. So it is now effectively an offense for US companies to trade with Huawei directly or indirectly. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3010403/us-commerce-... I h…
Which in some way makes this a self-fulfilling action.
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Why not? They also built on Android to have one common ecosystem with all the benefits of scale. If Huawei now builds their own App Store, Samsung risks losing customers in countries where Huawei already dominates. Building one together would at least keep the status quo.
Because of their country of origin. They both are based in democracies and are unlikely to be embargoed like Chinese companies. What we see are symptoms of trade war between China and the west. South Korean and Japanese companies do not share the same role in this story as Huawei.
I don't know how is it in US, but in Europe recently Huawei is very successful and growing. All big smartphone stores have now special tables with Huawei show-cases, lots of TV Ads.
I'd be really happy if this leads to app developers making apps that can work without Google Play Services.
Pretty much all android apps can work without google play currently. If you don't want to use google play, you can download the APK from any number of apk mirror sites and install the app yourself manually.
The play services is a framework that many (and probably all "western") apps require because they use push notifications, maps, google ads and probably a lot of other google services. An android phone without those services installed isn't able to run said apps. And while it is possible to emulate the play services, I don't think this would work on a huge scale because they would still be accessing private google cloud apis and google could shut it down very fast. You have to remember, Apps don't send your notifications to your device directly, they send it to google, who then forwards your push notification to the device (if every app would regularly pull an notification server, your device would run out of battery way too fast).
The only reason google currently doesn't ban those emulations is that the % of users who use those is so low that it doesn't cause them any harm.
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Enough with repeating the official propaganda of "espionnage", etc. This is a transparent pretext. The real issue is the US facing the end of their status of top dog with the rise of a superpower that does not answer to them (which is an emotive subject). It's no hyperbole to state that they are fighting for their empire and resorting to gunboat diplomacy. Nothing less, nothing more. This is an extremely sensitive, a…
Perhaps so, and as my emotional input I'd still rather have a bad-democracy ruling over the world as supposed to a totalitarian state. Actually I even prefer China losing influence on global scale, what do you have to say about that? Yet I still don't resort to over-extrapolation or forming my opinions based on how I feel about the subject. My personal values do have a play on how I view the world, but I try to be as…
I mean, would you say the US body politic has been acting particularly adult lately?
Trump has painted himself into a corner with all the trade war stuff, the only move he knows is escalation, and this is obviously a dumb idea.
Chinese companies are big enough to fork Android, and now they're supremely motivated even if this were reversed tomorrow.
One more bit of influence down the drain.
I don't know how is it in US, but in Europe recently Huawei is very successful and growing. All big smartphone stores have now special tables with Huawei show-cases, lots of TV Ads.
As a consumer, I'm almost at the stage now when buying a phone or any consumer tech - that I feel that I should be printing out a list of features the phone offers and getting the sales chap to sign them, so if any are changed/removed down the line (like software updates stop prematurely) - I'd have an easier legal redress to obtain a refund under being mis-sold.
And this is the danger of having so much power concentrated in a single country. Google might not want to do this, but they might need to, because they are a US company. Unfortunately this affects everyone. Why should Europeans care about US’s trade wars? And don’t get me wrong, I would never buy Huawei devices because they are made by a company owned by a communist party, but that’s my choice to make, not that of so…
Huawei is not owned by a communist party. Even google will tell you that much..
So how long will it take until Asian Phone companies using Android get together to develop an alternative Android ecosystem? They could set it up in a neutral nation with profits going to all companies. So far, these always failed because it was only one company involved (e.g. Amazons app store) but will all major manufacturers involved, it would be much more profitable for developers to be on that app store than on…
Most Chinese versions of Android are completely de-Googled[1]- no Play store, no Maps, no GMail, etc. They have their own app store, web browser, and everything else. They are still based on Android, but it's not a stretch to think that most Chinese phone manufacturers could fork the open source project tomorrow. As soon as Google goes too far against the Chinese government, the manufacturers will receive a notice th…
AFAIK, most Google stuffs are already blocked by the GFW, and Google Play is not preloaded on Android phones sold in mainland China. What can Google do to go farther...?
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Nothing wrong with the goal of advancing ones local industries. Competition is good, but only if it's fair. China uses and copies a lot of western technologies yet puts a lot of restrictions on western countries that want to do business in China. To get access to their huge market certain businesses are required to share their intellectual properties with the Chinese. Is that fair? Kawasaki Heavy Industries shared th…
> Nothing wrong with the goal of advancing ones local industries. Competition is good, but only if it's fair. Are you suggesting it's unfair to have a National Security Agency with the explicit goal of industrial espionage to help domestic companies? Let's not pretend that the US doesn't do that, please.
It makes strategic sense to do industrial espionage but there's so many ways it can go wrong.