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Android without the mothership

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Re: Android without the mothership

#151

Post by sp332 »

pessimizer wrote: post #102
euank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why no mention of FirefoxOS? The Mozilla foundation has our best interests at heart much more than Google and while it's not C++, html5/javascript is certainly an open enough platform which basically everything has started to target anyways. Sure, a pure linux phone would be cool in some ways, but FirefoxOS seems much closer, realer, and every bit as awesome.

>Sure, a pure linux phone would be cool in some ways, but FirefoxOS seems much closer, realer, and every bit as awesome. Linux phones are real. I've been using one exclusively for the past 5 years.

Nokia?

Re: Android without the mothership

#152

Post by miguelrochefort »

josephlord wrote: post #148
miguelrochefort wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are carrying a Google phone and using the Google systems you are giving them access to where you are going, where you have been, who you have met, who you know. That's great! Profit while it's still free. We'll soon have to pay to get businesses to track us. > All these can be intimate personal details at times. They may provide information about health, sexual partners and activity. They can also reveal jou…

I'm starting to think you are trolling me. In case anyone is taking your position seriously Google don't necessarily share the information about you with you. Secondly in twenty years time when someone has obtained high office Google will still have the records of them visiting prostitutes/gay bars/anti-gay marriage events (whatever is disapproved of in 2035) and Google[0] or a disreputable employee[1] will blackmail…

My position is obviously controversial, but I assure you that I truly hold these views. I am not trolling on purpose.

Google should definitely share information concerning me with me (or information concerning anyone with everyone). But whether or not they do it shouldn't have any legal implication. They can be evil (as in not transparent) if they wish.

Whether or not large corporations that gather data about people (such as Google) are evil or not doesn't concern me. I would hold the same position if Skynet existed. They deserve this right just as much as anyone else.

Re: Android without the mothership

#154

Post by seanmcdirmid »

DCKing wrote: post #129
dublinben wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon, Nokia, and the rest have largely had to build replacements for Google's services in order for their devices to work. As much as we might wish it weren't the case, pure AOSP without someone's proprietary baggage just doesn't work.

Pure AOSP doesn't provide cloud services. That's right. Developers need to think of the libraries they're using, whether they are Google's, Amazon's or Microsoft's. In the end, I think it's a good thing that AOSP doesn't have a dependency on some cloud service, be it Google's or someone else's. The unfortunate downside is that developers might forget that the cloud service they want is not available.

I would say that the kernel/UI you are running on your phone aren't as interesting as or provide significant value compared to the services used on the phone. If the OSS crowd wants to make a play for open phones, they have to address the service problem or they are just doing free work to support Google/Microsoft/Amazon, etc...

Re: Android without the mothership

#156

Post by njs12345 »

edgyswingset wrote: post #94
jlujan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

presumably, as a programmer, you check return values. Especially if they could be a null reference

Actually the way you check for Google Play services doesn't involve nulls at all, it's a status code. And related to null-checking, I took the pervasive approach in one of my apps for fun. It's hilarious - almost 1/3 of my app is checking if something is null. Makes you wish for a switch to a language where nulls don't exist unless explicitly asked for.

Not always. If you use maps, for instance, then calling getMap on a map fragment when Play Services isn't installed will give you back a null reference.

Re: Android without the mothership

#158

Post by hindsightbias »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #107

There should be a name for this privacy craze. It's one of the rare instance where people can act completely irrationally (to the point of paranoia), and people will accept it as completely normal and expected. I hope you realize how silly all of this will sound 20 years from now.

cryptosexual?

Re: Android without the mothership

#159

Post by balakk »

aestra wrote: post #97
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running something nice on Linux is still challenging today, in 2014. It was no picnic in the 90's. Credentials: I was running Linux before Linux was cool, it was called Minix.

When I first started there was no automount for CD/DVD drives! That made it pretty unusable for all but the most tech savvy.

When I first started there were no CD/DVD drives :(

Re: Android without the mothership

#160

Post by frowaway001 »

kodablah wrote: post #146
mike_hearn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great idea! It would make sense to define a high level yet minimalist type system, a large standard library, and a CPU independent bytecode format that many languages and compilers could target. They could then add to that basic type system as they wished whilst still retaining interoperability. We could call the infrastructure that makes this possible ... a virtual machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_l…

Scala has dropped Android support and I doubt others are gonna try and maintain it as new JVM instructions come out that we all want to take advantage of but Android will not support.

No.
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