21–30 of 95 posts
It's not just them. Google doesn't talk to anybody.
Apart from Matt Cutts responding personally on HN, people trying desperately to sell you Adwords, and press releases; they may as well be a black hole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs (Warning: Strong language)
Android is more and more like the mobile equivalent of desktop Windows. Now they have the huge pirate market in China too. When this happened to Microsoft, certain strategy-oriented parts of the company were happy to see Windows spread everywhere as quickly as possible and deal with piracy later, whereas others were more concerned with the bottom line and how to extract revenue immediately. Google will have to deal w…
Its worst than that. A least with Windows on PC clones, you have control over the hardware and can update to your hearts content. Android makers often change the interface and can interfere with you from getting updates.
Developing a new shell for Windows was technically possible, but must have seemed like an outlandish prospect to companies like Compaq or Dell. ("Where are we going to hire a bunch of C developers who know GUIs and can do a better job at this than Microsoft? Forget about it.")
Some companies did go there -- for instance, HP had an advanced Windows shell called NewWave [0], but I don't think they ever built PCs specifically for it.
Today, the situation is very different. The executives at any old phone maker will look at Android and say: "That's just Java, isn't it? We have plenty of people who know Java. Hell, there's a school down the road where they train 100 Java developers every year. Let's do it! We can be a software company too, just like Apple!"
And of course we know how that turns out. But it will take a long time until the executives at all those LGs and HTCs will recognize that their organization sucks at software, because it's not a software organization at its core. (Nokia spent tens of billions of dollars on Symbian and MeeGo until they finally got this lesson, and they ended up selling the phones to a software company.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can flash Gapps to get the G-suite in CyanogenMod. Download at http://goo.im/gapps Copy to your SD, reboot into recovery, flash the .zip file, reboot.
Read his question again. He didn't ask how to do it, he knows that. He asks why it works. I was wondering the same thing when I read the article - my best bet is that the idea of ‘cracked’ G-Suite keys is a journalistic fiction invented for the sake of the story. Not that it's legal for them to distribute it when they are not certified, but I don't think that there is actually a key required.
That was unexpected. Why would Google be so ignorant of Android China? China seems like such an obvious part of the mobile big picture that I can only assume "big" things. In no particular order: • Google's decision to leave China [1] • Political interference to protect a Chinese mobile OS [2] • Some sort of license restriction that doesn't effect Google services over the web but kicks in for mobile (completely a wil…
* A desire to protect Google's relationship with the big-name phone manufacturers: maybe the big players have hinted that Google getting too helpful to the small Chinese firms would tend to cool them on Android
* Concern that the Chinese manufacturers might accept Google's technical help, then refuse to implement all of the G-suite or otherwise violate the terms of the certification. With Google's weakened position in China it might not be able to get effective redress
* A specific form of the above: concern that Chinese-brand phones will contain trapdoors to allow clandestine Chinese government access to your Gmail etc. Google can't prevent this from happening on Chinese phones with "unofficial" G-suite access, but at least it can disclaim responsibility, never having certified the device
Can anyone explain how I can just install the G-suite on Cyanogenmod then? Is it blessed by Google? Or does it recognise that my phone is appropriately blessed via the bootloader?
It's not blessed by Google. In fact they sent a C&D to CM over it. http://gizmodo.com/5367420/google-threatens-cyanogen-android... The site(s) you're downloading it from are committing copyright violations and are subject to a DMCA takedown.
Yes, that is technically true. But in practice, it's not like Google just haven't noticed yet and are likely to take them down any day now: the current situation (cyanogenmod ships without gapps, but google won't prevent goo.im hosting them or cyanogenmod linking to goo.im) was worked out in 2009 after that C&D, and Google seems to have been fine with it for the last 4 years - they even let goo.im have an app in the play store - even if, officially, they still reserve their right to assert their copyright in the future.
(The wording of the license for gapps now specifies that the licence is scoped to the device[1], so an end-user who installs gapps (e.g. from goo.im) on cyanogenmod is not committing copyright infringement if their phone came with gapps (i.e. not kindles etc.))
[1] "..licensed to handset manufacturers shipping devices", http://source.android.com/faqs.html
Slighlty OT: Anybody knows why installing an OS on mobile hardware cannot be just like installing Windows in the old days? First installing the base system and then drivers for 'non-standard' hardware components. Why do need hardware manufacturers and OS vendors to talk? Getting the G-Suite seems to be a problem now but there are already some alternatives for each of the G-Suite's apps and I'd welcome any newcomer to…
People don't want their phone to BSoD.
Never mind third tier phone OEMs, this is really hurting Google in tablets, where you don't need carrier retail channels.
Can anyone explain how I can just install the G-suite on Cyanogenmod then? Is it blessed by Google? Or does it recognise that my phone is appropriately blessed via the bootloader?
It's not blessed by Google. In fact they sent a C&D to CM over it. http://gizmodo.com/5367420/google-threatens-cyanogen-android... The site(s) you're downloading it from are committing copyright violations and are subject to a DMCA takedown.
Google obviously decided some time ago that cutting off CyanogenMod from the Google universe would not be in their best interests, whatever the strict legality of the situation.
this "Google offers the Android codebase for free download, but this is only part of the software needed to make a phone viable" is simply false. You have everything needed for a "phone" and even for a "smartphone", you simply miss google services that might (West in particular) or might not (East in particular) be perceived as a must have by consumer. See for example all the android-based phone that ship with altern…
The real alternative is expensive: Build your own ecosystem, as Amazon has.
this "Google offers the Android codebase for free download, but this is only part of the software needed to make a phone viable" is simply false. You have everything needed for a "phone" and even for a "smartphone", you simply miss google services that might (West in particular) or might not (East in particular) be perceived as a must have by consumer. See for example all the android-based phone that ship with altern…
Nobody, not even Oppo with their CyanogenMod-based Android, is selling an Android product in developed-world markets without Google Play and the rest of Google's app suite. The real alternative is expensive: Build your own ecosystem, as Amazon has.