221–230 of 234 posts
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How can anything other that 99% market share even be considered a monopoly? If it's 80% or 90% then there is obviously choice and thus no monopoly. Anti trust is such bunk...
I once saw an economics paper finding that if the top four players in a given market have more than 60% marketshare between them, they'll naturally act as a cartel. Ergo preserving an effective free market for consumers requires preventing that circumstance.
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Is GMail subject to the same task killer that 3rd party apps are? I suspect it isn't. If that's true then Google has given itself a good monopoly for email on its own OS, much like Microsoft did for Internet Explorer.
Are you referring to how Android will reclaim memory from inactive processes? Android handles memory differently than you expect, it tries to keep thinks in memory and only kills apps if it needs their memory back for a more demanding process. Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory, but the same isn't true of Gmail or other Google Apps. They…
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Three points: 1) Newer custom ROMs can deny permissions on a per-app basis. I understand this isn't for everyone, but I enjoy having this option very much on my own device. (I also agree with you that it should be baked into the vanilla Android, but I can understand why they wouldn't want to confuse users with that option.) 2) Some apps will give you a choice in their own settings (if you trust that). 3) You always h…
> Some apps will give you a choice in their own settings (if you trust that) I noticed recently that Google gives you the option of disabling "Google Location Services" which allows apps to read location when they're not running. However, disabling this causes Google Maps to refuse to read your location when it is running. ...And that's about when I started looking seriously at OpenStreetMaps. Sadly haven't found a g…
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Are you serious? What other commercial OS can I do a competing fork of? Don't you see that the same restrictions apply to all other consumer OSs (iOS, WP, etc) by simply being closed-source?
That's a fair point, but Android is open source (and indeed was heavily marketed on that basis). They don't get to use any mechanism they like to make the situation comparable to their closed competitors. Their situation is also not comparable to iOS, WP, etc, because of their position of market dominance, just the same as the situation with Windows and Mac OS back in the day.
Android is open source; their services and corresponding apps aren't, and that's what they use as leverage. Not allowing them the same rights over those as other companies have over their proprietary software is essentially punishing them for having released something as open source.
And yes, Android is open source, and the Kindle Fire proves it. The fact that some people expect Google Play et all to be bundled is not Google's fault.
Their situation is also not comparable to iOS, WP, etc, because of their position of market dominance, just the same as the situation with Windows and Mac OS back in the day.
But Windows was, and while Microsoft was criticized for a lot of anticompetitive plays, not allowing people to create forks of Windows was never one of them. Not to mention that Google does allow you to create forks of Android, they just don't give you access to their services on top of that.
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.
for development yes, thats like providing a SDK. I can develop just fine on Windows phones and even iOS :) So basically, its not really all that opensource anymore, that's what most people mean.
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Why?
It's their OS, they can do as they please. As history showed, there wasn't even an MS monopoly in existence. OSX became viable in the early oughts, Linux was always around, and now people write of the death of the PC. Regardless, abuse of market dominance (note I don't use the overused 'M' word) increases incentives for competitors to enter the marketplace.
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Are you referring to how Android will reclaim memory from inactive processes? Android handles memory differently than you expect, it tries to keep thinks in memory and only kills apps if it needs their memory back for a more demanding process. Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory, but the same isn't true of Gmail or other Google Apps. They…
Yes I was, glad to hear GMail is subject to the same rules as other apps. Not sure what you mean by "Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory"
A lot of common APIs (Location API, Maps API, Play Games API, Push Notifications API, etc) have been consolidated under the Google Play Services umbrella process. Since these common APIs are used by lots of applications, this would ensure the Play Services process never gets booted from memory.
It also has the added benefit that applications using push notifications like Gmail don't need to maintain a background service because they can rely on Google Play Services to activate them as needed. Location based apps like Yelp can determine your location more quickly because Google Play Services is constantly monitoring it. All while reducing the over all memory foot print of applications because they're all deferring to Google Play Services.
Google can also change their APIs for services, upgrade to new protocols like SPDY, and developers don't need to update their applications because Google just needs to maintain the interface to Google Play Services. It's pretty clever.
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It's their OS, they can do as they please. As history showed, there wasn't even an MS monopoly in existence. OSX became viable in the early oughts, Linux was always around, and now people write of the death of the PC. Regardless, abuse of market dominance (note I don't use the overused 'M' word) increases incentives for competitors to enter the marketplace.
It's got nothing to do with monopoly !!! Apple or Linux have nothing to do with it ; the ruling being for behaviour in the period that preceded 2000. Microsoft were in a dominant position in one market and leveraged this dominace to gain dominance in another. This is anti-competative. for the final time; a monopoly is not illeagal in and of itself, neither is it antitrust .
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It's got nothing to do with monopoly !!! Apple or Linux have nothing to do with it ; the ruling being for behaviour in the period that preceded 2000. Microsoft were in a dominant position in one market and leveraged this dominace to gain dominance in another. This is anti-competative. for the final time; a monopoly is not illeagal in and of itself, neither is it antitrust .
Looks like someone didn't read my post :)