← Back to context

Comment by jsiepkes

18 hours ago

> Can you name an OS that gives more support to OEMs than Android?

I don't see how this is relevant for this discussion? The whole point is that Android is only opensource in name. You must license Google Play services from Google otherwise Android is practically useless since you can't run 99.9% of the Android apps. When you license Google Play services Google will also impose all kinds of other restrictions on you which have nothing to do with Google Play services. Like for example mandating you don't set Perplexity AI as the default...

Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.

5 comments

jsiepkes

Reply
robertlagrant  18 hours ago

> Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.

Or building your own services, presumably?

  • jsiepkes  16 hours ago

    > Or building your own services, presumably?

    In case of Android and Google Play services that is never going to work reliably. Your users will experience breakage on a regular interval and you will make yourself wildly unpopular with app developers (since they will be getting the bug reports of the subtle incompatibilities). Probably to a point where they might just block their app from running on your phone.

    All this stuff works on paper but it is going to be a constant up hill battle which you will loose in the end because your users will become fed-up with the constant needling of broken stuff and having to wait for you to fix it. It similar to using Wine on Linux. It works _a lot_ of the time but not all the time.

    If you want to experience using reverse engineered Google play services, try an Android phone (or emulator) with microG on it [1].

    [1] https://microg.org/

  • adgjlsfhk1  16 hours ago

    building your own services doesn't help any existing app OSes live and die from 3rd party apps so unless you can convince 10k developers to port their apps to a platform with no users, you're dead in the water