Most of the examples of Google closed apps that are not part of the AOSP release are in fact apps that are based off of Google data-center services. Would it really help Samsung if the source to the Gmail app was open? Since Google controls the server side, and the client-server protocol, it limits the amount of innovation they can do.
The web equivalent would be like claiming that Chrome OS isn't open because the source to Gmail isn't available.
Google is stuck behind a rock and a hard place. If they don't try to create incentives for a unified experience, they get bashed for encouraging fragmentation, if they do assert a level of control, they get bashed for not being completely open.
> Google is stuck behind a rock and a hard place. If they don't try to create incentives for a unified experience, they get bashed for encouraging fragmentation, if they do assert a level of control, they get bashed for not being completely open.
This is exactly the position Microsoft was in during the mid-1990s, even before they went after Netscape. The article is saying that Google is even applying some of the same strong-arm tactics to keep OEMs in line. Fortunately, Google can point to Apple and say they're not a monopoly the way Microsoft was in its market. Plus, Android still looks really open compared to iOS.
Android is open enough to replace all Google apps with your own (Samsung) and open your own appstore (Amazon). Also companies are completely free to not pick Android (Tizen / Firefox OS / ?) and they are free not to license the Google apps and put their own or (other) open source ones. It would be hard to make Google out to be a monopolist via that route.
MS was different; there weren't much alternatives and the alternatives which were there were squashed by MS. People currently want the apps in the appstore; they want to play clash of clans; they don't care about the Google gmail app. This being the same bubble world as the chromebook thread on HN yesterday; tech people think non tech people actually notice what they are running; they generally don't. If they can play the games their friends are playing and if they can use 'the software' they are used to they are happy. What brand it is is not important.
As an example; when I sit with any of my family members (they are all non tech), they will say 'I will open up Word now' or ' I will open up Excel now' to me when we need to organize something or go over numbers of one of the companies. What pops up definitely never is Word or Excel but rather Libre Office or Google Docs or some free Android/iPad variety. No-one I know actually has or uses MS Office; they use the terms because they don't know 'spreadsheet' and 'word processor' is a mouthful. They don't miss Windows and would even mostly hate it if they had to work with it now (after tablets or chromebooks and even Macs, Windows for non-tech people Windows seems incredibly hard and tech to use).
All these alternatives and Android being deployed by many different companies in different forms would make it hard to call Google a monopolist on that grounds. Samsung could turn into one though.
I'm interested in how you think it works well for Google if they do nothing and allow Alibaba's Aliyun OS to market themselves as android. When issues do arise and incompatibilities in apps occur.. is this not the fragmentation that Google already is looked down upon ?
Aren't we forgetting about the closed-source elephant in the room - Google Play Services - the "platform behind the platform"?
>> Play Services has system-level powers, but it's updatable. It's part of the Google apps package, so it's not open source. OEMs are not allowed to modify it, making it completely under Google's control. Play Services basically acts as a shim between the normal apps and the installed Android OS. Right now Play Services handles the Google Maps API, Google Account syncing, remote wipe, push messages, the Play Games back end, and many other duties. If you ever question the power of Google Play Services, try disabling it. Nearly every Google App on your device will break. [Source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...]
Google Play Services are not (currently) required for developing and running apps, unless those apps integrate with Google's services, like Google Accounts and Google Maps. Of course nearly every Google App will break if you disable it, since every Google App is proprietary and Google's Play Services is their common framework.
The question is - do third-party apps break if you disable Google Play Services? And the answer is that it depends. If the app needs Google's services then it will stop working. However, making Play Services open-source, at least for the functionality provided right now, wouldn't do any good. Because those services rely on Google's server-side infrastructure, so you're still at their mercy.
The only thing that bothers me is the Wifi-based location tracking. Google collects info about nearby Wifi networks and so the phone is able to give a pretty good estimate of latitude/longitude coordinates, even without turning the GPS on. Turning Google Play Services off means that Wifi-based location tracking stops working. And this is a pain, given that many apps these days (Facebook, Twitter) want to get your current city and so Facebook for example is accessing my GPS every time I open the app, with no way to turn this functionality off and it's consuming my battery and the GPS status notifier is annoying. In case you're wondering I had to turn Wifi-based location tracking because of a bug in the latest Android 4.3, as it is preventing my Nexus 4 to go to sleep, thus draining my battery.
>Most of the examples of Google closed apps that are not part of the AOSP release are in fact apps that are based off of Google data-center services. Would it really help Samsung if the source to the Gmail app was open? Since Google controls the server side, and the client-server protocol, it limits the amount of innovation they can do.
I don't think Google's development of their own services is issue here. The issue, in my understanding, is that Google ties its services to Android under "Android compatibility" label.
Skyhook is a great example (the article mentions it) - mapping is important for Google, and Google literally pushed the company out of business by strong-arming manufacturers to stop using Skyhook services.
Can, say, Samsung make a deal with Yahoo to drop gmail, include only Yahoo mail on their phones and still pass "compatibility" test in Google, and have access to Google Play store and the rest of the services? Can you imagine HTC phone with Nokia maps? (speaking of maps and Nokia, anyone is quick to point that Nokia made a huge mistake not betting on Android as Symbian replacement. And couple of months ago we saw that mapping is so important to Nokia that they're ready to let negotiations with Microsoft fail just to keep mapping in their hands. Does anyone thinks that Nokia would be permitted to make Android phones with Nokia maps?)
The fact that Google services are (mostly) better than competition isn't relevant here - back in the day Internet Explorer was way better than Netscape Navigator, but that fact didn't made MS actions any better.
I think there is some legitimacy to this line of criticism, but as Amazon has shown, large organizations can produce their own forks.
I can imagine too that selective replacement of chunks of the 'Google Experience' might make consumers get a negative impression of the Google brand if the replacement has issues. Like if you replace the location with Skyhook or Nokia, and the new Maps app is just called "Maps", and if there are serious issues, consumers might say "Man, this Google Maps on Android sucks!" without realizing it's not Google Maps, because Android is strongly brand associated with Google.
There's also a logical rational for Amazon-style forking, in the sense that if you're going for a complete reskinning, the end result will likely be a lot better if it is completely horizontally and vertically integrated by a single vendor rather than cobbled together -- 'bloatware' experience.
> Google literally pushed the company out of business by strong-arming manufacturers to stop using Skyhook services.
This is what Skyhook claimed, but the reality was much different. Skyhook were intentionally or unintentionally polluting the Google AP database. They refused to change and so failed the compatability test.
And, in fact, the same author made the exact same point about Google Play Services being a big tool Google is using to get past OS version fragmentation about a month-and-a-half ago:
The author was all-praises on Google for its actions.
"Not having to package everything into a major OS update means Google can get features out to more users much faster and more frequently than before. ... This should all lead to a more unified, less fragmented, healthier Android ecosystem."
You're partly right, but in regards to the Gmail app, what I don't like about Android is that it doesn't come with a good email client that's not GMail. Android's GMail client is very polished and there's not much in it that's specific to Gmail, it could be a generic email client that works with POP3/IMAP/SMTP and other standards as well. The experience of users that aren't into Android's own services do suffer.
But I do not agree with people that claim Android is not open. Building an operating system is a big challenge and stock Android is enough for anyone to fork and do whatever they want. I actually play around with an old Galaxy S on top of which I installed Cyanogenmod without any of Google's Apps. The only problem is that developers only publish their apps on Google Play, which is a shame, given that Android does allow you to install apps from third party sources and you could have a good experience just with stock Android. I ended up installing Amazon's Appstore on it, which is not as good as Google Play, but at least they've got special offers :-)
> Android's GMail client is very polished and there's not much in it that's specific to Gmail, it could be a generic email client that works with POP3/IMAP/SMTP and other standards as well. The experience of users that aren't into Android's own services do suffer.
GMail uses a proprietary protocol that is decidedly not imap. It has features like colorized labels and inbox prioritizing that just isn't present in imap. Furthermore it has completely different performance characteristics (e.g it is much faster) than what imap email can provide. No one seem to have any details on exactly what the protocol is or how it works. They definitely seem to not want any third party clients accessing gmail though. Otherwise they would have published a protocol specification a long time ago.
> I actually play around with an old Galaxy S on top of which I installed Cyanogenmod without any of Google's Apps. The only problem is that developers only publish their apps on Google Play, which is a shame, given that Android does allow you to install apps from third party sources and you could have a good experience just with stock Android.
I went through the same process of installing Cyanogenmod without Google Apps and it made me wonder why developers of free apps don't distribute them outside Play e.g. on their sites. I understand paid apps and/or apps that have in app purchase but there are a lot of just free apps that just can't be downloaded. Any theories?
> What I don't like about Android is that it doesn't come with a good email client that's not GMail.
That would be like saying that the default camera app does not come with filters, shaders and other features that you like. What Google does is, gives a good enough app for generic use and leaves options open for developers to make better things and put them on the Play Store.
If Google starts incorporating all such features, it'll get much more difficult for developers to earn through the store.
"Off of" has been an English construction since the 1500s. It's entirely reasonable and appropriate in this context, much like contractions in informal written English.
But I'm fairly sure I'm replying to a throwaway account, so it's not like you were seriously interested.
When someone like Github does this (make some parts of their code open-source, but others closed-source), journalists don't write critical pieces about them, do they? I mean, Google leaves a bad taste in my mouth since they started shuttering services like it was Christmas at the Google Service Chopping Block, but I don't see them being actively evil here.
It's all according to the previously openly aired plan. Google keeps all of the existing code open source. Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so. Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem. It's fair game -- if a hardware partner thinks that one of Google's competitors can provide a better Android fork, they are free to leave the Alliance and go partner with that competitor. They will still get an enormous amount of code for free in AOSP. They just won't get all of the services that Google is building specifically for its own version of Android. How is any of this maintaining an "iron grip" in any way? Just contrast this with Apple where it is the sole owner of everything to do with the OS and app marketplace.
> Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so. Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem. It's fair game -- if a hardware partner thinks that one of Google's competitors can provide a better Android fork, they are free to leave the Alliance and go partner with that competitor.
A good example of this is Amazon. They are doing this successfully.
> Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem.
Imagine you want to sell a Linux laptop with your own Linux distribution. You're just a small shop in California, and you're shopping around to find a manufacturer for your laptops. And you find that anyone connected to Microsoft (Foxconn, Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, etc) can't do any job with you. Would you say "that's fair, Microsoft isn't evil by forcing hardware manufacturers to work exclusively with them" in such situation?
That's not what they're doing. HTC, Samsung, etc still sell non-Google OSs, like Windows Phone and Bada.
A good analogy would be Microsoft preventing you from selling your fork of Windows on those manufacturers, which happens to be exactly what every big OS maker does, by simply not distributing it under a Free license.
That's a mischaracterization of his own comments on why he left. It had to do with open sourcing GPU drivers, which is probably an issue with other vendors, not Google.
> When someone like Github does this (make some parts of their code open-source, but others closed-source), journalists don't write critical pieces about them, do they?
Github don't constantly go on about how 'open' Github is, though.
True, but Github does use the halo of "Open Source" a lot to promote themselves (or others promote them using it..e.g. http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/github/) while overlooking the fact that most of their codebase is very close sourced indeed.
Not really. You will have your mainline Abdroid implementation shutdown if you do this. Google is clearly doing this to make forking a very risky proposition for device manufacturers. It's the antithesis to open.
> Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, it was decided that Google would buy Android. And Android would be open source.
This is blatantly false. Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
> Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
Not only, as has already been pointed out, did the UI change, but if you look at the Android architecture it's clearly evolved along an very different path to iOS.
I remember when the first Android SDK came out the programming manual made it very clear to developers that we weren't to expect devices to always have discrete GPUs or touch-screens.
All those videos of Android demo or prototype units clearly showed Android was a Blackberry clone (just look at that tiny touchpad for navigating around Android OS) and changed its design direction after iPhone made its appearance.
In fact, Google was concerned about Microsoft more-strongly binding Windows Mobile (Windows Phone came later) to their Web ecosystem. Microsoft was working on Windows Live Search, which would later be replaced by Bing.
At the time, Windows Mobile was the epitome of a modern mobile OS. It had a real(ish) browser and a VM-based app runtime for a modern (C#) language (albeit optional and not nearly as tightly integrated with OS middleware as in Android). Google saw that an ecosystem such as Windows Live is much more critical to a mobile device than it is to a desktop PC. The nature of Android more closely reflects the threat from Microsoft than from iPhone.
The only real thing that seems "evil" is the requirement for OEMs to not manufacture _any_ devices compatible with non-Google forks. The rest of it seems pretty necessary in order to keep carriers and OEMs in line. A lesson Microsoft learned, and why Windows Phone started off by allowing the user to remove any pre-installed crap.
If Google didn't do any of this, and was totally altruistic, Samsung and others would already have completely screwed things up.
While it's certainly very much to Google's benefit, it also benefits most users because overall, Google has done a far better job than any OEM regarding user experience.
It seems obvious that Acer would have wound up in hot water with Google over this somehow, though it is odd that Google decided to focus their complaint on compatibility (rather than on Aliyun's piracy).
On the other side of the coin, many Android OEMs have distributed (and still distribute, so far as I know) devices without Google apps for the Chinese market (including Samsung, ASUS, Huawei, and even Motorola [1]). So far as I can remember, these were always essentially the same as non-Chinese devices except that they came with a different ROM that didn't include Google Apps. Nevertheless, that means that there's some scope for making non-Google Android devices, we just don't know how far it goes. Maybe if the HTC/Amazon rumors turn out to be true, we'll find out more.
[1] Though I think Motorola's efforts were shut-down post-merger because of Google's China policies.
> the requirement for OEMs to not manufacture _any_ devices compatible with non-Google forks
Is that really where the line is? My understanding is that it is almost the opposite: an OEM cannot manufacture any devices that break compatibility with AOSP, not support compatibility with a 3rd party fork. And the constraint is a condition of membership of AOSP rather than something imposed directly by Google. They can make things as compatible with as many non-Google forks as they want. They can break all compatibility wherever they want if they give up AOSP membership.
I think alot of people misunderstand what open source means. It's nothing more than allowing people to see the source code, and use it (including forking).
Open source doesn't require you to cooperate with anyone, it doesn't require you to give away access to APIs, it doesn't require you to do anything beyond whatever is explicitly stated in the license.
Google, Canonical, Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, etc... aren't required to be good team players or corporate citizens. They're just required to abide by the terms of the licenses on code they use...
Well, there is a philosophy (or rather, various different philosophies) that go along with the legal structures, and different projects have different levels of adherence to those ideas.
It eventually comes down to perception of value. Part of the original attraction of Android was its openness, if Google is now closing off substantial functionality, to head off competition, then it's not unfair for people to re-evaluate their enthusiasm for the product.
> Part of the original attraction of Android was its openness, if Google is now closing off substantial functionality, to head off competition, then it's not unfair for people to re-evaluate their enthusiasm for the product.
Very well put! Its not a legal perception that theres something wrong about what they are doing(and nobody are saying that they cannot do it in the legal aspect).. its a betrayal of some part that make people defend android for what it is, a open source project.. its the ideal behind the project that is being broken
If its not like that anymore, the same people that support it for its openess should be aware of it.. and see that things are actually, gradually and silently changing..
As an Android developer, I love that Google is doing this!
Android has come a very long way in the last few years in terms of usability and design. A large part of this has been due to an increasingly uniform design language and feel. That, and the new distribution model for what are basically Android updates (Google Play Services) has made Android feel more polished and actually allowed it to stand on its own against iOS. It also means that developers like me don't have to spend nearly as much time worrying about fragmentation in the traditional sense. Each day the percentage of people using sub-ICS phones falls, and we all get one step closer to the day we can support ICS+ only.
However, companies like Amazon would force me to rewrite the maps integration, the sign-in portion, the wallet, etc... Amazon did a great job of replicating Google Maps API V1 but they have yet to mirror V2 and don't mirror the other components I mentioned.
Aside from fragmentation and developer sanity, the article mentions another key point here:
"[M]any of Google's solutions offer best-in-class usability, functionality, and ease-of-implementation."
Exactly! Google APIs are not perfect, and there's bugs (like when Google Maps broke map markers on high resolution phones like the HTC One). But generally speaking, I'm really happy with the quality of the APIs and services. In an ideal world, Amazon and Google would work together to provide great and uniform single-sign-in APIs, great maps, etc... As it currently stands though, I don't believe either party is interested in doing so. Prisoner's dilemma?
> While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. That's right, joining the OHA requires a company to sign its life away and promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.
...
> This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices.
That is fairly incredible, I'm surprised it is not an anti-trust/competition issue.
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.
All of its Maps data and many of its APIs already existed for Google Maps on the desktop. Within the mobile space, and relative to a mobile-only competitor, Google's access to that data is effectively free.
Map data for mobile isn't free even for Google. Google buys licenses to the data from a few map data providers, and as there was effectively a duopoly in global map data, those licenses have very strict terms of use. To use that data for e.g. real-time navigation assistance in mobile requires a different, much more expensive licenses.
You mean it has a low marginal cost. However, it required a huge capital investment to create, from which they are now rightfully reaping the benefits.
While I can see the point of this article, it's being cast in a much more dramatic light than necessary. Phrases like "While Google is out to devalue the open source codebase as much as possible" seem hyperbolic to me.
What's really annoying is when the Google apps start becoming worse to make Google more money. I never open the app store without wanting an app, but it constantly tries to sell me books and movies and stuff like that. They even have separate Google apps for reading and movies, so shoving it in the app store is just a money grab making my usage more difficult to shove some ads in my face. Were these apps open source people could just fork, but we're stuck going along with Google until they mess up so bad it makes sense to switch over entirely to Amazon App store, Samsung Apps Seller, etc. and the equivalent for everything else.
This is an opportunity for Yahoo. The article mentions that OEMs can't leave because they're afraid of losing Google services, Yahoo can be that replacement. They've been making beautiful mobile apps lately and they have some very polished services. They are a pure play service provider who isn't trying to compete with the OEMs; they have no conflict of interest.
If you work at Yahoo, this is something you should run up the chain. A relationship with OEMs would solve their problems, and allow you to get a foothold in mobile that you haven't been able to before.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Linus Torvalds famous for his iron grip of Linux? In a very different way, to be sure, but it's my understanding that just because you make something open source doesn't mean you have to (or even should) relinquish control.
I think it's also pretty standard to open-source the core and keep the baubles proprietary. GitHub, for example, made their git interaction library open-source but their git hosting service itself is closed, as far as I know.
Every open source project has someone (or some group) in control, and contributions can't land without their say so. But anyone who feels that the current leadership is doing it wrong can fork the code and try to persuade people to use their version. This is very important to the way open source software works.
Google have a level of control beyond that: they undermine anyone trying to fork Android by not letting them use Google's apps and services (even as they allow such use on competing systems like iOS).
Sure. That makes perfect sense to me - Google apps and services aren't open source in spirit or practice. If I wanted a pure open-source mobile OS of my own, I wouldn't want any of Google's apps or services tainting it; if I did, Google would evaluate that option on their own, as they should.
I have a feeling that if an Android fork actually started to gain serious market share, Google would very quickly allow them to use GMail, Youtube and the other apps.
Part of my business is about creating Android-based embedded systems. So far, none of what Google has done impinges on using Android as a basis for an operating system for appliance-like devices. The main problem is that current development of Android is not done in the open. But, so far, the advantages of using Android's UI stack and other APIs in "appliance OS" applications outweigh the annoyance of sporadic updates to the AOSP code-base.
If you want to compete with Google, using Android poses a choice: If you make Google-branded Android devices that use Google's proprietary apps, you will have to give that up in order to use Android with other ecosystems.
Thirdly, if you want to use the Google ecosystem in a product, you have to use all of it. You can't substitute someone else's location services, for an example that was litigated.
Google could develop Android in the open and retain the same level of control over OEMs, and I think they should.
Google appears to be inconsistent in enforcing restrictions on OEMs. OPhone OEMs also make Android handsets, despite the fact that OPhone is an Android derived product. Maybe that arrangement pre-dates Google's current policies.
> Android has arguably won the smartphone wars, but "Android winning" and "Google winning" are not necessarily the same thing.
This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation.
Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
> This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation.
> Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
That's effectively what it says in the article: "It's easy to give something away when you're in last place with zero marketshare, precisely where Android started. When you're in first place though, it's a little harder to be so open and welcoming. Android has gone from being the thing that protects Google to being something worth protecting in its own right."
i.e. Android is doing what it was designed for - protecting Google's presence on the mobile web - but with such a dominant market position Google found that it ceased to be solely a means of protection, and actually an asset in its own right. It's in that extension of the original aim where the interests of Android as an open source project and Google as a for-profit company do not match up.
The article's description of what we're to happen if Apple did not have competition is quite accurate and write frightening. Even with the north American market share that Apple has they abuse it where possible.
"In an ocean with great waves, whales fly into the air unnoticed, but in a calm pond, even the tiniest minnow makes a ripple."
-confucius
When the iPhone debuted, no doubt Google sensed the impact, and Apple's ability to create an effective closed ecosystem had already been proven with iTunes. I believe that Google wanted to undermine the market long enough to understand it. True enough, "android winning" was not the same as "Google winning," but it did mean everyone else "losing." I believe that for Google, Android started as a strategy in search of a goal. It was a smokescreen to prevent Apple from taking a dominant position by default. As the data poured in, they began to understand how to leverage it, and the Nexus line became an expression of such understanding, working to establish more control, and hopefully emerge from the smokescreen they had created.
> I believe that for Google, Android started as a strategy in search of a goal. It was a smokescreen to prevent Apple from taking a dominant position by default
Impossible. Google bought Android years before Apple sold a single phone.
I will only buy / recommend nexus phones. Knowing that the phone will be updated quickly and for a long time is worth a premium, rather than being a cash in strat for Google.
my impression of nexus devices is that you are tied to the package of google services. is this so, or can a nexus-user break free from google's domain and enjoy the benefits of a quality low-cost device without being beholden to the google ecosystem?
Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.
I'd fully support their modules that connect to the cloud servers being open source / GPL / etc, but to expect them to open them up to unauthenticated requests is untenable and leaves them way open to abuse / lack of rate limiting / making the service a bad time for all involved.
> Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.
It also consists of witholding access to those APIs if a company uses a competitor service:
> Another point of control is that the Google apps are all licensed as a single bundle. So if you want Gmail and Maps, you also need to take Google Play Services, Google+, and whatever else Google feels like adding to the package. A company called Skyhook found this out the hard way when it tried to develop a competing location service for Android. Switching to Skyhook's service meant Google would not be able to collect location data from users. This was bad for Google, so Skyhook was declared "incompatible." OEMs that wanted the Google Apps were not allowed to use them. Skyhook sued, and the lawsuit is still pending.
What's interesting is how having a mobile OS is now only one part of the offering needed to be successful, and is arguably the easiest part.
To be successful on mobile you also need a fairly extensive layer of services. Some of those (web, mail and so on) are easy to bolt together but others such as maps and app stores are far harder and are about data and commercial deals as much as they are about software. While it would be wrong to say that these services can't be opened up, in many cases doing so isn't as straight forward as sharing source code.
It doesn't feel as if Google has changed so much as what it means be a mobile OS has.
Google is creating a walled garden just like any other company does. The article points to how they are making their shift towards an operating system that is similar to ios (in terms of lock in). Android may be an open-source platform but, on the majority of devices that compete at the top level, it becomes far from open source.
It's understandable why Google would lock people out of seeing the back end of their closed apps. But you have to look at what the long-term implications of them slowly removing support for ASOP apps are. As Google continually pushes out fantastic products that tie in so well to the mobile experience, why would anyone/developer want to have/develop [for] anything else. As this power grows, Google can strong-arm phone manufactures to develop hardware/features/etc to work with what they are developing. They have to sign contractual agreements to get the top version of Android and are then locked in to keep up the good terms. Google is outsourcing the hardware manufacturing to other companies and ensuring that if a user wants a good phone, they will be using their services.
Many people here are claiming any company can leave Google's garden like Amazon did. While some companies may be able to do that, I'm struggling to think of a one with the technological background, money to invest, and callousness for risk who are willing to try. Amazon has a huge assortment of media that it can toss at its users who use their hardware. Other companies don't have a differentiating factor or the software development to be able to make a truly competitive product to drive people away from Google supported Android. Just look at how much Microsoft, a software giant, is struggling to gain any shred of market share.
No executive in any reasonable company is going to propose to invest billions in order to squeeze into the highly competitive mobile OS market. It’s a huge risk that only a startup could swallow, and yet few startups could even raise the money required to topple the Google supported android market.
What the future is starting to look like is the one Google was initially afraid of, that users were” faced a Draconian future, a future where…one company, one device, one carrier would be [the] only choice.” As Google gains more power, the open source part that Android users love is going to slowly disappear. This may or may not happen, there are many variables that could prevent it, but it is a future that would bring Google the highest return and that is the goal of all market traded companies.
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.
it is not the same with providing an SDK. Well, if android was documented better, we would not need source code this much but most of the time, it requires checking the actual implementation to understand the whole picture. Probably it is the difference between being "just fine" to creating great things.
I don't understand the point of this article especially the bit about being an evil genius by ways of making excellent best in business cross OS api's. Really? being competitive is being an evil genius? If amazon is willing it can open there api's to none FireOS apps they have the infrastructure and money to support it, but they don't.
As a user I'm happy that Google is making sure that I can hop device manufactures without loosing my apps or functionality, if everybody would roll out there own app store and removed Google's you would be locked in with the OEM. Now you can safely change to a different phone, also they don't mind you downloading the Google apps when using an alternative ROM.
Android is open source but does that mean that you are not aloud to make money of it by providing closed source apps and service, many open source companies do that. The work that went in to Android if freely available for competitors. Lots of kernel enchantments went back in to Linux and now you have Ubuntu touch and Firefox OS both based on the Android kernel which in turn is based on Linux, how cool is that.
I once read an article in 2010 that criticized people for saying that Apple and iOS of the 2000s is like the Microsoft and Windows of the 90s. The article pointed out that Apple IS the Apple of the 90s and Google with its Android platform will become the Windows of the 90s. I think it's happening. In a few years Android is going to be as closed sourced as Windows, probably as ubiquitous, and most likely, just as prone to security issues.
It's already kind of like windows, no? It runs on hundreds if different devices. It's often bloated by OEM software that people hate. It's prone to security wholes. It's slow and clunky unless you run it on the latest hardware. It bends over backwards for compatibility sake. It's more and more closed sourced...
Android is Mobile windows of the 90s. I hope Ubuntu Mobile will be successful.
Sorry, but some of the things you wrote are about perception, not reality.
What does "prone to security issues" mean? And compared to what? When we compare iOS and Android, iOS had 304 vulnerabilities in 2007-2013 (294 in 2009-2013), while Android had 29 in 2009-2013[1]. That's order of magnitude difference, yet Android is blamed to be prone to security holes.
Also what does "clunky unless you run it on the latest hardware"? All systems are slow, when you run new system on old hardware. You cannot bend physics there. Ever used iOS4 on iPhone 3G? iOS7 on iPhone4? Or why there is no WP8 update for WP7 phones? These are exactly the same reasons.
Even the APIs in Play Services, as described in the article, are exactly marked as "google, not android". You project has to explicitly include Google APIs, it is not enough to target Android. Every Android developer knows that.
Vulnerability numbers alone do not accurately convey the mobile security landscape. To start with, even if those mean something, we must consider that Android devices tend to lag behind in terms of receiving OS updates. By contrast, iOS devices tend to be quickly updated.
Nothing wrong with what Google is doing. Google is essentially a consumer (and enterprise) cloud services company that is looking to commoditize (read open source/sell at cost) all other parts of the stack. That includes open-sourcing Chrome/Android, selling Chromecast/Google Fiber at cost.
Samsung devices ship with two versions, remember that while Samsung can't opt out of the Google apps, they're free to remove any AOSP app they'd like.
In fact, I've had AOSP apps disappear from my Cyanogen Mod ROM when I installed gapps, although I don't know if that was due to being overwritten or just part of the install script.
I know this is potentially dangerous in the future (I worry more about NSA having direct access to all the phones in the world through Google), but in terms of user experience, I welcome this. In order to have an ecosystem that is "as unified and standardized as possible" you need to have one company controlling it, and the vision behind it. Too many companies pulling in too many directions is not that good.
If AOSP is open source and Google updates let's say the location services, why can't anyone start a similar project for AOSP and have it funded (like by Apache or Mozilla)?
It seems that the main problem is the gatekeepers who manufacture phones.
Mozilla makes Firefox OS. They don't have the resources to also fix Android and what not, I think.
Apache takes a few projects under its wing but they don't provide the developers, and thus many of their projects are stalling.
"Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list."
Google Apps and APIs are fine and good, but I don't think any company should dictate to an OEM what products they can make for other companies.
I'm surprised that there's no mention of Tizen, Samsung and Intel's project and supposedly the former's Plan B to ditch Android altogether. With the same TouchWiz skin both Samsung's Android and Tizen, and with both OS's able to run Android apps, the plan would be to swap out the underlying OS without the users noticing.
Sometimes businesses take measures to increase profits at the expense of their users. However, preventing fragmentation of Android seems to be both in both Google's interests and the users. Only certain competitors could mind. Also, why should Google do all the work of creating an operating system and not get anything in return?
As much as the Android people hate the Apple people, Android is doing the same thing Windows and Apple have been doing for years - trying to shoe horn people into THEIR walled in garden.
This is the future of smartphones. You pick a phone and by doing so, you pick the walled garden you're going to most comfortable playing in, pure and simple.
I think Google's malicious intent is being over-exaggerated. It could simply be that they don't have enough resources to maintain old code. As to them creating closed-source apps, well, Google knows which side their bread is buttered on :) Anything that makes money for them is closed source.
I'm curious to know if there are any internal google project of porting all the Google play API on iOS (either on Objective-C , or using a cross-platform language such as mono develop, which would make more sense).
Why don't they (potential competitors) write an open source app based on openstreetmap? Their mapping data is usually on par, often even superior to that of Google. Plus, its free (in both senses of the word).
Nothing good can come out of Amazon or Samsung influencing or controlling Android. If those companies were in control, we'd still be in the tech ice ages where the phone companies control our devices.
As a Google shareholder, this article warms the cockles of my heart. Why should Amazon be able to get all the Android improvements that Google creates?
Open always wins, until it conflicts with your business interests. "Open" used to be the oft-repeated advantage over iOS in the early days, I wonder if that will slip away from the narrative like "SD card slots", "removable batteries", and "real keyboard" did.
I don't see Google making any rules about OEMs not being allowed to manufacture devices with micro SD slots, removable batteries or physical keyboards. Just because Google doesn't want to spend its R&D money on those features doesn't mean they're stopping anyone else who uses Android.
History doesn't really support this. Even Linux had to get some corporate backing (initially Red Hat, Suse, and the like), and later Canonical and others before it really took off.
Open source has proven to be a long term survivor, but not a winner.
The Android platform is open source under Apache/BSD/MIT licenses -- it's no harder to get that than it ever has been (not hard at all). Look at products like Kindle Fire for examples of "uses Android without Google Apps".
Most of the examples of Google closed apps that are not part of the AOSP release are in fact apps that are based off of Google data-center services. Would it really help Samsung if the source to the Gmail app was open? Since Google controls the server side, and the client-server protocol, it limits the amount of innovation they can do.
The web equivalent would be like claiming that Chrome OS isn't open because the source to Gmail isn't available.
Google is stuck behind a rock and a hard place. If they don't try to create incentives for a unified experience, they get bashed for encouraging fragmentation, if they do assert a level of control, they get bashed for not being completely open.
> Google is stuck behind a rock and a hard place. If they don't try to create incentives for a unified experience, they get bashed for encouraging fragmentation, if they do assert a level of control, they get bashed for not being completely open.
This is exactly the position Microsoft was in during the mid-1990s, even before they went after Netscape. The article is saying that Google is even applying some of the same strong-arm tactics to keep OEMs in line. Fortunately, Google can point to Apple and say they're not a monopoly the way Microsoft was in its market. Plus, Android still looks really open compared to iOS.
Android is open enough to replace all Google apps with your own (Samsung) and open your own appstore (Amazon). Also companies are completely free to not pick Android (Tizen / Firefox OS / ?) and they are free not to license the Google apps and put their own or (other) open source ones. It would be hard to make Google out to be a monopolist via that route.
MS was different; there weren't much alternatives and the alternatives which were there were squashed by MS. People currently want the apps in the appstore; they want to play clash of clans; they don't care about the Google gmail app. This being the same bubble world as the chromebook thread on HN yesterday; tech people think non tech people actually notice what they are running; they generally don't. If they can play the games their friends are playing and if they can use 'the software' they are used to they are happy. What brand it is is not important.
As an example; when I sit with any of my family members (they are all non tech), they will say 'I will open up Word now' or ' I will open up Excel now' to me when we need to organize something or go over numbers of one of the companies. What pops up definitely never is Word or Excel but rather Libre Office or Google Docs or some free Android/iPad variety. No-one I know actually has or uses MS Office; they use the terms because they don't know 'spreadsheet' and 'word processor' is a mouthful. They don't miss Windows and would even mostly hate it if they had to work with it now (after tablets or chromebooks and even Macs, Windows for non-tech people Windows seems incredibly hard and tech to use).
All these alternatives and Android being deployed by many different companies in different forms would make it hard to call Google a monopolist on that grounds. Samsung could turn into one though.
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I read the article and kept hearing echos of the Microsoft strategy of the 90s as well.
History may not repeat, but it rhymes.
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I'm interested in how you think it works well for Google if they do nothing and allow Alibaba's Aliyun OS to market themselves as android. When issues do arise and incompatibilities in apps occur.. is this not the fragmentation that Google already is looked down upon ?
Saying 'iOS is more closed' doesn't make Android meaningfully open.
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I don't think Apple will be a good defense if Android's market share is 80%.
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Aren't we forgetting about the closed-source elephant in the room - Google Play Services - the "platform behind the platform"?
>> Play Services has system-level powers, but it's updatable. It's part of the Google apps package, so it's not open source. OEMs are not allowed to modify it, making it completely under Google's control. Play Services basically acts as a shim between the normal apps and the installed Android OS. Right now Play Services handles the Google Maps API, Google Account syncing, remote wipe, push messages, the Play Games back end, and many other duties. If you ever question the power of Google Play Services, try disabling it. Nearly every Google App on your device will break. [Source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...]
Google Play Services are not (currently) required for developing and running apps, unless those apps integrate with Google's services, like Google Accounts and Google Maps. Of course nearly every Google App will break if you disable it, since every Google App is proprietary and Google's Play Services is their common framework.
The question is - do third-party apps break if you disable Google Play Services? And the answer is that it depends. If the app needs Google's services then it will stop working. However, making Play Services open-source, at least for the functionality provided right now, wouldn't do any good. Because those services rely on Google's server-side infrastructure, so you're still at their mercy.
The only thing that bothers me is the Wifi-based location tracking. Google collects info about nearby Wifi networks and so the phone is able to give a pretty good estimate of latitude/longitude coordinates, even without turning the GPS on. Turning Google Play Services off means that Wifi-based location tracking stops working. And this is a pain, given that many apps these days (Facebook, Twitter) want to get your current city and so Facebook for example is accessing my GPS every time I open the app, with no way to turn this functionality off and it's consuming my battery and the GPS status notifier is annoying. In case you're wondering I had to turn Wifi-based location tracking because of a bug in the latest Android 4.3, as it is preventing my Nexus 4 to go to sleep, thus draining my battery.
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This is either becoming or already is the core of Android, and it's closed source and no one wants to talk abut it. It's ridiculous.
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>Most of the examples of Google closed apps that are not part of the AOSP release are in fact apps that are based off of Google data-center services. Would it really help Samsung if the source to the Gmail app was open? Since Google controls the server side, and the client-server protocol, it limits the amount of innovation they can do.
I don't think Google's development of their own services is issue here. The issue, in my understanding, is that Google ties its services to Android under "Android compatibility" label.
Skyhook is a great example (the article mentions it) - mapping is important for Google, and Google literally pushed the company out of business by strong-arming manufacturers to stop using Skyhook services.
Can, say, Samsung make a deal with Yahoo to drop gmail, include only Yahoo mail on their phones and still pass "compatibility" test in Google, and have access to Google Play store and the rest of the services? Can you imagine HTC phone with Nokia maps? (speaking of maps and Nokia, anyone is quick to point that Nokia made a huge mistake not betting on Android as Symbian replacement. And couple of months ago we saw that mapping is so important to Nokia that they're ready to let negotiations with Microsoft fail just to keep mapping in their hands. Does anyone thinks that Nokia would be permitted to make Android phones with Nokia maps?)
The fact that Google services are (mostly) better than competition isn't relevant here - back in the day Internet Explorer was way better than Netscape Navigator, but that fact didn't made MS actions any better.
I think there is some legitimacy to this line of criticism, but as Amazon has shown, large organizations can produce their own forks.
I can imagine too that selective replacement of chunks of the 'Google Experience' might make consumers get a negative impression of the Google brand if the replacement has issues. Like if you replace the location with Skyhook or Nokia, and the new Maps app is just called "Maps", and if there are serious issues, consumers might say "Man, this Google Maps on Android sucks!" without realizing it's not Google Maps, because Android is strongly brand associated with Google.
There's also a logical rational for Amazon-style forking, in the sense that if you're going for a complete reskinning, the end result will likely be a lot better if it is completely horizontally and vertically integrated by a single vendor rather than cobbled together -- 'bloatware' experience.
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> Google literally pushed the company out of business by strong-arming manufacturers to stop using Skyhook services.
This is what Skyhook claimed, but the reality was much different. Skyhook were intentionally or unintentionally polluting the Google AP database. They refused to change and so failed the compatability test.
Look into this more.
And, in fact, the same author made the exact same point about Google Play Services being a big tool Google is using to get past OS version fragmentation about a month-and-a-half ago:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...
The author was all-praises on Google for its actions.
"Not having to package everything into a major OS update means Google can get features out to more users much faster and more frequently than before. ... This should all lead to a more unified, less fragmented, healthier Android ecosystem."
You're partly right, but in regards to the Gmail app, what I don't like about Android is that it doesn't come with a good email client that's not GMail. Android's GMail client is very polished and there's not much in it that's specific to Gmail, it could be a generic email client that works with POP3/IMAP/SMTP and other standards as well. The experience of users that aren't into Android's own services do suffer.
But I do not agree with people that claim Android is not open. Building an operating system is a big challenge and stock Android is enough for anyone to fork and do whatever they want. I actually play around with an old Galaxy S on top of which I installed Cyanogenmod without any of Google's Apps. The only problem is that developers only publish their apps on Google Play, which is a shame, given that Android does allow you to install apps from third party sources and you could have a good experience just with stock Android. I ended up installing Amazon's Appstore on it, which is not as good as Google Play, but at least they've got special offers :-)
> Android's GMail client is very polished and there's not much in it that's specific to Gmail, it could be a generic email client that works with POP3/IMAP/SMTP and other standards as well. The experience of users that aren't into Android's own services do suffer.
GMail uses a proprietary protocol that is decidedly not imap. It has features like colorized labels and inbox prioritizing that just isn't present in imap. Furthermore it has completely different performance characteristics (e.g it is much faster) than what imap email can provide. No one seem to have any details on exactly what the protocol is or how it works. They definitely seem to not want any third party clients accessing gmail though. Otherwise they would have published a protocol specification a long time ago.
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> I actually play around with an old Galaxy S on top of which I installed Cyanogenmod without any of Google's Apps. The only problem is that developers only publish their apps on Google Play, which is a shame, given that Android does allow you to install apps from third party sources and you could have a good experience just with stock Android.
I went through the same process of installing Cyanogenmod without Google Apps and it made me wonder why developers of free apps don't distribute them outside Play e.g. on their sites. I understand paid apps and/or apps that have in app purchase but there are a lot of just free apps that just can't be downloaded. Any theories?
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> What I don't like about Android is that it doesn't come with a good email client that's not GMail.
That would be like saying that the default camera app does not come with filters, shaders and other features that you like. What Google does is, gives a good enough app for generic use and leaves options open for developers to make better things and put them on the Play Store.
If Google starts incorporating all such features, it'll get much more difficult for developers to earn through the store.
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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.
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Hypothetically, if you made all parts of android rely on "Google Data center services" would moves to close it off be justified?
This is what Play Services are moving towards.
>off of
Learn English, and then we'll talk.
"Off of" has been an English construction since the 1500s. It's entirely reasonable and appropriate in this context, much like contractions in informal written English.
But I'm fairly sure I'm replying to a throwaway account, so it's not like you were seriously interested.
When someone like Github does this (make some parts of their code open-source, but others closed-source), journalists don't write critical pieces about them, do they? I mean, Google leaves a bad taste in my mouth since they started shuttering services like it was Christmas at the Google Service Chopping Block, but I don't see them being actively evil here.
It's all according to the previously openly aired plan. Google keeps all of the existing code open source. Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so. Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem. It's fair game -- if a hardware partner thinks that one of Google's competitors can provide a better Android fork, they are free to leave the Alliance and go partner with that competitor. They will still get an enormous amount of code for free in AOSP. They just won't get all of the services that Google is building specifically for its own version of Android. How is any of this maintaining an "iron grip" in any way? Just contrast this with Apple where it is the sole owner of everything to do with the OS and app marketplace.
> Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so. Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem. It's fair game -- if a hardware partner thinks that one of Google's competitors can provide a better Android fork, they are free to leave the Alliance and go partner with that competitor.
A good example of this is Amazon. They are doing this successfully.
Another example is OUYA.
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> Now if they want a hardware platform to run on, go find one outside the Open Handset Alliance ecosystem.
Imagine you want to sell a Linux laptop with your own Linux distribution. You're just a small shop in California, and you're shopping around to find a manufacturer for your laptops. And you find that anyone connected to Microsoft (Foxconn, Asus, Acer, Gigabyte, etc) can't do any job with you. Would you say "that's fair, Microsoft isn't evil by forcing hardware manufacturers to work exclusively with them" in such situation?
That's not what they're doing. HTC, Samsung, etc still sell non-Google OSs, like Windows Phone and Bada.
A good analogy would be Microsoft preventing you from selling your fork of Windows on those manufacturers, which happens to be exactly what every big OS maker does, by simply not distributing it under a Free license.
AOSP is so open that the previous AOSP leader at Google quitted over the lack of openeness.
That's a mischaracterization of his own comments on why he left. It had to do with open sourcing GPU drivers, which is probably an issue with other vendors, not Google.
See: https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/9HHRURor...
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Blame mobile chipset vendors for that one.
> When someone like Github does this (make some parts of their code open-source, but others closed-source), journalists don't write critical pieces about them, do they?
Github don't constantly go on about how 'open' Github is, though.
True, but Github does use the halo of "Open Source" a lot to promote themselves (or others promote them using it..e.g. http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/github/) while overlooking the fact that most of their codebase is very close sourced indeed.
Anyone who wants to build a fork can do so
Not really. You will have your mainline Abdroid implementation shutdown if you do this. Google is clearly doing this to make forking a very risky proposition for device manufacturers. It's the antithesis to open.
Google used 'Android is open' as a dishonest slogan to convince developers that it wasn't just a power play.
That is why they are being criticized. It's not about who is more open. It's that Google misled everyone about their intentions.
Prove that Android is not open.
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> Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, it was decided that Google would buy Android. And Android would be open source.
This is blatantly false. Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
> Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
Not only, as has already been pointed out, did the UI change, but if you look at the Android architecture it's clearly evolved along an very different path to iOS.
I remember when the first Android SDK came out the programming manual made it very clear to developers that we weren't to expect devices to always have discrete GPUs or touch-screens.
Android clearly went in a different direction post-iPhone.
Agreed.
All those videos of Android demo or prototype units clearly showed Android was a Blackberry clone (just look at that tiny touchpad for navigating around Android OS) and changed its design direction after iPhone made its appearance.
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Almost exactly a year after they bought Android, Schmidt joined the Apple board of directors.
The iPhone certainly was in development some time prior to its announcement.
Schmidt joined the Apple board August 29th 2006: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/08/29Google-CEO-Dr-Eric...
Public iPhone announcement was January 9th 2007: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-th...
Even with a conspiracy angle, a three month head start isn't much.
In fact, Google was concerned about Microsoft more-strongly binding Windows Mobile (Windows Phone came later) to their Web ecosystem. Microsoft was working on Windows Live Search, which would later be replaced by Bing.
At the time, Windows Mobile was the epitome of a modern mobile OS. It had a real(ish) browser and a VM-based app runtime for a modern (C#) language (albeit optional and not nearly as tightly integrated with OS middleware as in Android). Google saw that an ecosystem such as Windows Live is much more critical to a mobile device than it is to a desktop PC. The nature of Android more closely reflects the threat from Microsoft than from iPhone.
The only real thing that seems "evil" is the requirement for OEMs to not manufacture _any_ devices compatible with non-Google forks. The rest of it seems pretty necessary in order to keep carriers and OEMs in line. A lesson Microsoft learned, and why Windows Phone started off by allowing the user to remove any pre-installed crap.
If Google didn't do any of this, and was totally altruistic, Samsung and others would already have completely screwed things up.
While it's certainly very much to Google's benefit, it also benefits most users because overall, Google has done a far better job than any OEM regarding user experience.
In fact, the boundaries of the compatibility requirement are pretty fuzzy.
For instance, the Acer/Aliyun situation is more complicated than presented. The Aliyun app store was distributing pirated apps (including pirated Google apps): http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/15/aliyun-app-store-con...
It seems obvious that Acer would have wound up in hot water with Google over this somehow, though it is odd that Google decided to focus their complaint on compatibility (rather than on Aliyun's piracy).
On the other side of the coin, many Android OEMs have distributed (and still distribute, so far as I know) devices without Google apps for the Chinese market (including Samsung, ASUS, Huawei, and even Motorola [1]). So far as I can remember, these were always essentially the same as non-Chinese devices except that they came with a different ROM that didn't include Google Apps. Nevertheless, that means that there's some scope for making non-Google Android devices, we just don't know how far it goes. Maybe if the HTC/Amazon rumors turn out to be true, we'll find out more.
[1] Though I think Motorola's efforts were shut-down post-merger because of Google's China policies.
> the requirement for OEMs to not manufacture _any_ devices compatible with non-Google forks
Is that really where the line is? My understanding is that it is almost the opposite: an OEM cannot manufacture any devices that break compatibility with AOSP, not support compatibility with a 3rd party fork. And the constraint is a condition of membership of AOSP rather than something imposed directly by Google. They can make things as compatible with as many non-Google forks as they want. They can break all compatibility wherever they want if they give up AOSP membership.
I think alot of people misunderstand what open source means. It's nothing more than allowing people to see the source code, and use it (including forking).
Open source doesn't require you to cooperate with anyone, it doesn't require you to give away access to APIs, it doesn't require you to do anything beyond whatever is explicitly stated in the license.
Google, Canonical, Oracle, IBM, Red Hat, SUSE, etc... aren't required to be good team players or corporate citizens. They're just required to abide by the terms of the licenses on code they use...
Well, there is a philosophy (or rather, various different philosophies) that go along with the legal structures, and different projects have different levels of adherence to those ideas.
It eventually comes down to perception of value. Part of the original attraction of Android was its openness, if Google is now closing off substantial functionality, to head off competition, then it's not unfair for people to re-evaluate their enthusiasm for the product.
> Part of the original attraction of Android was its openness, if Google is now closing off substantial functionality, to head off competition, then it's not unfair for people to re-evaluate their enthusiasm for the product.
Very well put! Its not a legal perception that theres something wrong about what they are doing(and nobody are saying that they cannot do it in the legal aspect).. its a betrayal of some part that make people defend android for what it is, a open source project.. its the ideal behind the project that is being broken
If its not like that anymore, the same people that support it for its openess should be aware of it.. and see that things are actually, gradually and silently changing..
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As an Android developer, I love that Google is doing this!
Android has come a very long way in the last few years in terms of usability and design. A large part of this has been due to an increasingly uniform design language and feel. That, and the new distribution model for what are basically Android updates (Google Play Services) has made Android feel more polished and actually allowed it to stand on its own against iOS. It also means that developers like me don't have to spend nearly as much time worrying about fragmentation in the traditional sense. Each day the percentage of people using sub-ICS phones falls, and we all get one step closer to the day we can support ICS+ only.
However, companies like Amazon would force me to rewrite the maps integration, the sign-in portion, the wallet, etc... Amazon did a great job of replicating Google Maps API V1 but they have yet to mirror V2 and don't mirror the other components I mentioned.
Aside from fragmentation and developer sanity, the article mentions another key point here:
"[M]any of Google's solutions offer best-in-class usability, functionality, and ease-of-implementation."
Exactly! Google APIs are not perfect, and there's bugs (like when Google Maps broke map markers on high resolution phones like the HTC One). But generally speaking, I'm really happy with the quality of the APIs and services. In an ideal world, Amazon and Google would work together to provide great and uniform single-sign-in APIs, great maps, etc... As it currently stands though, I don't believe either party is interested in doing so. Prisoner's dilemma?
> While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. That's right, joining the OHA requires a company to sign its life away and promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.
...
> This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices.
That is fairly incredible, I'm surprised it is not an anti-trust/competition issue.
It's not anti-trust because they're not required to only build Android devices. HTC and Samsung also build Windows Phone devices...
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.
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> Google does everything in-house. The company gets Maps and all of its cloud services basically for free.
This statement is utterly false. In-house does not mean free.
Exactly. Google's mapping data is a legitimate competitive advantage, and there is no reason anyone else forking android should be entitled to it.
The article in no way says this is illegitimate, it is listed as an extra barrier that a competitor would have to cross.
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All of its Maps data and many of its APIs already existed for Google Maps on the desktop. Within the mobile space, and relative to a mobile-only competitor, Google's access to that data is effectively free.
Map data for mobile isn't free even for Google. Google buys licenses to the data from a few map data providers, and as there was effectively a duopoly in global map data, those licenses have very strict terms of use. To use that data for e.g. real-time navigation assistance in mobile requires a different, much more expensive licenses.
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You mean it has a low marginal cost. However, it required a huge capital investment to create, from which they are now rightfully reaping the benefits.
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Close enough to free.
While I can see the point of this article, it's being cast in a much more dramatic light than necessary. Phrases like "While Google is out to devalue the open source codebase as much as possible" seem hyperbolic to me.
I agree. While it does make some good, disturbing points, you can tell they had to stretch to make some of the other points.
What's really annoying is when the Google apps start becoming worse to make Google more money. I never open the app store without wanting an app, but it constantly tries to sell me books and movies and stuff like that. They even have separate Google apps for reading and movies, so shoving it in the app store is just a money grab making my usage more difficult to shove some ads in my face. Were these apps open source people could just fork, but we're stuck going along with Google until they mess up so bad it makes sense to switch over entirely to Amazon App store, Samsung Apps Seller, etc. and the equivalent for everything else.
This is an opportunity for Yahoo. The article mentions that OEMs can't leave because they're afraid of losing Google services, Yahoo can be that replacement. They've been making beautiful mobile apps lately and they have some very polished services. They are a pure play service provider who isn't trying to compete with the OEMs; they have no conflict of interest.
If you work at Yahoo, this is something you should run up the chain. A relationship with OEMs would solve their problems, and allow you to get a foothold in mobile that you haven't been able to before.
Yahoo internals were even discussing ideas of creating their own fork of Android, way back in 2010. Nothing happened.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Linus Torvalds famous for his iron grip of Linux? In a very different way, to be sure, but it's my understanding that just because you make something open source doesn't mean you have to (or even should) relinquish control.
I think it's also pretty standard to open-source the core and keep the baubles proprietary. GitHub, for example, made their git interaction library open-source but their git hosting service itself is closed, as far as I know.
Every open source project has someone (or some group) in control, and contributions can't land without their say so. But anyone who feels that the current leadership is doing it wrong can fork the code and try to persuade people to use their version. This is very important to the way open source software works.
Google have a level of control beyond that: they undermine anyone trying to fork Android by not letting them use Google's apps and services (even as they allow such use on competing systems like iOS).
Sure. That makes perfect sense to me - Google apps and services aren't open source in spirit or practice. If I wanted a pure open-source mobile OS of my own, I wouldn't want any of Google's apps or services tainting it; if I did, Google would evaluate that option on their own, as they should.
I have a feeling that if an Android fork actually started to gain serious market share, Google would very quickly allow them to use GMail, Youtube and the other apps.
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Part of my business is about creating Android-based embedded systems. So far, none of what Google has done impinges on using Android as a basis for an operating system for appliance-like devices. The main problem is that current development of Android is not done in the open. But, so far, the advantages of using Android's UI stack and other APIs in "appliance OS" applications outweigh the annoyance of sporadic updates to the AOSP code-base.
If you want to compete with Google, using Android poses a choice: If you make Google-branded Android devices that use Google's proprietary apps, you will have to give that up in order to use Android with other ecosystems.
Thirdly, if you want to use the Google ecosystem in a product, you have to use all of it. You can't substitute someone else's location services, for an example that was litigated.
Google could develop Android in the open and retain the same level of control over OEMs, and I think they should.
Google appears to be inconsistent in enforcing restrictions on OEMs. OPhone OEMs also make Android handsets, despite the fact that OPhone is an Android derived product. Maybe that arrangement pre-dates Google's current policies.
> Android has arguably won the smartphone wars, but "Android winning" and "Google winning" are not necessarily the same thing.
This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation.
Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
> This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation.
> Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
That's effectively what it says in the article: "It's easy to give something away when you're in last place with zero marketshare, precisely where Android started. When you're in first place though, it's a little harder to be so open and welcoming. Android has gone from being the thing that protects Google to being something worth protecting in its own right."
i.e. Android is doing what it was designed for - protecting Google's presence on the mobile web - but with such a dominant market position Google found that it ceased to be solely a means of protection, and actually an asset in its own right. It's in that extension of the original aim where the interests of Android as an open source project and Google as a for-profit company do not match up.
The article's description of what we're to happen if Apple did not have competition is quite accurate and write frightening. Even with the north American market share that Apple has they abuse it where possible.
Yes I agree.
Android is not about North America. Android is about India, Africa, and China.
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Apple hasn't abused anything.
"In an ocean with great waves, whales fly into the air unnoticed, but in a calm pond, even the tiniest minnow makes a ripple." -confucius
When the iPhone debuted, no doubt Google sensed the impact, and Apple's ability to create an effective closed ecosystem had already been proven with iTunes. I believe that Google wanted to undermine the market long enough to understand it. True enough, "android winning" was not the same as "Google winning," but it did mean everyone else "losing." I believe that for Google, Android started as a strategy in search of a goal. It was a smokescreen to prevent Apple from taking a dominant position by default. As the data poured in, they began to understand how to leverage it, and the Nexus line became an expression of such understanding, working to establish more control, and hopefully emerge from the smokescreen they had created.
> I believe that for Google, Android started as a strategy in search of a goal. It was a smokescreen to prevent Apple from taking a dominant position by default
Impossible. Google bought Android years before Apple sold a single phone.
I will only buy / recommend nexus phones. Knowing that the phone will be updated quickly and for a long time is worth a premium, rather than being a cash in strat for Google.
my impression of nexus devices is that you are tied to the package of google services. is this so, or can a nexus-user break free from google's domain and enjoy the benefits of a quality low-cost device without being beholden to the google ecosystem?
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> whales fly into the air unnoticed
Is this the origin of the Twitter fail-whale?
Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.
I'd fully support their modules that connect to the cloud servers being open source / GPL / etc, but to expect them to open them up to unauthenticated requests is untenable and leaves them way open to abuse / lack of rate limiting / making the service a bad time for all involved.
> Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.
It also consists of witholding access to those APIs if a company uses a competitor service:
> Another point of control is that the Google apps are all licensed as a single bundle. So if you want Gmail and Maps, you also need to take Google Play Services, Google+, and whatever else Google feels like adding to the package. A company called Skyhook found this out the hard way when it tried to develop a competing location service for Android. Switching to Skyhook's service meant Google would not be able to collect location data from users. This was bad for Google, so Skyhook was declared "incompatible." OEMs that wanted the Google Apps were not allowed to use them. Skyhook sued, and the lawsuit is still pending.
What's interesting is how having a mobile OS is now only one part of the offering needed to be successful, and is arguably the easiest part.
To be successful on mobile you also need a fairly extensive layer of services. Some of those (web, mail and so on) are easy to bolt together but others such as maps and app stores are far harder and are about data and commercial deals as much as they are about software. While it would be wrong to say that these services can't be opened up, in many cases doing so isn't as straight forward as sharing source code.
It doesn't feel as if Google has changed so much as what it means be a mobile OS has.
Small correction: "Chrome is still open source" is incorrect. Chromium is open source. Chrome is closed source.
Google is creating a walled garden just like any other company does. The article points to how they are making their shift towards an operating system that is similar to ios (in terms of lock in). Android may be an open-source platform but, on the majority of devices that compete at the top level, it becomes far from open source.
It's understandable why Google would lock people out of seeing the back end of their closed apps. But you have to look at what the long-term implications of them slowly removing support for ASOP apps are. As Google continually pushes out fantastic products that tie in so well to the mobile experience, why would anyone/developer want to have/develop [for] anything else. As this power grows, Google can strong-arm phone manufactures to develop hardware/features/etc to work with what they are developing. They have to sign contractual agreements to get the top version of Android and are then locked in to keep up the good terms. Google is outsourcing the hardware manufacturing to other companies and ensuring that if a user wants a good phone, they will be using their services.
Many people here are claiming any company can leave Google's garden like Amazon did. While some companies may be able to do that, I'm struggling to think of a one with the technological background, money to invest, and callousness for risk who are willing to try. Amazon has a huge assortment of media that it can toss at its users who use their hardware. Other companies don't have a differentiating factor or the software development to be able to make a truly competitive product to drive people away from Google supported Android. Just look at how much Microsoft, a software giant, is struggling to gain any shred of market share.
No executive in any reasonable company is going to propose to invest billions in order to squeeze into the highly competitive mobile OS market. It’s a huge risk that only a startup could swallow, and yet few startups could even raise the money required to topple the Google supported android market.
What the future is starting to look like is the one Google was initially afraid of, that users were” faced a Draconian future, a future where…one company, one device, one carrier would be [the] only choice.” As Google gains more power, the open source part that Android users love is going to slowly disappear. This may or may not happen, there are many variables that could prevent it, but it is a future that would bring Google the highest return and that is the goal of all market traded companies.
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.
it is not the same with providing an SDK. Well, if android was documented better, we would not need source code this much but most of the time, it requires checking the actual implementation to understand the whole picture. Probably it is the difference between being "just fine" to creating great things.
I don't understand the point of this article especially the bit about being an evil genius by ways of making excellent best in business cross OS api's. Really? being competitive is being an evil genius? If amazon is willing it can open there api's to none FireOS apps they have the infrastructure and money to support it, but they don't.
As a user I'm happy that Google is making sure that I can hop device manufactures without loosing my apps or functionality, if everybody would roll out there own app store and removed Google's you would be locked in with the OEM. Now you can safely change to a different phone, also they don't mind you downloading the Google apps when using an alternative ROM.
Android is open source but does that mean that you are not aloud to make money of it by providing closed source apps and service, many open source companies do that. The work that went in to Android if freely available for competitors. Lots of kernel enchantments went back in to Linux and now you have Ubuntu touch and Firefox OS both based on the Android kernel which in turn is based on Linux, how cool is that.
I once read an article in 2010 that criticized people for saying that Apple and iOS of the 2000s is like the Microsoft and Windows of the 90s. The article pointed out that Apple IS the Apple of the 90s and Google with its Android platform will become the Windows of the 90s. I think it's happening. In a few years Android is going to be as closed sourced as Windows, probably as ubiquitous, and most likely, just as prone to security issues.
It's already kind of like windows, no? It runs on hundreds if different devices. It's often bloated by OEM software that people hate. It's prone to security wholes. It's slow and clunky unless you run it on the latest hardware. It bends over backwards for compatibility sake. It's more and more closed sourced...
Android is Mobile windows of the 90s. I hope Ubuntu Mobile will be successful.
Sorry, but some of the things you wrote are about perception, not reality.
What does "prone to security issues" mean? And compared to what? When we compare iOS and Android, iOS had 304 vulnerabilities in 2007-2013 (294 in 2009-2013), while Android had 29 in 2009-2013[1]. That's order of magnitude difference, yet Android is blamed to be prone to security holes.
Also what does "clunky unless you run it on the latest hardware"? All systems are slow, when you run new system on old hardware. You cannot bend physics there. Ever used iOS4 on iPhone 3G? iOS7 on iPhone4? Or why there is no WP8 update for WP7 phones? These are exactly the same reasons.
Even the APIs in Play Services, as described in the article, are exactly marked as "google, not android". You project has to explicitly include Google APIs, it is not enough to target Android. Every Android developer knows that.
[1] http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15556/ and http://www.cvedetails.com/product/19997/
Vulnerability numbers alone do not accurately convey the mobile security landscape. To start with, even if those mean something, we must consider that Android devices tend to lag behind in terms of receiving OS updates. By contrast, iOS devices tend to be quickly updated.
It is widely known that iOS is far more secure in the practical sense for the average user. Report: http://www.f-secure.com/static/doc/labs_global/Research/Mobi...
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This is exactly why most malware out there targets iOS, and why so many botnets are comprised of iOS divides. Right?
This was meant as a comment to vetinari.
Nothing wrong with what Google is doing. Google is essentially a consumer (and enterprise) cloud services company that is looking to commoditize (read open source/sell at cost) all other parts of the stack. That includes open-sourcing Chrome/Android, selling Chromecast/Google Fiber at cost.
Claiming that Google is "controlling open source" by working in-house on it's own Android applications is just really bizarre.
So, every Samsung phone effectively comes with three versions of the main apps - the AOSP version, the Google Play version, and Samsung's bloatware?
This seems like a terrible situation for users. Can someone with a Samsung smartphone confirm this?
If this is the case, how are the apps organized when you first buy the phone - are they all in one big apps list?
Samsung devices ship with two versions, remember that while Samsung can't opt out of the Google apps, they're free to remove any AOSP app they'd like.
In fact, I've had AOSP apps disappear from my Cyanogen Mod ROM when I installed gapps, although I don't know if that was due to being overwritten or just part of the install script.
Wow, I've heard that HN is often pro google, but this thread makes it blatantly clear.
I know this is potentially dangerous in the future (I worry more about NSA having direct access to all the phones in the world through Google), but in terms of user experience, I welcome this. In order to have an ecosystem that is "as unified and standardized as possible" you need to have one company controlling it, and the vision behind it. Too many companies pulling in too many directions is not that good.
Here's a different perspective:
http://techtainian.com/news/2013/10/20/editorial-how-kitkat-...
If AOSP is open source and Google updates let's say the location services, why can't anyone start a similar project for AOSP and have it funded (like by Apache or Mozilla)?
It seems that the main problem is the gatekeepers who manufacture phones.
Mozilla makes Firefox OS. They don't have the resources to also fix Android and what not, I think. Apache takes a few projects under its wing but they don't provide the developers, and thus many of their projects are stalling.
That, or someone to maintain a generic shim/interface so that the proprietary services are interchangeable
IMHO, the unfair part is the following:
"Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list."
Google Apps and APIs are fine and good, but I don't think any company should dictate to an OEM what products they can make for other companies.
I'm surprised that there's no mention of Tizen, Samsung and Intel's project and supposedly the former's Plan B to ditch Android altogether. With the same TouchWiz skin both Samsung's Android and Tizen, and with both OS's able to run Android apps, the plan would be to swap out the underlying OS without the users noticing.
Sometimes businesses take measures to increase profits at the expense of their users. However, preventing fragmentation of Android seems to be both in both Google's interests and the users. Only certain competitors could mind. Also, why should Google do all the work of creating an operating system and not get anything in return?
As much as the Android people hate the Apple people, Android is doing the same thing Windows and Apple have been doing for years - trying to shoe horn people into THEIR walled in garden.
This is the future of smartphones. You pick a phone and by doing so, you pick the walled garden you're going to most comfortable playing in, pure and simple.
I think Google's malicious intent is being over-exaggerated. It could simply be that they don't have enough resources to maintain old code. As to them creating closed-source apps, well, Google knows which side their bread is buttered on :) Anything that makes money for them is closed source.
I'm curious to know if there are any internal google project of porting all the Google play API on iOS (either on Objective-C , or using a cross-platform language such as mono develop, which would make more sense).
Why don't they (potential competitors) write an open source app based on openstreetmap? Their mapping data is usually on par, often even superior to that of Google. Plus, its free (in both senses of the word).
Nothing good can come out of Amazon or Samsung influencing or controlling Android. If those companies were in control, we'd still be in the tech ice ages where the phone companies control our devices.
So I guess the sign to look out for is Samsung licensing the Amazon APIs?
That would be interesting: an Amazon-Samsung software-hardware partnership.
This is an excellent piece of tech journalism and thank you for the journalist for examining each aspect of Google's strategy so thoroughly.
As a Google shareholder, this article warms the cockles of my heart. Why should Amazon be able to get all the Android improvements that Google creates?
I don't see how making closed source apps is "Controlling open source"
By any means necessary? So they'd murder to control the source?
Open always wins, until it conflicts with your business interests. "Open" used to be the oft-repeated advantage over iOS in the early days, I wonder if that will slip away from the narrative like "SD card slots", "removable batteries", and "real keyboard" did.
I don't see Google making any rules about OEMs not being allowed to manufacture devices with micro SD slots, removable batteries or physical keyboards. Just because Google doesn't want to spend its R&D money on those features doesn't mean they're stopping anyone else who uses Android.
History doesn't really support this. Even Linux had to get some corporate backing (initially Red Hat, Suse, and the like), and later Canonical and others before it really took off.
Open source has proven to be a long term survivor, but not a winner.
Open source is most definitely winning in infrastructure, high performance computing, servers, etc...
Ask IBM or Oracle if Linux is losing...
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Should read more like "Google has an Iron grip on Google Apps (Gapps)" - Not Android. Android is the OS, not the Google service based apps.
Isn't the whle point of the article that it's getting harder and harder to get the OS without being tied to Gapps? Which would justify the title?
The Android platform is open source under Apache/BSD/MIT licenses -- it's no harder to get that than it ever has been (not hard at all). Look at products like Kindle Fire for examples of "uses Android without Google Apps".
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