Comment by tluyben2
11 years ago
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.
Did you even read the article?
And if you want to stay on the technical side.. then what about contributors? I've helped port android to a couple devices. I had no idea google had a contract obligation with hardware makers that my work should have to be used in one way or another. I feel dirty.
edit: the Acer example goes exactly against what you mention. They tried to ship a fork, with some of the substitutions you mention. google released the layers.
I read the article; if you want out of their grip you can. You just need to provide alternatives for the Google apps and appstore. That is not trivial, but for a company like Samsung that wouldn't be that big of an issue either.
Acer tried to release it while still wanting to be in the 'Android family' (Open Handset Alliance); they didn't have their own substitutes and didn't want to make a clean break with Google (OHA). If they wanted that and would have provided an appstore, they could've.
> 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.
At the same time, those people are first to complain about a single button located somewhere different from what remember. Unless all they are doing is the bare minimum that any of interface elements doesn't matter, they would continue caring about what operating system they would be running on. I guess problems are people between complete novices and experts -- they know more than some basics (to recognize what they are running) but not quite up there to mitigate the difference themselves. (And somewhat, this could be said true so far as there haven't been so much of UI functional changes happened up to 7 from the Windows 95 era. People around me haven't really exposed to themselves to Windows 8.x would do to them when they finally hit them...)
So how long have you been working for Google?