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.
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...]
>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.
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:
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 :-)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] cromwellian|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dmethvin|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] r0h1n|12 years ago|reply
>> 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...]
[+] [-] apetrovic|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fpgeek|12 years ago|reply
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...
[+] [-] bad_user|12 years ago|reply
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 :-)
[+] [-] throwaway2048|12 years ago|reply
This is what Play Services are moving towards.
[+] [-] guenlo|12 years ago|reply
Learn English, and then we'll talk.
[+] [-] parennoob|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pavanky|12 years ago|reply
A good example of this is Amazon. They are doing this successfully.
[+] [-] apetrovic|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zobzu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|12 years ago|reply
Github don't constantly go on about how 'open' Github is, though.
[+] [-] demallien|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gibwell|12 years ago|reply
That is why they are being criticized. It's not about who is more open. It's that Google misled everyone about their intentions.
[+] [-] millstone|12 years ago|reply
This is blatantly false. Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
[+] [-] objclxt|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hackula1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rarepostinlurkr|12 years ago|reply
The iPhone certainly was in development some time prior to its announcement.
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] MichaelGG|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] yarianluis|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] Brakenshire|12 years ago|reply
...
> 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.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davyjones|12 years ago|reply
This statement is utterly false. In-house does not mean free.
[+] [-] andrewflnr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdellabitta|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cremnob|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rattray|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] takluyver|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] Zigurd|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cloudwalking|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Brakenshire|12 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Nerdfest|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyfelice|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] millstone|12 years ago|reply
Impossible. Google bought Android years before Apple sold a single phone.
[+] [-] coopdog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EdwardDiego|12 years ago|reply
Is this the origin of the Twitter fail-whale?
[+] [-] georgestephanis|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Brakenshire|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tyrannosaurs|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dave1010uk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tashoecraft|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yeet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zobzu|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stefanve|12 years ago|reply
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.