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.
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...)
I think that you hear whatever you want to hear, but the truth is very different: Google's apps and APIs are just cloud endpoints and weaving them into AOSP doesn't make sense and just delays updates, as the same author previously scribbled: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-sl...
As Andy Rubin puts it, Google will not encourage non compatible forks, it is in their interest to have Android developed apps run on all Android devices. Anyone can still have a go but Google won't encourage it.
It's a very flawed and overwritten attack piece, seemingly coming out of nowhere.
I think the strongest argument the article makes is the claim about the new Location APIs. Location algorithms are not dependent on Google services and have always been part of the core APIs, but now Google is moving new location algorithms into their closed source app. It's an obvious power grab, they want AOSP to be less and less useful on its own.
Actually location APIs do use core Google backend services (the wifi geolocation database). Even Keyboard does (spelling). In a way they are doing the opposite, building their services into everything, which is a natural googly thing to do to add features/improve them. At that point they close source them as they dont want other people using the services without signing up.
The way to compete is either to make standalone apps that dont require services (ie like the old unmaintained ones) or to build your own services, either open or closed.
I think the location APIs may also use system-level facilities that aren't open to normal applications, such as the ability to detect nearby access points even when WiFi is off and the device is in standby. So it's not clear that apps can implement it themselves without relying on Google. Also, the APIs for newer stuff like geofencing are Google-proprietary and don't support alternative providers, so mobile phone makers that don't want to rely on Google's services can't substitute a different backend without breaking existing apps.
It does not use system-level facilities that aren't open to normal applications. People love to hate on Google; if they ever embed features into the OS only they are allowed to use you will hear about it very quickly.
There is a class called WifiManager[1] which lets you ask the user to allow background scans. It also lets you see the results of the last scan.
It is unfortunate that the Geofencing APIs are not part of the android platform, but I suppose it's possible they use Google services.
If they rolled the improvements out as part of the platform, it would inherit the slow rollout weakness as any other platform API (it would take months/years to become viable and unavailable on existing versions). If they went the static library route, it would balloon the size of of the apps and they wouldn't be able to do the same sort power/efficiency call coalescing as they would by having an always updated client on the device.
Is it really that obvious? What power are they grabbing? By this reasoning, Google may not augment any 'traditional' AOSP service with improved functionality. That's obviously ridiculous, so what solution would you envisage?
The article was pointing out how Google is moving more and more functionality from open source to closed source. So, one way to counter that would be to augment the "traditional AOSP service with improved functionality", but license the code as open source. The service endpoints can certainly be closed, but the code to access those endpoints could be open. And the license to use those endpoints could be open source friendly.
Now, that may not be a good business decision, but it certainly counters the argument of the post.
An aside: I appreciate what google is doing to fight Android fragmentation, but also see some of the tactics as anti-competitive.
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 ?
Percentage of market share is not a clear indication of monopoly. From what I could find, 50% is typically the bare minimum to warrant consideration, and 70 - 75% will get more serious scrutiny. Also, it differs from country to country. In the UK, Tesco was investigated even though it had a market share of only 30%.
I also recall reading one of the EU's regulators (was it Joaquin Almunia?) say that (paraphrasing) "we start sniffing around when any one party gets a market share north of 60%." Unfortunately, I cannot find that article.
>Percentage of market share is not a clear indication of monopoly
True, and the reason is that a 30% UK-wide or a 50% Europe-wide market share can easily turn out to be a 100% market share in many local markets. Tesco defended itself by saying that 98% of consumers have access to five different super market chains within a drive time radius of 30 minutes. Make that a more realistic 10 minutes and the picture changes dramatically.
Let's imagine a hypothetical world where Company A owns 80% of the smartphone market and the rest is divided between the also-rans.
Now imagine that app developers can't profitably make a 1st rate app without getting the income from company A's app store (But can port the app to other OSes for extra income). If company A starts to use this situation to make it harder to port apps to other companies OSes via strongarm tactics, then company A is abusing its monopoly position of being the only profitable way to make an app.
Today's world is nothing like that, but it's an example of how near-total marketshare is not necessary for anti-trust to come into play. There is a certain point at which you have a large enough market share, that certain other players in the market must deal with you to get the volume needed to compete, particularly in high-volume, high-upfront cost industries (which many types of software qualify as).
Monopoly is not antitrust. Abusing control of a market is. A monopoly (which is usually considered to be dominance if a market place) is not itself unlawful.
"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"
Yeah, that's a serious problem for me, essentially using their leverage with the Google platform to keep competitors out of the market. Not cool Google.
Antitrust laws exist to enable greater competition by stopping businesses behaving in an anticompetative manner. They don't necessarily exist for "policing monoploies" anywhere in the world.
>"and it is such legislation which I consider bunk"
Why? Don't you think that Microsoft should have been reprimanded over their abuse of the OS market to gain control of the browser market?
Or is it because it's being held over $favorite_faceless_corp like the proverbial sword of Damocles?
To be fair, Microsoft also created a browser that, for its time, is pretty widely accepted (even around here!) as being much better than the Netscape counterpart. So while they did throw their weight around, it's not clear that their browser dominance was purely because of their OS monopoly. There were many other ways that Microsoft was leveraging its monopoly which deserved antitrust scrutiny, but I think bundling a browser was the wrong thing to be prosecuted for.
I agree totally that IE 4 was a browser ahead of it's time, however Microsoft were shown to have needlesly integrated it into their OS and then told OEMs that their Windows licenses would be revoked if they sold PC with Navigator pre-installed. I'd say they were lucky not to be broken up!
The problem there was that Microsoft had already signed a consent decree with Janet Reno's DoJ which specifically allowed them to expand the OS but forbade them from tying.
However, Microsoft also rewrote IE into componentized form, so that components (eg the rendering engine) could be used by other applications, including third-party programs. This was considered a Good Thing at the time (it won the deal with AOL, for example) and made integration (as opposed to tying) a reasonable claim. This is, of course, independent of the way Microsoft handled the argument in court, which was very, very badly.
In sum, whatever Microsoft did was not independent of the actions of the US government, whose interference had extremely bad results for consumers. This includes the crapware explosion that resulted from the DoJ's removal of Microsoft's power over OEMs.
As history showed, there wasn't even an MS monopoly in existence. OSX became viable in the early oughts, Linux was always around, and now people write of the death of the PC.
Regardless, abuse of market dominance (note I don't use the overused 'M' word) increases incentives for competitors to enter the marketplace.
It's got nothing to do with monopoly!!! Apple or Linux have nothing to do with it; the ruling being for behaviour in the period that preceded 2000. Microsoft were in a dominant position in one market and leveraged this dominace to gain dominance in another. This is anti-competative. for the final time; a monopoly is not illeagal in and of itself, neither is it antitrust.
I once saw an economics paper finding that if the top four players in a given market have more than 60% marketshare between them, they'll naturally act as a cartel. Ergo preserving an effective free market for consumers requires preventing that circumstance.
That depends on how the market share of revenue looks as well, and to my knowledge the percentage of revenue Apple receives is not dropping nearly as fast (and Google's not the main competitor there, Samsung is, even if it's using Google software).
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.
1) Newer custom ROMs can deny permissions on a per-app basis. I understand this isn't for everyone, but I enjoy having this option very much on my own device. (I also agree with you that it should be baked into the vanilla Android, but I can understand why they wouldn't want to confuse users with that option.)
2) Some apps will give you a choice in their own settings (if you trust that).
3) You always have the option of just not installing an app if you don't like the permissions. There's a fair bit of apps I refuse to install/update because their permissions asking for way more than I think their feature set requires.
> Some apps will give you a choice in their own settings (if you trust that)
I noticed recently that Google gives you the option of disabling "Google Location Services" which allows apps to read location when they're not running. However, disabling this causes Google Maps to refuse to read your location when it is running.
...And that's about when I started looking seriously at OpenStreetMaps. Sadly haven't found a good replacement yet.
As a practice, I turn off all location services on my phone and only briefly turn it on when I need to use Maps. May seem paranoid, but don't find myself suffering too much by this change.
I've been running CM since the Nexus One. I don't think it supports per-app system privileges. Unless it is hidden somewhere deep within (though I could swear I've recursively been through their entire settings tree).
I myself use AOKP, although I believe the permission management feature was cherry-picked from Cyanogen, and Google searches seem to verify the functionality exists.
On AOKP, you have to enable it by going into System Settings -> Permissions, which will then let you manage your apps.
Cyanogen uses a similar system[1], you'll need to navigate to CyanogenMod Settings, then Permissions, and finally Enable Management. After that, permissions can be enabled or disabled through the Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications menu.
[1]Those instructions were pulled from a Google search, as I don't run Cyanogen myself currently. They may be old/incorrect/etc. Good luck.
>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.
I'm already disappointed by my inability to remove the (rather poor) Samsung apps from my phone, as I'd like to only use the 'proper' Google apps (for me, gmail/google calendar app is 50+% of phone usage). It's not enough for companies to be able to produce their own forks - the forks still need to be competitive or better than Google versions, and that's not so easy to do.
> 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.
> GMail uses a proprietary protocol that is decidedly not imap
A thousand times, this.
Using a traditional IMAP client such as offlineimap makes this painfully obvious. Gmail synchronizes labels as "folders", not "tags", for some unknown reason, which means that mail in the inbox ends up getting duplicated on disk under "All Mail", and then again for every single label attached to that label.
Archiving hijacks the way that deleting works, and while clients can adjust to this, it breaks the way IMAP is supposed to work. If clients have to add special cases to interact with your service, that means you're going off-protocol!
Even the login is different. On IMAP, your username should be "foo", not "foo@example.com".
foo@example.com is a perfectly valid IMAP username. How else could a email service provider host multiple domains on one endpoint? For example Rackspace does this through imap.emailsrvr.com.
> 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?
Well one theory is that simply setting up a site that you can download an APK from is a hassle. It either costs you bandwidth if it's your own server, or has terrible UX if it is hosted via a share site.
There's always https://f-droid.org - it has somewhat vetted free-as-in-freedom apps that must compile from source.
Oh, come on, putting a 20 MB binary somewhere is cheap and easy.
I think developers don't put APKs anywhere else because they think they won't have an audience for those anyway. But it's a pity anyway. For example Humble Bundle packs with Android games were quite successful and the distribution method was through download links.
I agree that it is a pity. When/if I get around to developing Android apps, I will be definitely distributing packages that way.
However, I would like to point out that the Humble Bundle packs, while available via download links, also is available for download using a Humble Bundle app that acts like a package manager. I don't know how much that would change things, success-wise, but I thought it was worth noting.
> 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.
Yeah, but the email app on iOS is pretty polished and nowadays people expect the stock browser and the stock email app to be pretty good, especially on mobile devices. I'm not saying that Android's out of the box functionality should encompass everything, just the basic necessities, like email and web browsing. And I don't want people without an Android to get the wrong idea - Android does come with a standard email client, it's just that it's much, much less polished than the GMail app, which is a shame.
Are you referring to how Android will reclaim memory from inactive processes? Android handles memory differently than you expect, it tries to keep thinks in memory and only kills apps if it needs their memory back for a more demanding process.
Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory, but the same isn't true of Gmail or other Google Apps. They can and are purged from memory as other apps demand more memory. That being said, I've encountered very few situations where any app gets purged from memory. About the only time this happens is if I play a game like Galaxy On Fire or decide to open 100 tabs in Chrome.
Yes I was, glad to hear GMail is subject to the same rules as other apps. Not sure what you mean by "Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory"
> Not sure what you mean by "Google consolidating most APIs into Play Services would ensure it's constantly active and never purged from memory"
A lot of common APIs (Location API, Maps API, Play Games API, Push Notifications API, etc) have been consolidated under the Google Play Services umbrella process. Since these common APIs are used by lots of applications, this would ensure the Play Services process never gets booted from memory.
It also has the added benefit that applications using push notifications like Gmail don't need to maintain a background service because they can rely on Google Play Services to activate them as needed. Location based apps like Yelp can determine your location more quickly because Google Play Services is constantly monitoring it. All while reducing the over all memory foot print of applications because they're all deferring to Google Play Services.
Google can also change their APIs for services, upgrade to new protocols like SPDY, and developers don't need to update their applications because Google just needs to maintain the interface to Google Play Services. It's pretty clever.
"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.
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.