Google clamps down on handset makers to stem Android fragmentation - Page 3

this is just thw beginning.

all major Android OEM's - and Facebook - will "fork" Android in the next year or so. coming up with their own unique versions of the OS. independent of Google control. just one sucker will be left as the "official" OEM.

Amazon made this possible. Google's real control point was the Android app store. now there is a better alternative, free of any customization limits.

Google set up Android to work for the telcos, not the OEM's. now it's payback time.

fragmentation? you ain't seen nothin' yet!

Whether it plays out like that, I'm not sure, but the thought definitely crossed my mind as I read this news today.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The Android store is one of the few choke points Google has, and if the Amazon store does well they've lost that. Think Amazon will care if your handset is running custom Android?

Google isn't trying to exert control because they care about the "Android experience." They're trying to exert control because they can see a market where there are lots of Android phones sold that don't benefit Google because they're not tied to Google services. That's always going to be the difference between Android and iOS: Google isn't selling phones or giving away an OS, they're enabling a portal for their profitable services. Official Android will only ever be whatever serves that best.

It isn't worth much WITH it.

correct!

You show a projection and everyone else shows quarterly returns.

I know where I place my bet on. It's definitely not on ``projections.''

This is how Android has that all that market share.... they count all those bastardized versions of it floating around.

So you're saying 3rd-party Android apps are complete shit. It's good to see you finally admit that.

He doesn't even acknowledge those projections were based on an "open" Android platform. But that probably never crossed his mind.

They can make a forking mess though.

"If it's free, then it ain't the product; you are."

The end-users aren't Google's customers, the handset makers aren't Google's customers; Google's only paying customers are advertisers. They want to control the 'user experience' only so they can control the advertising channels.

I have to agree with Google on one thing, however: Android is 'open'... in that it makes all of your information 'open' to advertisers.

Yeah, sure.

It's good to see you make an ass out of yourself by posting a strawman argument or even worse, failing to comprehend what I posted.

What the heck does everyone here have against Android? What did it do to you!?

It can only help you. It has lots stuff you don't have (yet) that will be good for you if Apple copies it. Like being able to return apps you don't like. Would you like that? Multitasking, Flash, etc.

It's the same attacks I've seen against Flash. Lots of hateful posts against Flash. Most are just "I hate it", not even justification like it's slow, eats battery etc. Which by the way neither is true on my Droid 2, works smooth, lasts hours watching vids. I watched several Daily Shows on it yesterday. Right on the full-version website.

I use Macs because for me they are better than Windows. Not because it's "cooler". Similarly, Android has proved great for me, in many ways doing things iOS can't.

I hate MS because they are evil as well as having bad products. They crush (crushed) innovation with illegal business practices so it makes sense to root against them (kind of like rooting against the other evil empire, the Yankees). But Google, whether you like it or not, is at least more open than Apple. Maybe not 100% granola-eating GPL3 open. But, want to install an app not on the Market (their App Store)? Just uncheck a button in Prefs that says Only Allow Official Market App installations. More settings. More customization. Widgets. Multiple launchers. Custom ROMs (because it is open source unlike iOS). It's more customizable, that's a fact. There are downsides to this, sure. But I'm getting tired of seeing comment after comment at Apple sites mindlessly bashing Android. Does it have more lag sometimes? Yes. But jeez. The dire predictions for Android could be true. On the other hand it could be Windows of mobile devices. In which case I'll be glad I jumped on board early. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED.

I'm not at all surprised by this. Allowing Microsoft and Facebook to mess around with things totally undermines the entire purpose behind Google's creation of Android. If I was Microsoft, I'd be throwing boatloads of cash at every major OEM to make Bing the default search because it undermines Android.

but not when someone wants to cut out Google as the default anything.

Well, I believe source for Webkit is periodically disclosed after a few improvements are made.

Right now, the Chrome browser is based on Webkit, but they have diverged on certain parts of HTML 5. To understand what Google has done, imagine the stink if Apple said they wanted to approve all changes to Webkit. Bad Hitler Jobs!

Isn't what Google just did monopolism? If, in fact, they pull the source access unless they make Google the default, that's using market power in one area to add to dominance in another. That's the core of what Microsoft did: they'd punish any computer maker who decided to manufacture a Linux computer by withdrawing all their Windows licenses.

It sure sounds like it, but they have an out since they did it before they had a monopoly in the mobile OS market. What MS did was use their actual monopoly in Windows to force down competition with internet browsers. I can't imagine Google could get in trouble for this action.

Isn't that why webkit was created in the first place???

Well, I agree. I don't hate Android, or Google, but the alarm bells went off during the I/O conference, when they went on and on about the evil, despotic Apple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89xc_1Vv69k

And then, I have serious questions about the monopolistic possibilities of their business model. Yes, giving the system for free (except, uh, "not") to any manufacturer is great -- but the hardware companies should start looking at the "free OS" for what it is: a monopolistic model designed to pull the profits from any of Google's competitors. Will HTC pay for engineers to really make an Android branch, turning it into a compatible but separate OS? Of course not. When you take free gifts, the giver is in total control. So sure, the majority of smartphones is or will become Android very shortly. And the handset makers will be like the computer makers under the thumb of Microsoft. Google will have won this market with a minimal effort in software, and no hardware hassles at all because they don't make it themselves.

Google has gotten to monopoly status in search, and they're acting, predictably, like Microsoft did, extending that monopoly to other areas to keep all that ad revenue coming in.

I distrust Google as I distrust any advertising seller. (96% of their revenue is from ads.)

I frankly prefer Apple's model, of making both the hardware and the OS. I think we'd be much better off if other people imitated that model -- it's called design. One guitar maker makes theirs, and another guitar maker makes another, and you decide which to buy. That's actual competition.

I know that most techies just luv Google, but I think they're being misled. We'll have to confront a real Dracula in the industry sooner or later.

But yeah, there are some good Android phones out there.

No, because OEMs can develop for other OSes, get Android for free and not pay a cent for it minus the google branding while thus allowing you to put anything on you want, neither does Android have a dominant share of the market.

Wonder why apple banned java, flash, anything other than cocoa on the iphone? Bans any app that duplicates functionality of their own apps? Banned third party tools and google voice, only to be allowed back in due to the FTC?

It's their platform. They want control of it. Control nets them $$$.

No one is forcing you to buy an iphone or an android phone. You have plenty of choices available.

But I feel that some, like me, would want an iphone without all the artificial bull shit that comes with it. It doesn't work that way.

Open does not mean restricted and does not mean google search only. Everyone wants to complain about Steve Jobs and his "preaching" but how can someone be attacked for speaking the truth. 7 inch tablets are not taking off and google is NOT open. Atleast with iOS you know what you're getting and you know what you are dealing with.

We still have to wait for some 7" tablets with a modern tablet OS to be released. So far we have seen some overpriced Archos crap with and without Android, and some other devices last year running a smartphone version of Android. The PlayBook will likey be te first modern 7" tablet and Asus will likely have the first decent Honeycomb tablet. BTW, that's decent compared to other non-iPad tablets.

Was Paul McCartney in another group before Wings?

Ha - Google is learning the hard way that rhetoric doesn't pay the bills

Yes, I'm happy to let people be happy with their own preferences and purchases. It's the hypocrisy that is the main thing for me.

Google most likely doesn't want anyone removing their spyware.

Yeah, it's funny how I was about to post exactly that, but exactly your post was the last one in this topic.

On other sites like Engadget I've been called fanboy, iTard, iSheep and whatnot for suggesting that Google should try to curb the fragmentation going on in the Android world. It makes life hard for Android developers, it results in consumers not getting updates and it doesn't help the overall experience of Android phones in general. Every phone works differently, some phones are downright handicapped by the crap the manufacturer bolted on top of Android, and many handsets are obsolete within 6 months because the manufacturer is too busy porting over his crappy UI layer to their upcoming 'Galaxy S-II Speed x2 S89118 Optimus Ace' model.

I guess now that Google says it, the same people will congratulate Google with their great vision, strategy and dedication to the Android user experience, and I'll be the iTard for saying they should have thought about this from the start, or suggesting Google only does this to prevent phones hitting the market that don't have all their adware..err.. I mean... Google application and search bars on them

You really are a master of twisting and bending reality to suit your own arguments, and claiming that's exactly what people replying to you do by saying they only have strawman arguments, you know?

Apple doesn't have Java on the iPhone because unless your whole OS is Java (like Android), running Java applications is a big unnecessary waste of resources that will result in crap applications. iOS is a native OS, running compiled code, and slapping a Java VM on top of that to run... well.. what exactly? Java applets? It doesn't make sense, and it would mean people who don't even know that Java is more than just coffee and an island part of Indonesia, will run into RAM-hogging, slow, and crappy applications that don't integrate with *anything* else on the phone: not with the UI, not with the smart management of RAM that Objective-C allows, not with the clever multitasking scheme, nothing. It would open up a whole can of opportunities to mess up the user experience, and for what reason, exactly?

Apple doesn't have Flash on the iPhone for similar reasons, and Adobe is showing time and time again that they are right, by only appearing to be capable of supporting a Flash plugin that almost half-decently works for a few of the highest specced Android phones and tablets running the exact right Android version. The Flash topic has been discussed to death so I'm not going to go into it any further, but I'll leave it at the observation that the market doesn't seem to care about Flash that much, looking at the things iPhone users complain about.

As for your other comments: they are downright false. Apple allows other development tools such as Unity, Adobe Air, etc, as long as they don't run their own VM. There are many good technical reasons for forcing developers to write native code, and they are all related to the same considerations for not wanting to run Java or Flash on iOS. Apple also allows writing applications that don't use Cocoa at all, in fact, most games only use Cocoa to load and kick off the application delegate, then launch straight into their own (often OpenGL based) environment, having full control over everything. I'm not sure what more you would want. Support other UI toolkits just so everyone can make applications that look and work differently because developer A likes Qt, developer B likes GTK, and developer C from the 1980's likes Tcl/Tk? GUI inconsistency has always been one of the biggest barriers for Linux on the desktop because people get confused when every application works differently, and perceive Linux as 'complicated' and 'hard'. Trying to steer developers towards Cocoa is only a problem if you are a developer too hard-headed or lazy to adapt, for end-users it only has advantages. Last but not least Apple doesn't block applications that duplicate functionality of their own applications. They ban clones of their own applications, for very obvious reasons. You can still have alternative browsers, mail applications, music players and map applications, as long as they are not just exact replicas of the standard iOS apps.

So, yes, Apple wants control over their platform, and yes they want to make $$$. Just like Google or anyone else. Don't pretend Google is in it just to make your life better, they want to monetize Android just as much as Apple wants to with iOS. Where you are wrong is how you conveniently leave out the step between 'control' and '$$$', which is 'great user experience'. It goes like this "control" -> "great user experience" -> "$$$".

There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with control and preferring to have more options, but stop pretending 'control' means 'bad for user', while in reality, for the vast majority, 'control' means 'better product' means 'good for the user'. Even Google seems to acknowledge this to at least some extent, seeing that they publicly stated Android 2.x was not suited for tablets, Honeycomb will not be open-sourced (for now, or maybe even never) because they don't want it on smartphones, and now this article. Also, stop exaggerating the amount of control Apple enforces on iOS and making a caricature out of it. It makes you come off as narrow minded and suspect of just being a whiney fanboy instead of trying to add insight to the discussion.

You can buy into the technical arguments made for why they are banned all you want. It's just a big smoke screen for the real reasons, seeing as there was no "technical" reasons apple banned google voice or apps that are "political satire."


Better check your history of 2009. Running a VM isn't what apple banned.


edit clarify: Some control (ie not the extent that apple dictates) and great user experience isn't mutually exclusive.


Right. Why don't you recall what apple did to their TOS back in 2009 and how the FTC formally set them straight? It isn't out of kindness of their heart that they allowed Google voice and third party dev tools back in.

No, I buy into those reasons, because I actually understand them. If you would educate yourself a little on the way iOS and Cocoa works (if that doesn't exceed your mental capabilities, that is), you could maybe even have an informed opinion on this topic yourself. iOS doesn't work so well because of fairy dust and unicorns, but because great care has been taken to be as efficient and clever as possible, which means there are restrictions to what, and how, applications interact with the OS. Anything running in its own VM is opposite to these design choices, because, by definition, a VM tries to abstract the OS and OS frameworks away from the application completely, offering its own replacements (e.g. the Flash runtime or the Java VM).

That you dragged in the Google Voice thing and apps with political satire just confirms the first paragraph of my previous comment: that you are prepared to fire off strawman arguments yourself and bend reality just so you don't have to admit you are wrong. I presonally also think these cases were stupid moves by Apple, and I downright disagree with banning applications based on the ethics of their content. Apple is no saint and I never pretended they were, but that doesn't stop you from trying I did and using this 'fact' as an argument.

Also, the infamous case of the banned cartoon application was rectified afterwards and it was allowed eventuallyt, which is yet another fact you conveniently left out.


Yes it is, go check the submission guidelines. Apple explicitly bans applications that contain ways to run non-native code, such as emulators, VM's, JavaScript engines, etc. For exactly the reasons I already elaborated on and more (security being another reason, for example).


Yeah, so what? When I say: in the case of iOS, 'control' indirectly leads to 'great user experience', did I say anything about the two being mutually exclusive? Don't think so, do you? I'm just stating a very obvious relation between the two things. What's your point here?


Again, what does this have to do with anything except you trying to make a holy war out of the Apple vs. Google vs. the rest, and the 'open is good, closed is bad' thing? You are again cherry picking a completely unrelated fact, which may or may not be an example where Apple made a booboo, and in one swell swoop you extrapolate that to make it a cornerstone argument in your theory why Apple, iOS, the iPhone, the way it is developed and the strategy behind it, are so terrible.

Try to stop thinking in 'us vs. them' and 'black vs. white' some day. I remember having a lengthy discussion with you on the topic of 'WebM vs. H264' a while ago, which was exactly like this one: you picking and choosing the very few actual facts supporting your argument, then abusing those to try to justify shitloads of completely unrelated stuff and trying to paint a picture as if there was 'absolute truth' in the whole codec discussion. A childish 'good vs bad' fairytale.

Sorry, directly addressing your points and bringing up points discussed isn't a strawman argument. edit: I never said cocoa c sucked (though programmers in other forums seem to say it does more than any other language), so you are the one with the strawman.


So, we agree. Btw, where did apple change on their TOS that political satire is now allowed? Also, you brought up the frustration of apple's approval process, which has gotten better but still isn't consistent to their own rules.




We know that. That isn't what they banned in 2009 for the third time!





See my clarification.


Not one booboo, nor was it resolved without FTC intervention. In the long run, does it matter? No. Jobs is making shit loads of money, and he knows that people will pay almost 2x for the iphone vs anything else (look anywhere for an official unlocked phone).


Funny, using facts to support my argument. Sorry you have a problem with that. I can't help reality from setting in for you.

The strawman argument I was referring to was already a few posts back where you first introduced the fact that iOS does not allow Java or Flash to make a case against systems that are more closed and controlled.

Flash and Java are not 'banned' from iOS just because Apple wanted to dick around and screw over Adobe, or their own customers. They simply decided they didn't want to include a Java VM in iOS because the OS doesn't need one, and Java applications could never be as good as native ones. They didn't want to allow Flash because it downright sucked and Adobe was unable to make it suck less.

Apparently you disagree and don't want to believe there are very good techical reasons and limitations why anything running in a VM would yield a subpar user experience, and knowing your style of commenting I don't feel like trying to convince that you simply lack the knowledge and technical background to make that call.


I never said you said Cocoa sucked either, I just tried to tell you that Apple does not require applications to use Cocoa. By the way, Cocoa is not a programming language but a set of frameworks. It is written in Objective-C, which is also what about every other piece of iOS software is written is, probably that was what you are thinking about when you mentioned Cocoa as another 'restriction' imposed by Apple. Before you bite: you don't have to use Objective-C for iOS either, you can also use Objective-C++, C, C++, Fortran, in fact any language supported by gcc, and you can link against binaries in any language with C bindings.

Offtopic: programmers who say Objective-C sucks are retards, plain and simple. I'm not even going to try to pretend being polite or nuanced about it, or trying to 'think like the programmers in other forums' to understand why they think like that, because they are simply trolling if they say that. I've programmed C, C++, Objective-C, Python, Java, Delphi, Pascal, PHP, assembly, and probably some more languages I forgot over the years, all in non-trivial amounts, and all have their good and bad points. None of them 'sucks' unless you don't use them properly or for the wrong things. If anything, Objective-C is a great combination of the strengths of C and C++ without their downsides. Combined with Cocoa (which you can also objectively define as 'very good'), they make an extremely pleasant, easy, fast and efficient development platform.


They didn't change anything in their TOS, because the TOS never said anything about political satire, only about defamatory content and such. Some over-zealous reviewer at Apple without a sense of humor just misinterpreted that and judged that a cartoon about Obama was defamatory.


Again, you're off into a nonsensical rant that doesn't really support anything else you say. It degrades all the other things you say that might have some truth in them. Just leave these bits out and maybe someday people will take you a little more seriously.

It's always been a mix of proprietary and open parts, with Google controlling whether one can call it Android or not, depending on how far one strayed from the proprietary parts. In a way, this doesn't really change anything but (mis-)perceptions of what Android is: the "open" claims have always been dishonest, and Google is simply tightening up the requirements for being allowed to brand it as Android.

I think the Amazon app market probably is a big motivator here. With a viable alternative marketplace for apps, the temptation for handset makers and carriers to cut out more and more of the proprietary parts of Android and replace them with their own becomes significantly greater. Google is gambling that the Android brand and early access is worth enough to keep them from doing this, more to allow Google to keep control of the platform than because they specifically care about "fragmentation".

The danger for Google, in terms of losing control of the platform, is that handset makers and carriers decide that Android is "mature enough" that they don't need early access to new versions, and the brand is worth little enough (which I think it is with consumers) that it's better for them to just go the ophone route, rip out the proprietary bits and use what they have now, or in the near future, and create their own branded versions. I think this is also one of the reasons Google is keeping the Honeycomb source closed, in violation of the GPL.

They may not have a monopoly in the mobile OS side, but the argument could be made that they are abusing their monopoly position in search. According to Microsoft, Google has 95% of the search market in Europe. If they leverage that into the mobile OS realm, it gives them a significant lead against Bing or other search platforms. Their domination in the search market is the key to any action brought against them. The US regulators likely won't touch Google, but I expect the EC would be much more receptive to competitors' claims.

Since Google cannot control the Android platform they will kill it with Chrome. And Andy Rubin will be the latest casualty of Googles deceit.

No, not like Windows. They never allowed a line of source code out of their doors... unless they were compelled to during a court case.

Thompson

'Clopen', thats worth keeping! Useful and entertaining term.

D-range is handing you your ass. You're responding with non sequiturs, flailing and strawmen. And smilies. This being the internet it's business as usual, but don't flatter yourself that people don't notice.