Google invested Billions into Android.<p>Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a "if the worst happens" plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.<p>LG has the Palm/HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.<p>Everyone else? They're too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.<p>Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn't do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.
Does it reveal Google's iron grip on Android ?<p>Really ?<p>I'd say it rather reveals most users' unhealthy addiction to Google's services, without which, this whole thing wouldn't be the 'tragedy' and wake up call it's turning out to be for many.<p>I have used Android for a decade now completely Google-free and no one could pay me enough money to be tracked and to run pure spyware 24/7 at this point... I enjoy immensely having a laptop replacement always on, always with me, in my pocket. No use for Play Services, advertising companies data mining all I do at all times, or 27, 42 or 59 'social media' applications running to give purpose to my life and 'communicate' with my 'friends'...<p>File manager, web browser, terminal, editor, LTE... That's what I need or care about. I guess not many of us left.
The article links to an interesting view on how even AOSP is a no-go for Huawei: <a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/analysis-huawei-aosp-google-ban/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xda-developers.com/analysis-huawei-aosp-google-b...</a><p>What I find interesting is that Apache Licensed software can be relicensed even in proprietary form (as long as you make it a derivative work, with your derivative bits with a proprietary license), thus the easy way out seems to be to have a non-US entity make a proprietary fork of AOSP. I do not see a legal reason why this company would not be able to sell AOSP to Huawei under these conditions.<p>I am sure plenty of us remember the days when free and open source encryption software was distributed exclusively through non-US servers due to US export restrictions.<p>IANAL, so I wonder if I am missing something?<p>As for alternative platforms, I imagine plenty are US based/originating (QNX, webOS from Palm/HP originally, Android), but there are alternatives like Jolla and Ubuntu Touch which aren't.<p>While I dislike Huawei since they decided to stop sharing unlock codes for their phones, Huawei has one killer app that's not very much reliant on Android: camera.<p>Getting that camera app on one of the less known platforms and enabling Huawei phones for them would still make them appealing to a large number of customers in eg. Europe.
It reveals the value Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen created in the GPL, how much market forces will tend toward monopoly, and how we've let up on resisting those trends.
Yeah, and it also reveals what the world would look like if Windows phone won instead of android. Atleast for Android you have AOSP, which is atleast somewhat open source. If Windows phone and iOS were the only two alternatives, a ban on a phone company like huwaei would be a death sentence. Can't do much with windows or iOS.
So they trigger the PRC gov to build their own OS. A temporary setback or worse? Who do we bet on in 10 yrs? State sponsored technology or Google?<p>My bet is on China.
I for one have been using a Honor (Huawei) phone for over 3 months with DNSFilter app running 24x7. Blocked all google domains after I installed the necessary apps from playstore. I don't see any problems if google shuts of Honor/Huawei devices permanently. I'd say it will be a benefit of Honor/Huawei phones. It will be the most privacy friendly phone out of the box.<p>Edit-
I use Newpipe instead of Youtube. So thats the alternative for the last google service I'd need everyday.
Huawei is a massive company with a large lineup of affordable Android phones. Why can't they just fork Android just like Amazon and Microsoft?<p>I guess they would have to come up with alternative to google play marketplace, gmaps, gmail, etc. but it's not really a big deal with the resources they have. Not to mention that the open source equivalent of these apps are serviceable.
“Consumers are attached to the Google products and services that sit on top of the operating system,”<p>I doubt that. Google is pretty bad at keeping users. (Probably GMail is the strongest anchor point, but as we have seen with the G+ real name gotcha, it's better to be prepared to stop using that. Though of course most GMail users are not prepared for that.) Users will use whatever is the default.<p>Probably the YouTube app is what users would miss the most. And I don't know whether it works without Play Services. But it certainly works on iOS, so if there were a new platform, Google/Alphabet/YT would make apps for that platform too.
Such iron, much grip. You can trivially install Google play store and services on 98% of the non-licensed phones in China.<p>The fact that a $50B Chinese domestic Android market is thriving with zero control by Google proves the thesis to be untrue.<p>Then there's Amazon's fire product line. The only reason it lags Google's play store is quality. If Amazon's hardware and software/store selection were 80% as good, they'd be a serious contender - again one needs to look at China for evidence of this, where Tencent, Baidu etc. run their own successful app stores agnostic to hardware
Arguably Huawei wouldn’t be where they were today if they wrote their own OS from scratch. People complain about the power of Google. They’re complaining about the power of a great product. Anyone is welcome to build on top of Android it’s just really really hard so they let Google do that work.
I have a few comments on this. First, Google as a money making corporation would probably not like this restriction enforced by the US government. Second, I used to use Android and when I did I avoided installing any apps, preferring to use web versions of the services I needed. The Huawei phones could be functional with some thoughtful default setups, home screen icons linked to appropriate web URIs, etc. The big kicker would be lack of games.
Here's a granular discussion of another instance of Google exerting control over Android, from a decade ago (2010):<p><a href="https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ma-court-of-appeals/1683074.html" rel="nofollow">https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ma-court-of-appeals/1683074.html</a>
I would like to see an open source project taking the spot here, not Huawei doing the same (actually probably worst) thing as Google and create their own semi-closed OS.<p>In fact, in Huawei's particular case, I don't even think it will be a push to create momentum for a truly open smartphone OS out of necessity, after all, Huawei goes through great lengths to keep the bootloader in their phones locked.
Curious to know, are there ways that a country (in fact mainly the U.S.) can 'flip the switch' (weaponize, if you will) on fundamental internet tech, such as DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP and many many others, to severely affect a foreign adversary's business (either a company or a country)?<p>Sure those are merely standards/protocols, still, is it possible these tech and their current world-wide setup be effectively used in conflicts by issuing government executive orders or enacting new laws?<p>Edit: just found this on reddit. Not exactly what I was asking (fundamental internet standards/protocols), but still somewhat related.<p>From a reddit post --
"Huawei is no longer able or allowed to work on standards for Wi-Fi, USB and SD cards. "Temporarily restricted" by Wi-Fi Alliance, voluntarily withdrew from JEDEC (USB etc) and no longer a member of SD Associaton (which technically means no more SD slots)"
Ugh... Google owns the android brand. Is this somehow news?<p>Google open sources the core operating system and people use it for embedded systems or grad projects as reference materials.<p>If anyone wants to know what Android is like without Google, look at Amazon Kindle. Amazon did the whole no Google Android.<p>Point is that this should have shocked nobody.
In defense of Google none of the smartphone makers have tried to make their own mobile OS based on Android.<p>Besides I think it more reveals how Google is in the grip of US politics- it might be time for Google to draw up some contingency plans for when America goes completely nuts.
It is not an accident that successful tech companies that provide devices for their users control their own destiny from the hardware to the UI level, great examples Apple, Microsoft. You can team up with Google but then your destiny is controlled by them.
My feeling is that this whole silliness will backfire spectacularly! Huawei will develop their own OS. It's hard but not impossible. Who cares if there's buy-in from the entire developer community...nowadays people don't use apps that much anyways. Apps are just another way of consumption. Most apps can probably be replaced with webviews with little lost of functionality. I don't know enough about the technical difficulties they'll have in developing a brand new os, but it's been done multiple times. In any case, this sux for all parties.
US enterprises are losing reliability with this dirty game of its government. I hope this issue will be taken as a wake up alarm for the necesity of a pluricultural and far more diverse technology market.
Can someone explained what happened recently to cause such aggressive action against Huawei with ARM , Google etc refusing to work with them. Is it related to arrest of their executive recently ?
Google is prosecuted for abusing Android monopoly in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google</a>
I don't know what I would have done, but as a multinational I would have bought Windows Phone OS and their platform.<p>Launch could be within months of acquiring everything. And the heavy lifting was already done ( compatibility).
I don't see the problem. Android, the operating system, is open source. App developers make a choice to use Google Play services? Why do developers choose to do this? Does Google provide features people want?
If you lose access to google play do you also lose access to Google Cloud Messaging for notifications ? Because if that's the case that's huge. Hosted notification is so important these days.
Everyone acts as if this came out of the blue, in reality there have been problems with China's state owned enterprises for a decade. Everyone has to play by the rules or why have rules at all?
But Google made and owns the Android OS. Why shouldn't they have an iron grip on it? Should Apple not have full rights to iOS or Microsoft to Windows? It is a product that Google made.
They should have pumped more effort into the Web. Would have made it a real competitor in every way and no one would have cared about native apps and stores anymore.
There was no Huawei disaster... it was all FUD for Trump's triumphant trade war. As Trump shows his hand, the world now can see that the real disaster is US hegemony:<p><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/24/tech/donald-trump-huawei-ban/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/24/tech/donald-trump-huawei-...</a>
The rationale for cutting off Huawei seems to be "No matter how much you claim to not spy, you are forced to comply when the Chinese government tells you to do so" - which so far appears to be the hypothetical worst case scenario. Considering that, it's kinda ironic that Google/Amazon/ARM et al are all _actually_ carrying out Huawei's own (formerly)hypothetical worst-case scenario because the US government told them to do so.
This title is an extreme framing of the situation. A similar title would be "The Huawei Travesty Reveals Microsoft's Iron Grip on Windows NT".<p>Yes, copyright is a thing, and if you own a copyright, you are entitled to control its copying through license agreements. To characterize that as an "Iron Grip" is quite strange, as short of releasing all of this investment as open source, there is no other kind of "grip" that Google is entitled to.<p>Google has invested billions of dollars into applications and infrastructure for their most successful Linux distro, and yes, they own the copyright to that.<p>As far as I'm aware, Google does not market their current Android distro as "open source" to any great extent, so why is it more of a problem than any other piece of popular proprietary software? What about the millions of Linux-based kiosks, pub games consoles, and giant social media and advertising juggernauts who also have proprietary software that they sell access to?