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> "There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source."

> "There's a whole thing about the Play Services absorbing more of the features, and I feel like it's a great indicator of the difficulties with open source." Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where Play Services were open source. How would this hold back Google from maintaining/growing their market share? As for developing for Android and swapping out the backend later, by that point your apps would be tied into the Android API calls, unless you intentionally make your apps cross-platform, at which point what do you gain from running Android? If it's just for the drivers then libhybris is an option. If you want the ability to run Android apps whilst you build up your own, this is something you can do with Sailfish OS, which you'll almost certainly be able to run on the Librem smartphone if it's released.

rtpg 9y ago
My point about Play Services was that, despite Android being OSS, it is not sufficient to just set up AOSP. People still want to use apps, so you have to get a copy of Play Services. But Play Services is a Google blob, phoning home and the works. The higher-level stuff is what "matters" to people. If Play Services were open source, then someone could release forks of that which patch out the questionable parts of it (just like Chromium/Chrome, in reverse). Efforts could be combined on the open source parts of things, so that we don't spend our lives rewriting battery-efficient geofencing services. the gain from running on Android is that you can concentrate on higher-level value-adds first, to build adoption of your stack. You could build out some cross-platform thing too, it's just that Android tends to make things a bit easier for swapping things out. Sailfish sounds like a good option for this, but what I'm reading is that the people making Librem are spending a lot of effort building out a new OS mostly from Linux?
s17n 9y ago
Play services exists to give Google a way to deliver updates that isn't subject to carrier or oem interference. If it was open sourced, that would defeat the purpose. To put it another way, giving the general public access to the source wouldn't make any difference to Google, but giving Samsung that access would make a big difference.

rtpg 9y ago

My point about Play Services was that, despite Android being OSS, it is not sufficient to just set up AOSP. People still want to use apps, so you have to get a copy of Play Services. But Play Services is a Google blob, phoning home and the works. The higher-level stuff is what "matters" to people. If Play Services were open source, then someone could release forks of that which patch out the questionable parts of it (just like Chromium/Chrome, in reverse). Efforts could be combined on the open source parts of things, so that we don't spend our lives rewriting battery-efficient geofencing services. the gain from running on Android is that you can concentrate on higher-level value-adds first, to build adoption of your stack. You could build out some cross-platform thing too, it's just that Android tends to make things a bit easier for swapping things out. Sailfish sounds like a good option for this, but what I'm reading is that the people making Librem are spending a lot of effort building out a new OS mostly from Linux?

s17n 9y ago

Play services exists to give Google a way to deliver updates that isn't subject to carrier or oem interference. If it was open sourced, that would defeat the purpose. To put it another way, giving the general public access to the source wouldn't make any difference to Google, but giving Samsung that access would make a big difference.