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> Android is all about choice and user empowerment! I disagree, strongly. I believe Android is really more about keeping you in the Google ecosystem. So is AMP

• freedomben 8y ago
  Agreed regarding ulterior motives (keeping you in their ecosystem). In the excellent book "In The Plex" by Steven Levy, he talks about Google's motivation of essentially building a browser, mobile OS, etc just to ensure that some other party (like Apple) doesn't cut them out and reduce their search/ad domination. I believe protecting search/ads is at the base of their motives (as is, undeniably, vacuuming up tons of data and mining it for ML purposes). But that said, why do so much for open source? Why not keep big things proprietary? Why sell Chromebooks that can be unlocked, put in dev mode, and flashed with FOSS BIOS implementations? Why allow unlocking the bootloader on Nexus and Pixel phones? There's lots of things they do that clearly aren't for the bottom line or just to trap you in their ecosystem (they do offer versions of basically everything for iOS as well, which makes it easier to switch to iPhone even if you are deep in the Google ecosystem). Some of my argument is emotionally based tho, I will admit. After being trapped in Apple's very proprietary, anti-competitive, you-dont-own-it-we-do system, I find the ability to reclaim some freedom (tho not all, they could do better) very nice. So I think our only real disagreement is likely regarding motives.
  • pdkl95 8y ago
    > why do so much for open source? For the low price of working under an open source[1] license, they bought over a decade of support from a large portion of tech industry professionals. Google (along with the other FAANG businesses) was able to simply ask people to supporting their increasingly monopolistic position. When some of us attempted to warn about the long term consequences of giving Google/etc even more power, we were ignored or accused of being "crazy conspiracy theorists"; with a lot of open projects to use as counterexamples, and not many current, specific examples of Google actually abusing their power, a lot of people simply couldn't believe that Google might be doing anything bad. Open sourcing anything that overlapped with a competitor's proprietary software was a highly successful strategy to undermine the market and hurt their competitor's revenue. The minimax best move isn't always the move that maximizes your benefit; sometimes it's the move that minimizes your opponent.. [1] Note that while they use FSF/RMS-style free Software, Google generally doesn't license their open source software under the GPL. Their openness has a carefully considered limit.
  • yorwba 8y ago
    > But that said, why do so much for open source? It gets them more users for their services if people make use of their open-source libraries that happen to be optimized for Google, e.g. by integrating better with Google's cloud offerings. > Why not keep big things proprietary? They do keep big things proprietary. If it directly makes money for Google, you're not going to see it's source code, unless you work for Google. > Why sell Chromebooks that can be unlocked, put in dev mode, and flashed with FOSS BIOS implementations? Why allow unlocking the bootloader on Nexus and Pixel phones? Most people don't change their OS ever, so it doesn't really matter whether bootloaders are locked or not. Even if more people did it, many of them would still install Google apps, so it would continue not to matter. > There's lots of things they do that clearly aren't for the bottom line or just to trap you in their ecosystem (they do offer versions of basically everything for iOS as well, which makes it easier to switch to iPhone even if you are deep in the Google ecosystem). Google is not in the phone business. Their phones are just funnels for their advertising business. If they were in the phone business, offering those indispensable apps to iOS users would decrease their ecosystem lock-in. But because they're not in the phone business, offering apps for iOS increases their ecosystem lock-in, because even going to Apple, you still stay with Google. Nexus/Pixel phones exist only as funnels into the Android ecosystem. Android exists only as a funnel into default-installed Chrome, Gmail and Google Search. Chrome itself is a funnel for Google Search, while Gmail's purpose is to make people sign into an account for easier tracking. Then there's the general ecosystem pull of being the one-stop shop for a bunch of online services. But in the end it all boils down to ads. Because the majority of their products are only funnels, they'll happily cooperate with competitors for some of those products, if that helps them keep people in the wider Google ecosystem. So you get Chrome for iOS, Google Search for Firefox and so on. When a company seems to be hurting their own bottom line by giving away stuff for free, it's usually because the free stuff isn't that important to them and their real bottom line is elsewhere.
    • cronix 8y ago
      > Most people don't change their OS ever Or the default search engine, which is Google. So most Apple users are still using Google, and Google pays a ton for Apple users data. $12B is not a trivial chunk of change. That's more than most companies make, and that's only from search! http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-engine/ http://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-eng...