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From a purely FOSS POV, Google never tried to build a community around Android. They develop it privately, and code-drop it when there is a release. Not even th

From a purely FOSS POV, Google never tried to build a community around Android. They develop it privately, and code-drop it when there is a release. Not even their partners (generally) get to see it before the public release. Without a public roadmap, the only kind of significant user contribution to the project is bugfixes (which are still welcome of course). But notice that the problem is not "the rate of free updates", but rather the fact that Google is moving more and more development into the closed-source part of the operating system, while still trying to maintain the market line that the "operating system is free". But which operating system is free? If you install AOSP on your phone (assuming you can and manage to go through the hurdles) you end up with a phone which is completely different from stock Android. That is my complaint: the difference between AOSP and the so-called "pure Android experience" (as on a Nexus) is widening more and more. You say Android is available for free to "competitors". But as a matter of fact, AOSP (not Android) is available to competitors, and only those that are not part of the OHA. If you are a member of the OHA (so if you are an Android vendor of any significance), your contract says that you cannot fork Android; not only that, but you cannot even produce/manufacture a forked Android device as a supplier for an unrelated company outside the OHA (which is why Amazon has problems producing Kindle Fires, since all major manufacturers are also trying to sell consumer devices based on Android). Moreover, if you fork AOSP, not only you don't have access to the Play Store, but many (most?) .apk won't even work on your device, since they rely on the proprietary Google APIs which are not part of AOSP. And this, again, is a widening ongoing process, so more and more (rather than less and less) existing .apk found on Play Store are incompatible with AOSP. I think the way Google cleverly designed the whole "AOSP vs Android" licensing is way more than a standard freemium model; it's a model in which nobody pays, a part is open-source, and still it's close to impossible to create a forked consumer device that uses AOSP and benefits from the existing ecosystem. The markets in which AOSP is really making a different (in my experience) is the B2B embedded device market, which is not in direct competition with Android devices, and where AOSP is quickly moving to become the de-facto Linux embedded distro. I work in that field, and I'm grateful to Google for AOSP, as it's really making the whole market progress faster than ever.

zmmmmm 13y ago
> If you install AOSP on your phone (assuming you can and manage to go through the hurdles) you end up with a phone which is completely different from stock Android It honestly sounds like you have never installed AOSP yourself. I do it all the time and quite often use the device for a bit without any "Google". The experience of running barebones AOSP is way, way closer to stock Android than anything you will buy from an OEM. I even sometimes do it and forget to install the Google apps because it is so similar you cannot actually tell the difference until you try to use something like Gmail or Google Now. The idea that consumers buying branded phones are somehow being deceived because they think they are getting stock Android but Google has somehow slipped proprietary code in is laughable when you look at what the OEMs do in comparison. I would challenge you to get hold of a Nexus and flash plain vanilla stock Android (to make things easy, use CM 10.2 and don't put Gapps on there). These are built from source directly derived from the AOSP, by people who are NOT members of the OHA and have no special relationships with Google, manufacturers or anyone else. You will find you can set up your email, calendar, pretty much everything you need, with the exception of Maps is available. It may make you feel better about things. In my view, what is happening lately is that Google is drawing a sharper boundary around what is open source Android and what are proprietary Google services. The OS is remaining open source, as a hard condition. Things that belong in the OS are staying there and staying open source. But the layers above that - things that are rightly and properly user space apps - are only delivered as part of the OS as a convenience. Making better versions of those - possibly better versions than can ever be made open source, either because they depend on proprietary / live Google services (eg: maps) or because they use licensed or patent encumbered code - is fair game.

zmmmmm 13y ago

> If you install AOSP on your phone (assuming you can and manage to go through the hurdles) you end up with a phone which is completely different from stock Android It honestly sounds like you have never installed AOSP yourself. I do it all the time and quite often use the device for a bit without any "Google". The experience of running barebones AOSP is way, way closer to stock Android than anything you will buy from an OEM. I even sometimes do it and forget to install the Google apps because it is so similar you cannot actually tell the difference until you try to use something like Gmail or Google Now. The idea that consumers buying branded phones are somehow being deceived because they think they are getting stock Android but Google has somehow slipped proprietary code in is laughable when you look at what the OEMs do in comparison. I would challenge you to get hold of a Nexus and flash plain vanilla stock Android (to make things easy, use CM 10.2 and don't put Gapps on there). These are built from source directly derived from the AOSP, by people who are NOT members of the OHA and have no special relationships with Google, manufacturers or anyone else. You will find you can set up your email, calendar, pretty much everything you need, with the exception of Maps is available. It may make you feel better about things. In my view, what is happening lately is that Google is drawing a sharper boundary around what is open source Android and what are proprietary Google services. The OS is remaining open source, as a hard condition. Things that belong in the OS are staying there and staying open source. But the layers above that - things that are rightly and properly user space apps - are only delivered as part of the OS as a convenience. Making better versions of those - possibly better versions than can ever be made open source, either because they depend on proprietary / live Google services (eg: maps) or because they use licensed or patent encumbered code - is fair game.