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This should be just another wake up call to the fact that Android just isn't open. Unless you're inside the OHA your view doesn't count, and even then you have
by fidotron 12y ago
This should be just another wake up call to the fact that Android just isn't open. Unless you're inside the OHA your view doesn't count, and even then you have to go along with Google's vision of the future.
End users might think they have it bad, but the development experience is basically an exercise in dealing with whatever hyped up shiny unfinished turd is floating down from on high. It's a shame because some aspects of the system are really damn good, but there is just so much crap.
Having seen all this develop has persuaded me that the future is lower level APIs. On the web that means asm.js, Canvas, indexeddb etc. (discarding HTML and CSS), and on Android it means C++ and OpenGL and staying the hell away from as much of the higher level parts as possible. (Bonus points for increased code portability). The reason for this is the lower level ones seem to reach stable predictability much faster. It is better/easier to bundle any high level UI toolkit in the application itself than to have to support rendering on four different versions of the toolkit.
- TillE 12y agoI'm not sure what you think "open" means. You're still free to fork Android and do what you want with it. Google's negligence in fixing a variety of issues doesn't change that one bit.
- fidotron 12y agoYou aren't really free to fork it at all. Forking the SDK is explicitly not allowed, but the killer is if you want to make one device which carries the Google Apps you have to agree that all Android devices you make will. (i.e. you are forced to bundle Google Play Services on all devices). This is why Amazon do what they do and it remains a separate ecosystem.
- digi_owl 12y agoI seem to recall that there is some fairly stringent marketing elements involved as well. If you carry the Google apps, you can't put them deeper than one level below the launcher or something.
- bad_user 12y ago> Forking the SDK is explicitly not allowed That is not true. The SDK's source-code, like much of Android, is licensed under the APL 2.0 license. The SDK license you're referring to and that has restrictions applies to the binaries, as packaged and distributed by Google.
- zanny 12y agoIts open collaboration versus open source. Even at that a lot of Android is still free software, distributed under the Apache license, but being free does not mean Google needs to accept bugs or interact with users at all on their part, it is just the users ability and right to observe and modify the code they run.
- TheDong 12y agoThe existence of the Kindle with Amazon's android fork seems to be good evidence to the contrary; another company took the code and made their own fork. Sure, upstream might not be making changes to support Kindle, but it's open so they can apply those patches.