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I don't know enough about Android technically to tell whether this is true, but the blog post is complaining specifically about restrictions on reverse engineer
by comex 12y ago
I don't know enough about Android technically to tell whether this is true, but the blog post is complaining specifically about restrictions on reverse engineering the SDK.
Another bullet point is about restrictions on jailbreaking; while this is certainly highly onerous and I don't think Google has an equivalent clause, it's worth noting that Google's ban on reverse engineering the Play Store and apps distributed by it (as opposed to the SDK itself) includes activities that, translated to Apple terms, are fairly important to jailbreaking. (In particular, many App Store apps refuse to run on jailbroken devices, and must be reverse engineered to identify how to bypass this check. I don't know what the situation is on Android, but I would be surprised if that clause wasn't rouinely ignored.)
- MCRed 12y agoTLDR: Google is doing it too. Thank you for pointing it out.
- yincrash 12y agoThe main SDK is open source. It's built from the same tree as Android from the AOSP, and you can build it yourself right now, which makes reverse engineering it sort of moot. Things like billing APIs or maps or google's push notifications however are in closed binaries, which I believe is what the clause is protecting.
- yincrash 12y agoAdditionally, I know enough of the Android build process to know that yes, it is true that the Google Play Store does not require DRM. It's also easy to pull any app that doesn't have DRM off a phone and put it on a phone using the debug tool that google themselves release (ADB). `adb pull <app location>` plug in new phone `adb install <app file you just pulled.apk>`