With Cyanogen dead, Google's control over Android is tighter than ever
greenbot.com
greenbot.com
1. Closed source apps are not the threat (Nowhere does it say that the dialer, home screen, messaging app, or camera are a part of the OS. All are replaceable, and all replacements integrate just as well as the original, it's not an iPhone).
2. Google controlled Android through legal means - If you want to make your Android phone in a factory, or if you want to use any google app, you need to obey their rules. So if yo want Play store, you have to play along.
3. Cyanogen saw Google as a threat, but Google didn't see Cyanogen as a threat. Cyanogen didn't die because of Google's behavior. They died because of terrible execution.
Remember the spat over split-windows. Google didn't ban the appstore (despite being able to), they demanded that the environment not be _too_ modified.
Cyanogenmod backed down and Google let it go.
The only thing is that they were forbidden to _package_ it, but opengapps is still around.
4. Google isn't closing-source because of Cyanogenmod or other custom Roms. It's bigger threat is Samsung or Amazon.
Yes, they are. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html
> All are replaceable
You can not replace the Dialer at all. Replacements can not integrate at all. The others have similar problems.
> Google controlled Android through legal means
According to the EU, they didn’t – they abused their market power to extort companies to force them to bundle their products.
> Google didn't see Cyanogen as a threat.
Yet Google cracked down even more on OEMs that shipped non-Google Android in markets where Google Android exists in the meantime. They definitely saw a threat.
> Google didn't ban the appstore (despite being able to), they demanded that the environment not be _too_ modified.
See the EU argument again: Google does not have the right to restrict their services in that way, due to having too much market power. They can not discriminate against the environments their products will be used in.
I would like to add more to this. Not only stock apps are not replaceable on most devices but they might not even work as OEMs are notorious with their ROMs and don't use all of the Android hardware API in their apps instead develop their own which makes it easy for them to update. This sounds good but isn't as most good third-party apps use those drivers & APIs to make them work.
That is why until M fingerprint sensor mostly worked on all apps which used Android's fingerprint API but wouldn't work on a lot of devices as OEMs used their own to integrate in the device.
Well, they should. But I wouldn't call a closed-source messaging app (which you can replace with qksms) proof that AOSP is over.
>According to the EU, they didn’t – they abused their market power to extort companies to force them to bundle their products.
I meant legal to contrast "force" (closing the source), not that it's not illegal. They could really open-source everything and still mandate people to use Hangouts.
>Yet Google cracked down even more on OEMs that shipped non-Google Android in markets where Google Android exists in the meantime. They definitely saw a threat.
Did they fight CM?
What did they do to make CM's life difficult?
>See the EU argument again: Google does not have the right to restrict their services in that way, due to having too much market power. They can not discriminate against the environments their products will be used in.
But they can refuse to license the Google Play store to entities outside of OEMs, as long as the terms aren't discriminatory.
At least for my phone (LG G2), the camera uses several proprietary frameworks and there are only 1-2 apps that work with them (the official one and a community replacement). Furthermore the frameworks only work on one Android version (Lollipop) so there is no way to upgrade to newer Android.
Similarly there are a lot of LG UI tweaks (lock screen, notification bar, a few others) with no source (Although here at least there are custom mods with different tweaks, so there is some amount of freedom).
> If you want to make your Android phone in a factory, or if you want to use any google app, you need to obey their rules.
The first part is wrong - "Android" per-se is Apache 2, i.e. free to use without restrictions (thus Amazon's "Fire OS"). But Google has been moving more and more functionality (e.g. location services) into Google Frameworks so it's pretty hard to avoid signing an agreement.
Opengapps isn't really a solution, you still need a license to use them on the phone (and Google could easily lock out an unlicensed manufacturer). https://microg.org/ is but it would still take some work to make it production-quality.
That's why I stressed "in a factory". No factory which makes commercial Android is permitted to make unlicensed android.
According to [1], OEMs can use Android trademarks as long as they conform to the Android compatibility standard, which doesn't require a license for the Google Mobile Service (Google Play, etc) [2]. If you do want to brand it as an Android device, you largely just have to maintain compatibility with the Android ecosystem regardless of whether you distribute Google apps. If you don't want to use the Android trademark (which is independent of the source code), you don't have to do anything.
So Amazon can't get Acer to build them phones or tablets. As most independent manufacturers build Android phones, Amazon had a hard time finding someone to make Fire for them.
Just an anecdote. I'm currently living in China and me and the other expats were always kinda amused that local Chinese are willing to spend the equivalent of 2 months of their salary on an iPhone. Apple's grip on the market is absolute here
At first, like some high brow NYT journalist, I thought it must be a cultural thing. People looking for a status thing, a vanity thing in a image conscious society. Or a the very least they're willing to fork over tons of cash to get a good quality device bc they don't trust their own phone makers. But the local phones are actually hardware-wise okay. And they have decent warranty support (not Apple level.. but still)
But after watching a friend struggle with an Android phone, I realized that the problem is the apps. There is no GooglePlay store, just crappy 3rd party stores like the Xiaomi Store. These stores have basically no standards when it comes to app quality and Chinese apps are horrible bloated virus-like monstrosities that slowly cripple your phone till it barely works and the battery dies after half a day. All the permissions managers and security features in the world don't stop the system from being a complete disaster here.
If anyone wants to free Android - they need to make a good play-store alternative that only allows high quality apps. They you can make your Android fork and whatever else you want
* not even connecting to WiFi worked, as it tries to connect to a Google domain to check, which is blocked. (iPhone connects to apple.com to check, though that domain works fine)
There are several other minor features also which made the cut from AOKP roms to AOSP.
And once you spend enough time on websites like [Google-My Activity][1] .You would realise why many would want to avoid the google ecosystem owing to their privacy concerns. Most of the alternative android app markets like F-Droid survived majorly because of custom ROMS. While their numbers were not huge, they were the few who preferred keeping control of their devices and the information that they shared. Almost 80% of the custom ROMs are forked off CM. With CM being dead,this would affect others too.
You can also thank CM for ensuring that devices have a much longer lifespan than what the OEMs deem.
Also, IMHO, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the Google Now shortcut was inspired by PA's Pie controls. One is just a shortcut to an enhanced search feature, and the other is... not unlike iOS's Assistive Touch feature on steroids. The only commonality is that they occur near/around the home button.
EDIT: And in fact, my Galaxy Note II had a "long-press menu button to trigger search" since the dedicated search button was removed -- nothing particularly unique about that paradigm.
While Cyanogen Inc. may well have been Google's biggest "threat" when it came to control of Android, it wasn't even that big a threat to begin with. They were always beholden to Google's source dumps, as was any other ROM distribution. I'd argue little has changed in terms of how much control Google has over Android's destiny, and Cyanogen Inc.'s (impending) death doesn't really move the compass in any meaningful way.
ApOps was removed by google[1] .
I agree with the little has changed bit. But I think we should give them credit for innovating quite a bit on the platform.And with Google's version of the OS, there were little outside options.which will reduce more drastically atleast till all Custom ROMs start forking of LineageOS.
[1]: Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top of App Ops that Google had already been developing.
I agree that CyanogenMod did bring innovations to the table -- I'm in no way trying to diminish that. Just clarifying attribution where due.
Speaking more generally, there is no doubt that custom ROMs answered needs/demands that Google just couldn't satisfy in the same timelines. Custom ROMs deserve tons of credit for prototyping and "market testing" concepts/features for Google. The good news is that -- by and large -- most of the low-hanging fruits have already been incorporated back into mainline Android. Nowadays, I've personally found fewer and fewer reasons to use custom ROMs (outside of the ever-important need to extend device lifetime anyway -- probably the biggest thing remaining that Google likely won't ever attempt to satisfy).
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/11/googler-app-ops-was-...
[2] https://www.xda-developers.com/protecting-your-privacy-app-o...
If there are no alternative OSes, the fact that most of Android doesn't really matter any more.
PA - dead
AOSB - Exceeded bandwidth and archive doesn't seem to have archived it properly. According to Google cache, they're working on L, so seems dead.
Slim - was dead for a few years. Seems to have revived.
The question is what will LineageOS look like?
I thought so too but, based on a quick search I just did, it was relaunched in 2016.
Certain custom ROM's such as ParanoidAndroid [2] used AOSP as a base prior to CyanogenMod getting shutdown so these ROM's would not be impacted.
The nice thing about CyanogenMod was the wide variety of devices they supported. This meant you could get a newer version of Android/CM on what would have been an otherwise unsupported device by the OEM/Wireless Carrier. CyanogenMod was generally the model project for other third-party custom ROM's.
[1] http://source.android.com/source/index.html [2] http://www.paranoidandroid.co/
CM supported more than 500 devices, the only other ROM that is even close to that is MIUI which supports about 200 devices (most of which are in China).
Other ROMs support less than 50 devices. Some even keep it limited to Nexus devices only (read CopperheadOS).
AOKP is based on CM
AOSB isn't being officially updated to even Lollipop I think.
SlimROM is active but yet again quite limited and slow. They released their ROM based on M late this year which is very late in terms of custom ROMs standard (even most OEMs by then had released M for their devices)
Paranoid Android is active but limited to about 30-40 popular devices.
CM was known for supporting devices which the OEMs ignore after 2 years of launching them. And once CM was released for it many other custom ROMs were developed based on it to keep devices updated. This is the main reason why CM is most popular and appreciated for.
At one point CyanogenInc partnered with MSFT so they have a Microsoft sponsored Android flavour with several Microsoft apps preinstalled. https://cyngn.com/press/cyanogen-announces-strategic-partner... http://www.businessinsider.de/why-microsoft-cuddled-up-to-cy... smells like MSFT common EEE strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish to hit Google's Android market, especially now as their WinPhone market is dead with less than 1% of world wide market share.
Hopefully it gets done right this time.
I looked into custom ROMs (i.e., Android forks) and that wasn't my experience. They took AOSP (Android Open Source Project), made some mostly cosmetic changes, and distributed it. CopperheadOS might be an exception.
but, i guess it was really about Android's market share.
(but seriously, what about it?)