Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kuschku | Hacker News Reader

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> Closed source apps are not the threat

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.

> Closed source apps are not the threat > Yes, they are. See > https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html

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.

Came to say most of this and agree 100%.

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.

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