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Comment by ggggtez | Hacker News Reader

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-for-vendors-to-sell-an-And...

>The AOSP doesn't come with Google Services. You can build a device and sell it, but it will not have the incredibly important set of Google Apps people love, not even Google Play (so people cannot go and download Google Maps and Gmail afterwards).

Hmmm, and yet this comes with Google Maps... Suspicious...

Edit: A post below indicates that it is Android 8.1. I'm no lawyer, but it sounds like a trademark violation to sell Android but call it something else.

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Lots of companies sell Android devices without explicitly calling it Android. The most notable example is Amazon (Android - without GApps - is the OS on pretty much everything in the Fire line, e.g. Fire Tab and Fire TV).

In other words, I think you've got it backwards: you're not allowed to use Google's branding/trademarks (including "Android") unless you have authorization from Google. Meanwhile, I'm not aware of any requirement to call the OS "Android" even with that authorization; the word "Android" doesn't show up at all in the official product page for Samsung's Galaxy S9 [0].

[0]: https://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/phones/galaxy-s/galaxy-s9-...

Incorrect. Look at the specs page: OS Android O (8.0)

It's not just that it's not visible, it's the Blloc is pretending they invented an entire new os ("Blloc OS").

Amazon Fire is a different story, because they package their own app store (not the Google Play Store). But Blloc is loading the Play Store. I am fairly sure that a requirement of doing so means you have to accept the Google branding (i.e. you have to call it Android).

oxygenOS ? lineageOS ?

Well shoot. I even did a Ctrl-F on the page and got zero results, probably because it was hidden under that drop-down.

Regardless, worst-case is they just have to tweak their OS branding to be "Android with Blloc Root" (which is what HTC does, i.e. "Android with HTC Sense"). Yet I'm not finding anything which explicitly requires that (only finding instances where use of Android branding is not allowed, e.g. FireOS).

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