Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnsea | Hacker News Reader

What a nice PR reply Pichal is delivering here.

There might be 1'300 brands and 24'000 devices, but all are bound to the Google conditions. This is not choice.

Phone makers may be free to also pre-install competing apps alongside Googles, but they are not free to not install Googles app. This is not choice.

I'm using a Jolla phone. Its producer (afaik) is not allowed to support the Play Store without accepting the far reaching (now deemed illegal) conditions of Google. A severe hindrance of my choice.

What is this sentence about the rule "sends a troubling signal in favor of proprietary systems over open platforms"? The Google Play Services is closed source and required for quite some Android apps, is it?

Of course you intend to appeal. But from my point of view you deserve every cent of the fine!

View on HN

> There might be 1'300 brands and 24'000 devices, but all are bound to the Google conditions. This is not choice.

Building and maintaining android costs money. It's your opinion that "following Google's conditions" is onerous, and "not choice." Clearly the situation is that the android business model is supported by Google's terms. The alternative is something maintained by whom?

> The Google Play Services is closed source and required for quite some Android apps, is it?

As someone who worked in abuse: if you provide an app store that doesn't have governance, it'll be full of spyware/malware and finding the app you actually want, well good luck. So yeah, the app store service is run by Google and it wouldn't make any sense for that to be open source.

The overall angry attitude that "this all should be free software and that there are unpure components is wrong" -- is kind of shameful. If you care so much then go build a free software alternative. And if you're mad about walled gardens then get mad at Apple. Google's trying for a middle ground to provide consumers more choice than iOS vs free-software-that-nobody-maintains-or-isn't-safe. Yelling at people to make everything free isn't a solution.

> Building and maintaining android costs money. ... Clearly the situation is that the android business model is supported by Google's terms. The alternative is something maintained by whom?

It's not the EU's responsibility to come up with a new business model for Android that isn't illegal. Just because the business model they chose is illegal doesn't mean that we have throw out the baby with the bathwater.

> As someone who worked in abuse: if you provide an app store that doesn't have governance, it'll be full of spyware/malware and finding the app you actually want, well good luck. So yeah, the app store service is run by Google and it wouldn't make any sense for that to be open source.

I think you're conflating two separate issues. Google Play services include much more than just the Play Store and could very well be open source or at least have publicly accessible APIs licensed on non-anticompetitive terms. The Play Store can keep out malware without requiring phone makers to swear undivided loyalty and submission to Google.

> It's not the EU's responsibility to come up with a new business model for Android that isn't illegal.

Actually it is. A regulatory body is supposed to give maximum freedom to business to help them come up with cheaper and better products while not violating other people's rights.

EU is equivalent of the white cop shooting an unarmed black kid and then have audacity to call himself the defender of law and justice.

But Google is simply pointing out that the people who will end up paying the $5B fine is not Google shareholders by the EU users. As a person who owns Google shares I think Google must modify their playstore policies to charge EU android users and extra fee to pay for this $5B fine.

>A regulatory body is supposed to give maximum freedom to business to help them come up with cheaper and better products while not violating other people's rights.

Where did you manage to come up with that definition of regulatory bodies? Their job is to regulate actors under their jurisdiction based on goals set for them by their respective legislature. They don't all have an overarching goal of improving businesses. Some are(were) explicitly opposed to business interests like the EPA

> So yeah, the app store service is run by Google and it wouldn't make any sense for that to be open source.

I don't see why you're equating "governance" with "open source". You can have either one without the other.

And governance driven by a open community is also possible.

Also, the spyware you describe is only possible because of the security model employed. It's also possible to completely secure a platform so as to make these sorts of problems a thing of the past.

> It's your opinion that "following Google's conditions" is onerous, and "not choice." Clearly the situation is that the android business model is supported by Google's terms.

Android has a huge market dominance and Google looses some scope in their terms. I do think for competitors "following Google's conditions" is "not choice", e.g. you have to have the Play Store or you loose bitterly. Most/many good apps are only available through the Play Store.

A choice for me would be when a competitor has access to Play Store (of course with a fair compensation) without enabling Google at the same time to install many other unwanted/data grabbing apps/services.

> Yelling at people to make everything free isn't a solution.

Regarding closed source you misunderstood or I didn't write well. I was not angrily critizising (or yelling even) that Google Play Services is closed source, I wanted to express that one major part of Android is _already_ closed source when Pichai said "sends a troubling signal in favor of proprietary systems over open platforms". -- (Besides, what good is open platforms when services come with heavy strings attached and, sometimes, are taken away in a blink because some algorithm decided...).

“If phone makers and mobile network operators couldn’t include our apps on their wide range of devices, it would upset the balance of the Android ecosystem,”

Its as though Pichai thinks people actually want all of Google's shovelware on their devices. Why does Google try and sneakily update and re-enable their low quality Newsstand, Games and other apps that I literally do not want on my phone? Unbundling is the right move, even the Play Store should not be in the ROM itself, as when it gets updated you have no way to free the space that is used by the older version of the Play APK.

That is what infuriates me about bundled shovelware like <vendor specific apps>, Facebook, <carrier apps>, when those get updated or disabled, you still don't get to delete the original APK file. Your never getting that room on your storage back!

Is losing 10, even 100mb something to get "infuriated" about when phones have 32-128gb now, and 100mb is like 1 video you took? It's not like this is Windows system tray software where your precious ram is being eaten up. It's disk space dude.

(Also being able to factory reset the phone is worth losing 100mb imo.)

I want my storage, and advertising for memory on device these days is fraudulent. How many of the supposed 32GB of flash is actually available once you boot your phone up? Generally 7GB to 11GB is eaten by Android and shovelware right off the bat, I'd call it fraud if something is sold to me with the expectation of 34% more storage space than what I actually end up with.

It's not fraudulent; your expectations are out of line. If you flash some other OS onto your device, you'll have (32gb - whatever the size of your OS is). So to market the device as having 32gb, then having the OS take up some space, is completely accurate. The _specs_ do not indicate how much actual free space you have. This is the nature of electronic devices that have memory but require software to work.

Flashing a different OS onto most Android devices isn't possible, especially if its not a newer flagship phone. There is no foreseeable way to recover even part of this space on most Androids, which is especially troublesome considering they ship with under 32GB of storage usually.

Regardless the point was that the spec is factually correct so there's no bait and switch here. If you're lamenting the need to understand that OS'es take up space on the phone you purchased, I don't know what to tell you. Nobody gives the "with OS" memory figure.

For me it's not about the space, but this kind of thing infuriates me too.

I'm struggling to articulate a concise way to describe why practices like this upsets me so much. When I fall victim to things like this, I feel like companies are forcing my head into a pile of shit.

With android, The only time it ever happened to me was when I got an HTC evo. I spent half a months rent on that thing and Sprint decided to bundle it with a ton of applications I absolutely did not want. Finding out I couldn't uninstall their ringtone store, whatever app blockbuster paid to have shit into my phone and all the other nonsense admittedly raised my blood pressure.

I did a lot of googling and was made even angrier to learn that the only way around it was to re-flash the firmware. At the time, the outcomes I was reading about seemed pretty mixed so this seemed awfully risky to do to my new phone.

Since then, I only buy unlocked phones so I can get at that /system folder if I need to.

Unfortunately, anything that has a socket back to the mothership eventually seems to decay into shit. My ps4 has been moving the streaming apps I use further and further down the UI so I have to go back to scroll past whatever company de jure they've sold me out to this week.

Their file system has tons of options to customize sorting / positioning / visibility of everything except their streaming section, because "fuck you, you're still revenue" despite having spent 400$ on the box. I hate how often I get reminded that Stallman was right.

What if every time you went to your closet to find a shirt, the company that built your house had hung a new multi million dollar company's representative on one of your hangers that screams "HEY GIVE ME MONEY, I'LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING THAT WILL FINALLY MAKE YOU HAPPY" as bright lights flash in your face and sirens spin. Every time one of your neighbors gives them a dollar you can hear the celebratory gong from your breakfast table. It's corporate panhandling, and once you make the mistake of buying a device their dicks are still inside you're now forced to suck it down.

Maybe it shouldn't make me so angry, but it does.

Absolutely right on the emotional mark!

I have intentionally entered into plenty of relationships with companies to have cheap(er) product subsidized by advertising. It's a choice and I know what I'm getting.

But I feel like we're getting to the point where no amount of money is enough to opt out of ads in certain types of products:

* Physical copies of movies

* Non-libre operating systems [1]

* Gaming consoles

* Phones

* Most websites

* Most print media (excepting books)

* All television

In many of these cases, I've chosen to not participate at all, rather than enter into such an agreement. But that's kind of sad.

[1] I'm really just generalizing about consumer Windows here. Sweet monkey lord, when I open the "Start" menu on a nearby Windows 10 laptop, it's visually like walking into a Las Vegas casino! I assume the enterprise Windows situation is not like that? Also, I don't know if it's better or worse on Macs?

At the moment, it is better on Mac, but who the hell knows how long until the touch bar is repurposed as a billboard to sell you a subscription to WWE's streaming service or whatever the fuck.

Sweet monkey lord indeed. I used to be one of those rare Windows evangelists who said C# was the best thing since sliced bread, Windows 7 was the best thing since Windows 2000, WPF was my favorite way to make apps, and the microsoft surface (the table sized one) was going to change computing forever. I even nearly bought a zune.

Now I turn my PC on in disgust just so my daughter can play Job Simulator. After my macbook dies, maybe I'll wind down the consulting business, move to South Dakota and start selling plasma.

Enterprise Windows is much the same. It comes with Candy Crush and other crapware preinstalled.

I am sitting right in front of such a system (employer provided). How would I find Candy Crush? The Windows Search doesn't turn up anything.

Your IT department may have removed Candy Crush and other bundled applications. That is what we did.

In a sense, yes. I currently have a Moto G 1st generation that I acquired approximately 4 years back. I intended to keep it for at least a year or 2 more, but through the steady accumulation of such 100 mb losses, I have ~ 500 mb storage left on an 8 gb phone.

Now, with a reasonable OS that should be enough. However, Android insists that it does not have enough storage for app updates, and keeps bugging me with a notification for this. I fail to understand how this is possible given that the app size itself is less than a 100 mb in many cases. Almost every week I am forced to clear the cache in order to perform updates. I believe this has something to do with the swap file - but am not sure.

As a consumer, I feel artificially pushed onto a useless upgrade train. The only reason I am merely annoyed and not infuriated is because I have finally found a legitimate reason (for my needs) to upgrade - a better camera.

I have a Moto G 1st generation and put LineageOS [0] on it. Far better experience and much more free space. Unfortunately won't help with making the camera better.

[0] https://download.lineageos.org/falcon

High End Market Phones have 32 GB and upwards.

If you go to the low budget market in other countries, finding phones with 2 and 4GB of internal memory is not rare, even common. The cameras are so potato that 100mb of video is a long recording time too.

Lots of people can't afford or don't want to afford the high end phones that Samsung or HTC have.

In the same way, you won't get back the space taken by recovery partition on a random laptop.

It's there for a reason - to get the device back to the same state as it left the factory. If you could remove random apks from there, that objective would be impossible.

So on Android devices, the /system partition is read-only intentionally. The space taken by it at least has a use during both runtime and recovery; traditionally the recovery is completely wasted space.

What I do mind thought, is the Android vendor's ability to prevent user disabling their apps, and abusing it. There's no reason why I should keep Samsung's (for example) showelware enabled.

Shovelware shouldn't be in the system partition, plain and simple. Its a bad industry practice, even on Laptops (which do let you delete the recovery partition FYI).

On (unlocked) mobiles, you can re-partition the device and write /system image without the apps you don't want too. Few users will bother, just like few users will bother with deleting the recovery partitions on laptops.

By request, I've done this for friends and family a few times. Few users bother because it's made arbitrarily difficult so as to seem dangerous to many non IT professionals.

Sony has been getting more and more aggressive shoveling garbage down my throat via the playstation 4 funnel. I can't imagine ever giving them another dime as a result. Hopefully they'll keep going until they cross most people's line so the door can swing the other way.

With the ARM platform, resizing the partitions comes with significant risk if something goes wrong. In the PC-land, the equivalent would be the potential of losing your BIOS/UEFI. Many people would then think twice about repartitioning.

PC repartitioning only looks dangerous, because ordinary users are not aware where they put their data, and changing partitions and resizing filesystems is a nice way to loose at least some of them.

I don't own PS4, so I cannot comment on that. I do own Xperia phone thought, and I'm satisfied with it.

Stateside, most phones ship with locked bootloaders. Most models never see their bootloader get unlocked, because all the development interest goes towards the flagship phones from Samsung and LG.

The locked status and unlockability, is being done on request of carriers. Because they order thousands of pieces, they get to say what those pieces should do.

If you do not agree, get your stuff elsewhere, the carriers will get the memo eventually. Yes, I know that you would have to pay the full price, and with carriers you don't have to, but then the locked status and customized firmware comes as a part of the price for the convenience.

I don't know how big the unremovable version of google play services is in most roms, but the currently installed version on my phone is 400MB. I'm guessing that means it takes 20% of the storage on a low end 4GB phone. When the recovery images on computers were significant compared to the overall storage, they were more commonly included on separate discs, or a utility was present for the owner to archive the recovery image onto discs locally and then remove it and expand the visible partition.

Since the apps are all going to be updated shortly after unboxing anyway, it would be better for the user to just include a stub downloader for most things. Enough of google play services to update the services to current and offer (but not force) install the rest of the "essential" apps. Plus a small basic browser; Chrome is 177 MB on my phone.

Most low end phones are shipping with at least 8GB of storage, but up to 7GB of that is eaten by the system partition usually, giving you effectively no space.

Maybe low end phones in the US are shipping with 8GB; low end phones in lower income markets still only have 4GB. (See the recent articles about life with a Bharat 2)

Android was never free. It has cost all of us a lot in terms of freedom and privacy.

... and time spent by developers trying to make their apps work right across all devices (or even on a single device)

There isn't a platform on earth where developers don't have to worry about their app working on all devices.

Also:

- Just like on WP, you cannot set some things to open in other browsers.

- No extension support, because they know perfectly well what many people would install first, an add blocker.

To be fair, you can install FF, disable chrome and everything should work since WebView is now unbundled

You can install Chromium for Android and get everything except Flash working.

You are free to not use Android. That is choice.

Everything else that follows is based off of your choice to use Android.

There are consequences to your choices. You don't have a line-item veto, after the fact, on contract terms.

If you want Google to stop open sourcing Android, this is how you do it.

Then you will lose the choice to have Android at all, unless Google is the provider, possibly with Samsung or Jolla as the OEM.

So take it or leave it eh? And what about Google choosing an anti-competitive (i.e. Illegal) business model?

They are far, far more open than iOS. You can actually replace the built-in apps.

You didn't answer his question.

I'm attacking the assertion that the business model should be illegal.

The law is currently written that a competitor, who gets twice as much revenue in their app store, and has far stricter controls, is not in trouble.

That's moronic.

Still didn’t answer their question.

"So take it or leave it eh?" Yes.

"And what about Google choosing anti-competitive (i.e. Illegal) business model?" I think the law should be re-written so its not illegal, or what Google's competitors are doing should also be considered illegal.

I made both of those points abundantly clear. Yes, I did answer their question.

A competitor that has less than 15% of the market on smartphones, 0% of the market on search and under 5% of the market on browsers.

The business model is not illegal but it is if abused to leverage market position against the competition.

Apple doesn't have a large market nor do they leverage their market position to force potential competition out of said market.

They have the choice to build their own OS. The reason they don’t is clear, it’s too expensive. Google instead of charging money requires certain licensing conditions. If they truly want full control they could build it themselves but obviously they’re prefer google’s licensing model.

That's the current local optimum for phone manufacturers. The anti trust regulations exist, in part, to help prevent companies from forcing a local optimum that ensures no one ever tried something different, and thus forces the industries to keep improving.

If the OS was so good on it's own then google would not need these licensing terms to maintain market share.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com