India orders anti-trust probe of Google for alleged Android abuse
reuters.com
reuters.com
you don't expect the water and power dept leaving out a neighborhood just so the free enterprise have a chance there, do you?
A very obvious example in India is the Indian airline industry. As an intern I worked with an investment bank on preparing a pitch for the sale of a private Indian airline, and the entire thing basically hinged on what the government wanted to do with the national airlines (which since then have been merged). The Indian government’s recent inability to sell Air India has led them to take action that, at least to an outside observer who did some pretty in depth research, albeit a decade ago, appears to have been driven by reducing competition for the government airline.
Ok, this story is more about Google Play Store but I feel like there is maybe (in my opinion) some conflict and abuse of dominant position here too.
Felt like it was relevant will all the other Google stories in the last days (Nest for ex.)
And enforcement of law and contract should not be built into programs - they're supposed to serve the user, not betray them to corporations and government.
There are numerous reasons to use the application.
1) FOSS, available in F-Droid.
2) Multitasking.
3) No ghost touching
4) Saves battery.
My alternative would be using Firefox where I utilize uBlock.
I see that there's a repo on GitHub: https://github.com/kiwibrowser/android
But the status of the code is unclear (the readme just says it's unsupported), and the last public commit was months ago while the app on the Play Store (having been restored) was updated much more recently.
> Chromium-based Kiwi Browser attracted widespread attention last month after it added support for desktop Chrome extensions. The app recently vanished from the Play Store, and while some assumed it was due to the browser's new extension support, it was apparently removed due to its ability to play YouTube videos in the background — functionality that is supposed to be reserved for the native YouTube app with a Premium subscription.
Fuck this shit man. As a kid I always wanted to work for Google. And now as a teen I find it hard to believe how they turned on the whole "don't do evil" thing.
It's like a friend put it the last time I was ranting about this:
"Its like funding out your childhood hero was a fraud :/"
It wasn't: don't do evil, it was: don't, do evil.
As I said before, everyone loves Google until it stomps them on their face.
People have been permanently banned from everything on Google for their bots stupid algorithm.
Fuck Google and fuck everything they stand for.
AOSP is a very small part of what actually makes Android on the eyes of consumers.
At the same time, we're getting articles talking about how Microsoft is now an "open source company" because their proprietary operating system can run Linux and some open source apps: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/microsoft-the-open-s...
There are so many apps that won't work on it at all since Google has been steadily replacing AOSP services like location with Google Play proprietary versions. If you go to the open version of location services, you'll see there's a huge note at the top that you should really go use Google's version: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/location
And any app that requires that, isn't going to work on Android releases that don't have Google's blessing like Huawei.
The flip-side of your experience is that it highlights the existence of a large number of Android devices based on AOSP that don't run Google apps, particularly in the PRC. Aside from the Chinese market, you have a major company like Amazon selling millions of devices with their own AOSP fork on them. On an individual level, I can install Lineage OS on my unlocked devices and use apps from F-Droid as well as many others.
Play Services does have a significant foothold in many users' experiences, which bears discussion, but it doesn't invalidate AOSP. It is Android's open source nature that allows for forks and for apps to be shared across the Android ecosystem much more readily than programs developed for an actual proprietary operating system such as Windows.
Microsoft does license Windows to the same OEMs that are having fun with Android, which just like on Android are allowed to do a certain level of customisations.
Windows is not only what comes with a PC.
The only big difference is that AOSP costs zero dollars, euro, yen,.....
1. They fined Google INR 1 Crore in 2014 for refusal to provide information relating to a "search bias" case 2. Later, on the same case Alphabet was fined INR 135.86 crores
How would India like to have a choice between iOS & BlackBerry? Android losing India as a market would suck a bit for Android, but life would go on.
Since this probe may take a year or longer (things usually take longer in India), the impact on Google would be very less. Google could figure out ways to appease the CCI without sacrificing much.
You're very wrong here. Source: am Indian.
Edit: I think that you're an Indian too, from a previous comment. I don't know what age bracket you're in or what demographics you're exposed to, but digital literacy is not poor here at all, and is rapidly on the rise.
Maybe your education, social/economic standing and your circle of friends/coworkers hides others in the society and their hardships.
Digital literacy may be on the rise, but even “basic” things like transferring money from one bank account to another is out of the reach of many people. How many understand basic security principles and follow them? As I pointed out, what percentage even knows what a browser is and what alternatives exist?