The Huawei Disaster Reveals Google’s Iron Grip on Android
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a "if the worst happens" plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.
LG has the Palm/HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.
Everyone else? They're too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.
Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn't do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.
- China has a huge domestic market and it may be sufficient in itself for a profitable venture
- About half of Android phones are manufactured by Chinese brands.
- China has deep pockets and are willing to play the long game.
- They have no choice. Trump's used the nuclear option, which may well work in the short term but in the long term this has shown China and others that they have to get rid of their reliance on US tech and companies as a matter of national security.
I think Trump's move has set a ball rolling and that in 10 years we'll see the results of that... And that won't be a pretty picture for the US.
If 50% of Android phones are by Chinese brands then once an alternative exists they will have a big incentive in dropping Android. The end result can only be a massive market share loss for Google.
The same goes for other tech companies like Qualcomm, ARM (not US but in same boat). Anything that can be weaponised.
This is geopolitics and a global strategic issue. Google is just caught in it.
But if they relinquish some control for the sake of getting a competitive OS where they can't be cut off, what you're saying is true. I do see them capable making an OS, technically, I'm more worried about their worldwide soft skills/soft power. Which I'm guessing they'd also want to improve, so you never know.
Because this is HN and HN has a horrible moderation system that makes no sense and pales in comparison to the BBS of olde.
Indeed. Trump's heavy-handed approach in recent weeks seems likely to have far-reaching implications, and presumably the results won't be favourable for Western businesses hoping to expand more into fast-growing Asian markets in the years ahead. He's shown that any business with strong connections to the US can't be relied upon to be an economically rational trading partner, because the US is now demonstrably willing to conflate national security issues with trade policy.
That policy is also putting US allies in awkward positions. Here in the UK, we are faced with questionable demands from a long-time ally (the US) and thinly veiled threats from a big investor (China) if we comply with those demands. Presumably other allies such as Australia feel similar opposing pressures. The only rational long-term strategy I can see for nations in this position is to be clear that they will always make their own strategic decisions on security matters and which global suppliers to use for national infrastructure projects (and then to actually do so, throwing a proverbial elbow at the US if necessary). At least that way you maintain some credibility with future governments around the world as a reasonable partner.
In the meantime, it seems that the current hostile stance toward China from the Trump administration in the US is hurting the global economy, and ironically it also seems like US consumers are the ones ultimately paying most of the cost of those trade barriers.
Consumers will pay more but I'm not as sure about the irony. Couldn't it be that the intent is to reduce US consumption of Chinese imported goods? Couldn't the policy's intent simply be to shift the economy ever so slightly away from consumption and toward production?
It certainly could be, but I think how credible that is depends on the goods affected. If they are essentials and there is competition from elsewhere, the barriers make China less competitive, and US customers will presumably go for the best deal to minimise their losses. If they are non-essentials, the barriers also make them less attractive, and again China loses out. But if they are essentials and China is the only game in town, import tariffs look a lot like a tax on the US market.
Facebook and others will make apps for them...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35288650-the-next-factor...
Expect that this will cause a decline in EU GDP as the remnants of colonialism get displaced/replaced.
Or is it about the trade deficit? In which case Korean and Japanese manufacturers are not safe from prosecution.
Japan has to sign the Plaza Accord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord#Effects when it positioned to challenge US economy. It is attributed as the main reason to their Lost Decades. You bet that Japanese forgot about this, and Korean and Chinese do not know this.
What US gov initially wanted probably is something like Plaza Accord with Chinese, but they have the size to resist, so Trump showed the nuclear option. Like some commenters pointed out here, it may work in short term, but it will hurt US companies in long term.
Google's biggest trick was developers. They leveraged the decaying state of Java, and it being the default CS language in a lot of places. They simple showed a more attractive opportunity to tenths of thousands of Java devs stuck in ungainful employment in "enterprise software" sector.
Nobody else in the world managed to get so much of developer mindshare overnight ever.
Developers, developers, developers, developers... Balmer got the idea, but did not know how to get it.
Jobs realised it too late, and spent too much effort toying with Internet only apps in time when most of USA was on class 2 GPRS.
Andy Rubin, well I'd say, got the right solution almost by accident, and only realised its value later in Android's life.
After that things went sour:
- GTK+/glib dev community began to wither simply because of older members retiring, and no new blood
- DRM flamewar with record labels
- Android diverted a great amount of community resources
- Monopolisation of smartphone SoC market.
- Elop...However, the parents cant handle the debt and commit suicide, entrusting older brother to his rich uncle. Sure enough, the older bro didnt live long either. After a long coma, the plug was pulled on the older brother's life. Even his rich uncle cant save him.
What a waste of resource
Against platforms actively fighting you? Good luck with that!
That would be interesting to see!
Perhaps it’s possible to resurrect Blackberry 10 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_10 ) for example, which seemed to be an impressive piece of engineering that got trampled by Blackberrys failing business. I played with a demo once that could run Android apps and was amazing at multi-tasking thanks to its microkernel architecture. Plus would be governed by Canadian export laws I guess. Perhaps I’m just daydreaming though.
Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing
I don't understand what you mean about "US assets, patents, licenses" -- what are you thinking about here?
BB10, on the other hand, is dead and buried. It would be easier to port something like UBPort's Ubuntu Touch to QNX as an alternative to Android.
But sure, it's also in infotainment systems and at the heart of self-driving cars.
On the other hand, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, Xiaomi are all not sanctioned by US, all of them offer comparable products with a very similar price and aggressively try to expand their international presence.
So I expect mainly a Oppo/Vivo/OnePlus vs. Xiaomi vs. TCL/Alcatel fight for every slot Huawei is at risk to lose...
They dropped Huawei but had a OnePlus instead.
More Chinese brands pop up every time you try to cut one off ;)
Samsung tried this with Tizen, IIRC:
That, to me, seems like the real barrier for any new smartphone platform. It happened with Windows Phone, a platform backed by a huge company and even using a very popular language and platform.
I think WebOS and Firefox OS were before their time a little given the rise of progressive web apps, but I still don't think they're a complete answer until they can use native UI elements.
android's large market share is attributable to many things beyond the software itself, which, in any case, owes a heavy debt to Linux. replacing android as an ecosystem will require enticing a large 3rd party developer base to write apps. the worldwide android developer community is full of developers eager to you know, like, make actual money on their apps. if Huawei can create a new app marketplace where that happens for these developers, they should be able to attract abundant talent. they should imitate Apple, not Google.
It used to be [1], but was a victim of HP's incompetence.
Netflix, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Chromecast, Dropbox, OneDrive, YouTube, Twitter, Google search ( or duck duck go), Amazon, Amazon video, 2fa authenticator, iftt, Wikipedia, Skype, messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Waze, Google maps, Ted, Wolfram Alpha, ... I'm pretty sure there is one of them that you use recurringly.
You're going to use that OS?
The only Chinese app I use is eWelink and I really want to flash that device to be more flexible and dump it.
I would. Nothing in that list is indispensable to me.
The others I don't use, so it would be OK for me.
So Baidu will be the default search engine on any browser that will be used ( since they can pay).
All the craziness about preventing American internet companies from dominating the Domestic Chinese market makes total sense now, doesn't it? If the Chinese economy had been built around Facebook, Google etc. the US would have a lot of leverage, since they're all US-based companies and _must_ comply with whatever US Government asks them to do.
Can you tell me with a straight face that the CIA, NSA etc. do _not_ have active espionage activities in China? Do you think valuable intellectual property and state secrets exist only in the US? That as a result of these activities, the Chinese Government has not also lost lives?
Do not buy so easily into propaganda. Nations will promote themselves as the only "Good" nation to their own people throughout the world. Because the US is a democracy, the US Government has to be very careful and frame the narrative in a way that's not an outright power grab.
Google may lose a lot more business than it seems at first glance.
The US has power over Google. Google has power over android. TFA is about the latter.
When you are developing Android apps, you can leverage Google Play Services for all sorts of functionality, such as push notifications and maps, and I would say more apps do use these than don't.
Huawei can still put Android on their phones, but not with Google Play Services. This means that many Android apps just won't work. They also can't supply the Google Play Store, which means that they need an alternate way to distribute apps.
So sure it's possible, but it's not as easy as you perhaps think?
Their problem isn't implementing these things. Their problem is convincing non-Chinese developers to port their apps to Huawei's ecosystem.
I'm not stating that the problem isn't hard, just that the Fire Phone had other issues.
Launcher, Phone app, Messages, Contacts, Calendar. All proprietary.
Notification API, Location API, SMS APIs and step counter APIs, and even the new app format. All proprietary.
It's a huge undertaking building an app for Android today without using Google's services, and sometimes even impossible.
If you want to verify a user by sending a code through SMS (think Whatsapp sign-up) you either have to use the proprietary API, or you'll be banned from the play store. Using the open source API instead gets you banned because it allows you to read all SMS — and Google never cared to build a new open source API because they already have their proprietary API anyway.
And nowadays you don't have APKs anymore but often app bundles, a special format which only the Play Store can parse.
And if you create a new app today, per default you don't even get the signing key to publish APKs yourself, but only Google gets to keep it.
Replacing those bits is still less work than writing your own entire OS. There are even open source projects to replace those bits.
I remember days when Android was still open, nowadays I’m fighting against the ever-increasing restrictions with my open source apps with every single OS update.
They're saying that there's easy and simple drop in replacements, app and service wise that can hook into better services/ones you host.
I’d be interested in what existing, working solution for a FCM replacement there is? Replacing the apps is simple, replacing the services is the hard part.
If there is a working open FCM alternative, please link it, I’d immediately add support for it in my apps.
F-Droid developers manage to do it. Sure, they might not publish their apps on the Google-Play Store (some do, actually) but so what? Any Android user can freely download these entirely open apps and install them on their own, by pre-checking a box in the phone settings. That's still more than you can say about iOS!
Right now I’ve spent months on getting a full clean-room reversed version of Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging system’s client library working, and we’re still nowhere close to that.
The final goal being that we can have one, fully GPL app, which can utilize FCM if it’s installed on the phone, either through the proprietary Google Play Services, or through microG, but which can also work without it otherwise (while also avoiding any tracking or telemetry)
And trust me if I say Google’s making this for us devs harder with every update.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for that! I'm very sceptical of Googles "soft lock-in" and will switch to MicroG Lineage sooner or later. So every inch helps.
We need anti monopoly measures to prevent this kind of thing.
No. They play an entirely different league of evil. Google is orders of magnitude more evil. Hint: it is very easy to live without oracle.
It's ok.
Note too that they could have gone the Microsoft IE route and declared various apps as part of the OS. Instead they made their apps separate from Android, and let them succeed by bundling them together. Amazon Fire is at least one example where the Play Store et al. are not installed.
No, their action actually lead to this in the first place — previously, each manufacturer slightly modified the AOSP apps, now each manufacturer actually builds their entirely custom apps for this purpose, as most can’t or don’t want to license Google’s apps for that purpose (they license the base Google Play apps, but e.g. not messages or the phone app or the launcher).
/thread
To answer the big question in this thread. Yes, Huawei can simply fork Android. It will be a pain in the ass, expensive, and not as usable, but they certainly can.
Google's "iron grip" in this instance is only ostensible, not literal and complete. HN is not immune to clickbait.
Is this only in cases where the app reads the SMS as soon as it's received, and authorizes the user without any further user input?
Because I've done similar authentication stuff for some website logins (like a real estate listings one) where they require me to punch in the code I received via SMS. This was an interaction that occurred independently of Play Services I would imagine.
All major 'Android' manufacturers in China somewhat customized launchers with unique UXs. Notification services were always chaotic and every platform provider woke the phone up to checkout pending notifications and drained the battery. And this list of abyss easily expanded to App Markets and other features.
So blocking Huawei from Android might create some troubles but it would definitely not be around these proprietary features where other proprietary counterparts existed, at least in China, Huawei's home market.
They also are using safer xen compartments, as Amazon did until recently or Qubes is doing. kvm is fast, but certainly not secure.
Personally I trust Huawei more than Google, and esp. LG, Sony or Samsung. The current war on Huawei looks like Huawei is denying the US their backdoors into the baseband layer on 5G. Loosing 5G would be big for US intelligence, and good for privacy. China getting access into 5G backdoors is not as worrying as continued US abuse.
Buying both Sailfish and Qt would be peanuts for Huawei.
I got the impression that the United States forced their hand.
1: BlackBerry hub is a lot nicer to view messages
2: Smart use of Bezel gestures makes it much easier to actually interact with the phone:
-If you want to access the hub while using an app, you take your thumb from the bottom of the screen and swipe up and to the right. The interface is very forgiving of where you swipe, you can do it without even looking, yet you wont accidentally do it either. If you don't want to fully enter the hub and just take a peak without leaving your app, just do a partial swipe.
-If you want to view all your running apps, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to the middle of the screen, and voila , you get a tile arrangement of your running apps (easier to view than a Rolodex), as well as phone and camera access. And you are also less likely to lose track of what windows you have open. I find lots of peoples android phones have like 30 windows open - this is a fault of its interface.
-If you want to access your apps, swipe up from bottom bezel (shows running apps), and then swipe left, now you can view all your other apps.
-Every app is expected to have its settings menu accessible by swiping down from the top bezel.
There are no silly little cumbersome function buttons at the bottom like Android has (the back/home/apps buttons). Smart use of bezel gestures make this unnecessary.
Everything can be accessed easily in a simple, comfortable gesture with your thumb. As a result, it is a lot faster to use day in day out. And it is not as cluttered as Android.
I am sad the whole world chose Android. It's a crappy interface.
I would love to see an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly. One way to go would be a better F-Droid ecosystem, and pure AOSP.
But perhaps, even better, a true Linux userland. Maemo lives on with Jolla. Although I hate they still have many closed components.
It's somewhat of an alternative to iOS & Android and feels like running Linux 20 years ago. You are making it harder on yourself.
Running Android apps with microg installed on it provides a decent fallback.
The UI is still very much a work in progress, though. But it's fully open source. Based on GNOME.
I was a BB Classic user for about 2 years before jumping ship to iOS for practical reasons.
Aside from what you mentioned, I would also bring up that, at least on the Classic, the little touch nub/joystick/trackpad thing was actually incredibly handy. It could act as a mouse, which meant that you could use "Desktop" websites very easily, since you didn't have to try to fat finger tiny little buttons. And since it was essentially a real mouse, hovering worked to, which is nice for sites that required that.
For those that have never seen one, it was a small button, about the size of an iPhone home button, but the surface doubled as a capactive trackpad, I assume with similar tech to those used in laptops, but far more sensitive. I still used the touch-screen a fair amount, but having a mouse was wonderful when you needed it.
The hardware on the Classic was just fantastic... long battery life, good build quality, and a SIM+microSD slot.
I personally don't like gestures. You have to remember and get used to them. Then suddenly in a major update they will change everything to new "cooler" gesture, re-learn and get used to it again. Year after year that happens.
Compare that to buttons. You can always see them, so no need to remember anything. Older people also able to use them.
Of course new shiny mobile os have mixed both together and now we are guinea pigs of modern UI.
Also, have you actually used the BlackBerry gestures? Upon getting a BlackBerry, the very first thing it does is a 1 minute tutorial explaining how to use the gestures. There are only a few. They really aren't complicated. They just take a brief explanation and the reward is you get a more functional interface.
There is no need to keep track of them or close them, since the app lifecycle is managed automatically by the system – having a window (called activity on Android) open doesn't mean that the app is running.
Non-foreground activities are automatically suspended by the system and resumed when you return to them. Processes with suspended activites are automacially killed when resources run low.
Even in 2019 email sucks on a modern smartphone compared to blackberry in 2004.
I'm still hoping Apple wakes up and releases messenger for Windows and Android before that ship sails. They claim to be a services company but they still can't seem to let go of tying it to devices.
They've shipped apple music on Andriod since day 1, have had it on Sonos for several years, and in the last 6 months have announced & started to ship TV on tons of actual TVs and non-apple straming boxes.
They've 'let go' of tying services to devices, but iMessage isn't a paid service so the advantage to shipping it on other platforms is lower.
They acquired a product (beast music) that already had an Android version and didn't deprecate it, congrats?
>have had it on Sonos for several years
Sonos had to pay a license and write the code... I'm not sure I'd hold that up as an example of them being open.
> started to ship TV on tons of actual TVs and non-apple straming boxes.
Literally hasn't been released and isn't scheduled to be until "Fall of 2019".
>They've 'let go' of tying services to devices, but iMessage isn't a paid service so the advantage to shipping it on other platforms is lower.
Right, so charge for Messenger on other platforms. Nobody asked them to give it away.
> Literally hasn't been released and isn't scheduled to be until "Fall of 2019".
“A whole new world of entertainment just opened up, because the Apple TV app is now available on select 2018 and 2019 Samsung TVs...”
But of course Google would never allow BB users to access the play store ...
It's a must-have for the small companies like Xiaomi that only or mostly make smartphones. But they can't afford to develop an android alternative.
Huawei and Samsung make lots of things other than smartphones and can just leave the market if need be. It's less expensive for both of them to shutter their smartphone business than it is to develop a viable android alternative that developers would want to code for and that consumers would want to use.
Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing
Unlikely.
> “Sailfish OS, as a non-American, open-source based, secure mobile OS platform, is naturally an interesting option for different players — currently the interest is stronger among corporate and governmental customers and partners, as our product offering is clearly focused on this segment,” says Jolla co-founder and CEO Sami Pienimäki .
> “Overall, there definitely has been increased interest towards Sailfish OS as a mobile OS platform in different parts of the world, partly triggered by the on-going political activity in many locations. We have also had clearly more discussions with e.g. Chinese device manufacturers, and Jolla has also recently started new corporate and governmental customer projects in Europe.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/trumps-huawei-ban-also-cau...
Hell, even include Microsoft in there too.
Creating another OS seems like an inevitability.
When they released it, it was pretty much 100% Open Source, then they moved more and more elements to their proprietary GApps suite, included the Play Services required to run even many 3rd party apps.
At this point Android is barely more Open Source than iOS and its Mach kernel, but the difference is that Google got its market share by selling to manufacturers the fact that they're independant because it's Open Source.
> When they released it, it was pretty much 100% Open Source, then they moved more and more elements to their proprietary GApps suite, included the Play Services required to run even many 3rd party apps.
I thought the reason they did this was because third party phone makers were controlling when/whether users could update the OS on their device. So users were often several Android releases behind, even on a phone that was only a year old. By moving a lot of the core functionality into apps, users could update these apps and have access to newer features even on older OS versions.
Though, I guess that doesn't explain why the apps themselves aren't open source.
If you want to add in the Play Store into the mix, things change slightly.
Sure you could build a phone on top of Windows Mobile, Sonys Xperia X1 is my favorite entry from this time period, but you had no consolidated Software Vision for a mobile OS. Customers were craving phones that were as accessible as iPhones were, with a good example being the datepickers in mobile safari. You couldn't fix this with a Custom Windows Mobile Homescreen. Neither Nokia, nor anyone else in Mobile Phones at the time had thought about the software part as much as about the hardware. Even Andy Rubin got smacked in the face by the iPhone Keynote, but his advantage was the lack of organizational and technological debt that anyone else watching this keynote in a position to act plagued.
Apple was highly regarded inside Google when it comes to design decisions and is so until this very day (Why again does my Pixel 2 lack an 3.5mm socket?) so for Rubin simply adopting the design and ui vision while following different engineering principles was a path that had less hurdles for him than for everyone else in the position to do something about it in 2007.
That's why Android is where it is, not because Google decided to go the OpenSource way with it. Customers decided this was the only viable alternative, they brought money to the platform and developers followed.
Sure it was a lot fun stuff happening on the platform aswell that gave it the positive look, but this didn't affect the relevant apps to stay iOS only until they couldn't afford to anymore, simple market share decided that.
Device Manufacturers were desperate for anything, if they had to pay license fees for closed source software or not wouldn't have mattered if there had been a viable answer to iOS in 2007.
As it stands, Android's whole notification system (3rd party apps included) relies almost completely on communicating with Google servers. Seems like a bad design if privacy is a concern.
True, although having one endpoint does have some advantages for battery life and api consistency.
I am getting ready to leave the commercial smartphone world entirely, in large part to escape Android. I want to escape Android primarily (but not only) because of the very thing you said here.
Google is making it harder and harder to use Android devices in a secure way, and for me, the cost/benefit of using it became too high a while back.
Really ?
I'd say it rather reveals most users' unhealthy addiction to Google's services, without which, this whole thing wouldn't be the 'tragedy' and wake up call it's turning out to be for many.
I have used Android for a decade now completely Google-free and no one could pay me enough money to be tracked and to run pure spyware 24/7 at this point... I enjoy immensely having a laptop replacement always on, always with me, in my pocket. No use for Play Services, advertising companies data mining all I do at all times, or 27, 42 or 59 'social media' applications running to give purpose to my life and 'communicate' with my 'friends'...
File manager, web browser, terminal, editor, LTE... That's what I need or care about. I guess not many of us left.
I only need LTE and very rarely WiFi, so Bluetooth and NFC if available on device are disabled and neutered. Devices are encrypted but hold no data other than that in use, all data is always kept on external encrypted cards, and those go up to a tera now, so no issues even with large, very large files. Makes no sense to me that people tie data to a device, be it laptop, smartphone, tablet or desktop.
The 'phone' part is just for emergencies; police, ambulance, that sort of thing. Otherwise even a mid-range device works as a fully fledged laptop substitute for me, can be my main computer, and has for years.
Edit : Most of what I use is open source, and no adware, spyware, analytics, or crash reporters anywhere on my system. The current software business model based on data mining needs to die. Also, a decent web browser does, and better, what 90% of so-called 'apps' do.
SMS only?
I found that my only requirement for a smart phone is the Uber and Lyft apps. If I can get somehow free of them I can switch to a Nokia 1100 and be happy.
My hope is that Chinese companies start making a new OS, and Google sees this and makes their APIs more open and free so in such an event not everything is rendered inoperable.
What I find interesting is that Apache Licensed software can be relicensed even in proprietary form (as long as you make it a derivative work, with your derivative bits with a proprietary license), thus the easy way out seems to be to have a non-US entity make a proprietary fork of AOSP. I do not see a legal reason why this company would not be able to sell AOSP to Huawei under these conditions.
I am sure plenty of us remember the days when free and open source encryption software was distributed exclusively through non-US servers due to US export restrictions.
IANAL, so I wonder if I am missing something?
As for alternative platforms, I imagine plenty are US based/originating (QNX, webOS from Palm/HP originally, Android), but there are alternatives like Jolla and Ubuntu Touch which aren't.
While I dislike Huawei since they decided to stop sharing unlock codes for their phones, Huawei has one killer app that's not very much reliant on Android: camera.
Getting that camera app on one of the less known platforms and enabling Huawei phones for them would still make them appealing to a large number of customers in eg. Europe.
" A country banning its resident companies from engaging in contracts with a specific company breaks how our copyright system works, and as a result, breaks how open source licenses work. -- If Huawei cannot enter into a contract with Google, then they cannot enter into the Apache 2.0 licensing agreement with Google, which means that they would not have a license to distribute the AOSP codebase."
If we look at the cited license (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html) it's just a one sided license from the copyright holder, not a contract between parties, right?
As lawyers usually say: it depends.
Except that camera itself is not a killer-app. The major use-case of a mobile camera BY FAR is not just to capture content, but to share the content on social media, also in Europe. So whatever less-known platform the camera-app would be moved to, that platform would still also have to provide a good user-experience for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. So in the end, that less-known platform would need a SocialMedia app-ecosystem comparable to Android just to match the Android-experience for Camera...
ARM, a UK company stops doing business with Huawei because of US pressure.
IANAL, but: any such fork would remain a Derivative Work of AOSP in which Google would hold some copyright. When Huawei came to redistribute it, they would need licenses from all the copyright holders - this company, Google, any other contributors. Normally this does not matter: the Apache license states "each Contributor hereby grants You...", and You is defined as "an individual or Legal Entity exercising permissions granted by this License".
No doubt the US government can enforce whatever capricious fines it likes within the US. But I find it hard to imagine a European court finding Huawei guilty of copyright infringement for distributing Google work that came with a clear, simple license granting them permission to distribute. If the US government wants to say that Google can't grant that permission, that's between Google and the USG. And given that the Apache license states that the grant of permission is "perpetual, ..., irrevocable" and came with a copy of AOSP that Huawei has no doubt downloaded and read years before the current crisis, trying to revoke that permission now doesn't work either.
But anyone with access to the binaries (not in the US I guess) is allowed to redistribute it to Huawei, and the GPL then requires google to grant Huawei a license, not doing so would appear to be in violation of the license.
> 3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided [irrelevant terms here]
> 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
IANAL
- Can open source licenses be unilaterally revoked?
- Is Google the sole proprietor of AOSP?
- If there are other proprietors of AOSP, do they have a say?
But this has been the case of a long time already.
Maybe a consortium of China-backed companies (Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus, etc) could create a viable fork of Android and/or put enough weight behind an alternative app store that it could be a viable alternative for the mainstream (say, F-Droid, Aptoide, etc).
Thing is, on such short notice they will struggle and it doesn't seem like they have preemptively prepared to a full-blown switch of OS/ecosystem AND also an architecture switch (British ARM also joining the US sanctions).
AOSP makes no difference I think. If you are locked out of the official store, you are locked out of "Android" as people recognize it.
Mobile application permission systems don't cease to exist in the absence of a sanctioned app store. The only thing that disappears is the ability for Google or others to completely remove an application that is abusing the permissions a user granted: but the permissions are still there.
Even in the worst-case scenario, malware on modern phone operating systems is substantially more limited in disruptive and destructive power than what one can achieve on Windows without a UAC grant.
Permissions systems definitely do not anything against malware. See: all the flashlight apps with every permission under the sun.
>Even in the worst-case scenario, malware on modern phone operating systems is substantially more limited in disruptive and destructive power than what one can achieve on Windows without a UAC grant.
Sure, but it can still collect all your pictures, have access to your microphone/cameras, and tarck your location. It's better than full control of your device, but it's not that much better.
oh the irony!
Making a good OS is hard, and getting market share in an established market is very, very difficult.
My bet is on China.
They've tried before. Anybody else remember Kylin and Red Flag OS?
redflagOS was a huge success when you see the goals and few resources invested.
Edit- I use Newpipe instead of Youtube. So thats the alternative for the last google service I'd need everyday.
I do hope they consider pushing alternatives, but also that it's a more organic process where "the market" has some say and not a move to give plenty of money to a university/company only to shut the project down after a few years of failure.
Competition doesn't happen overnight. The changes need to be in place for some period of time before entrepreneurs consider a new product/software in that sector to be viable.
So the business case for Spotify was very much focused on desktop users, where WMP would have been the dominant competitor had it not been for the Microsoft case.
I guess they would have to come up with alternative to google play marketplace, gmaps, gmail, etc. but it's not really a big deal with the resources they have. Not to mention that the open source equivalent of these apps are serviceable.
1) Without GMS, developers will need to fork their apps and reimplement everything they use Play services for today. That's non-trvial and I suspect a substantial number of developers would not be willing to do this.
2) Even if Huawei developed their own app store, IAP framework, etc, as I understand it the order in the US prevents Huawei from entering into any new business with US companies without a license. So, does that mean that FB, Twitter, et all would be prohibited from listing their apps? I believe so.
True but Hawuei has the resources to actually make great open source alternatives that developers can take advantage of.
>2) Even if Huawei developed their own app store, IAP framework, etc, as I understand it the order in the US prevents Huawei from entering into any new business with US companies without a license. So, does that mean that FB, Twitter, et all would be prohibited from listing their apps? I believe so.
I guess but that's not their business.
They will have to come up with a alternative to Arm due to licensing. A RISC-V chipset developed by a major company is an interesting prospect.
I mean my point is that it is a total show stopper for their business if they cannot have US apps on their store! Good luck selling a £800 Android phone in the UK with no Instagram! Or a $200 one in India with no WhatsApp.
Additionally, Huawei has has done so well because the OS and consumer experience is generally the same across Android, so consumers choose based on hardware. Now Huawei will have to compete not only in hardware (their main advantage), but also in software.
I doubt that. Google is pretty bad at keeping users. (Probably GMail is the strongest anchor point, but as we have seen with the G+ real name gotcha, it's better to be prepared to stop using that. Though of course most GMail users are not prepared for that.) Users will use whatever is the default.
Probably the YouTube app is what users would miss the most. And I don't know whether it works without Play Services. But it certainly works on iOS, so if there were a new platform, Google/Alphabet/YT would make apps for that platform too.
You can look at the difference between iOS and WP. Since iOS was a big market Google wanted [and wants] to be in they made the YT app. And since WP was small and late to the game Google had the upper hand, because MS wanted any users more than G wanted the small number of WP users.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/7/4308662/youtube-windows-ph...
Therefore if there were a credible new platform that Google wants to be on, they will develop the necessary apps.
After August 2013, there was never an official YouTube app for Windows Phone.
That said, Google didn't build third-party YT apps for BB10 or WebOS either.
[0] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2475440/microsoft-gets...
The fact that a $50B Chinese domestic Android market is thriving with zero control by Google proves the thesis to be untrue.
Then there's Amazon's fire product line. The only reason it lags Google's play store is quality. If Amazon's hardware and software/store selection were 80% as good, they'd be a serious contender - again one needs to look at China for evidence of this, where Tencent, Baidu etc. run their own successful app stores agnostic to hardware
You can. I can. My mother and 95% (99? 99.9?) of the android users cannot.
> The fact that a $50B Chinese domestic Android market is thriving with zero control by Google proves the thesis to be untrue.
In Western countries it's true. You also can't build an online business in Europe if you're blocked by Google because they have a monopoly on search and nobody will find you. You can in China, but that doesn't change the situation in Europe (or, to a lesser extent, the US, I hear bing has some market share still).
My mom is quick to install shitload of stuff on her phone that would be much harder for me to do (I once tried shutting down Facebook group notifications on her phone and gave up after manually going through a 100 or so ;)). She will gladly follow a tutorial on the web, download apks from unsafe sources, allow all permissions the app asks for etc.
I, on the other hand, would look for a trusted source which would be much harder to find, would be weary of giving my credentials to any app, and would be even more weary of giving permissions that I do not find strictly necessary to an app that's coming on my phone.
Your mother sounds like she trusts herself to be able to do it, then looks for information (with you hoping she chooses trustworthy people) on how to do it. Most people I know pretty much shut down when they hit something they haven't encountered before, so they won't even search for the error message. Trust out of the way, a more open android is a good option for tech savvy people, but I fear the majority wouldn't be able to work with that.
You mean Google's own Google Play store?
Sounds like Google is in control of that one as well.
Better, go build your own store, as many companies have. Or sideload apps. Heck, build your own phone when. All possible because Google does NOT exert influence on the open source parts of Android, specifically AOSP.
What are similar alternatives on iOS?
Additinally, the Apple whataboutism is a non-sequitur that adds zero to the discussion.
Cheers
This product line does not include smartphones. The Fire Phone has been dead for a while, and never got a sequel.
What?
Also google product lost trust, as a business platform in result. So imho they lose double time here. Because they are forcing out 3rd biggest phone seller to competition.
The fact that this competition is practically non existent makes things even more unpredictable imho, which businesses doesn't like.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ma-court-of-appeals/1683074.html
In fact, in Huawei's particular case, I don't even think it will be a push to create momentum for a truly open smartphone OS out of necessity, after all, Huawei goes through great lengths to keep the bootloader in their phones locked.
Sure those are merely standards/protocols, still, is it possible these tech and their current world-wide setup be effectively used in conflicts by issuing government executive orders or enacting new laws?
Edit: just found this on reddit. Not exactly what I was asking (fundamental internet standards/protocols), but still somewhat related.
From a reddit post -- "Huawei is no longer able or allowed to work on standards for Wi-Fi, USB and SD cards. "Temporarily restricted" by Wi-Fi Alliance, voluntarily withdrew from JEDEC (USB etc) and no longer a member of SD Associaton (which technically means no more SD slots)"
So the US could cut cut them off or manipulate their connectivity to the global internet through something like BGP or DNS, but the impact would be far less than the US doing that against a country such as Canada that has a deep reliance on US infrastructure and services.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/12/great-firewall... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_intranet
For example if, say, all U.K's companies are not allowed to use email or skype to talk to the Chinese, or all U.S., Canada and Australia, etc. web sites are not accessible from China because of some executive orders or laws by the U.S. (similar to google complying with the order currently), then I guess China's economy would be severely affected.
Google open sources the core operating system and people use it for embedded systems or grad projects as reference materials.
If anyone wants to know what Android is like without Google, look at Amazon Kindle. Amazon did the whole no Google Android.
Point is that this should have shocked nobody.
Besides I think it more reveals how Google is in the grip of US politics- it might be time for Google to draw up some contingency plans for when America goes completely nuts.
It's also possible that this will cause Huawei and the Chinese government to pour funding into Chinese chip designs. Eventually, China will become less dependent on the US and the US will lose another point of influence.
Is this bad for Huawei in the short term? Of course. But is this hurting the Chinese economy in the long term? I don't think so.
My bet is Huawei will pick up a team or company (lineage team start packing your bags) to move forward with minimal risk. That or partner with a few other b-list manufacturers and create an alternative.
Hell even Google itself is trying to drop Android.
You can bet that no bank or whatever will abandon such a large fraction of the users of their app, but is already calling people to get the Huawei OS version of their app started.
Especially given that Huawei OS looks to be a fork of AOSP with the proprietary Google Services replaced with proprietary Huawei services. The developpers will just fork the existing app, using Android studio, and the same language!
? WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Uber, GoogleMaps, Twitter..
There are web replacements for all of these, but people are choosing to use them in app form overwhelmingly. Maybe that will change, but it would be a pain to try a cell today that couldn't run all of these apps very well.
Google, Arm etc. don't want to stop doing business with Huawei (since doing so no doubt costs them a lot of money), they're being banned from doing business with Huawei by the US government.
Also google, are they so bowed down to the government, that they just accept this, or do they know more reasons to declare Huawei a enemy?
I worked for a non-Google tech company and there is literally code which prevents users in any sanctioned countries from being able to use the services.
Unless Sundar Pichai would like to go to jail, there's very little that they can do about this.
But I do not see that hapoening, so something (or quite a lot) is going on behind the scene.
Changing the law is a different process.
I rather talk standing up for free market. In a free market system the government can't just order companys to stop doing buisness with someone unless very good reasons are provided. I don't see that with Huawei. And china is Authorian? Yeah, so is half the world. But it would be news to me, that only "democracies" are acceptable trade partners.
What choice do they have ? Comply with law or be heavily fined, shut down, executives jailed for compromising nation security.
All based on a presidential order, without providing evidence.
Congratulations to US legal system then and feeling superior to authorian china.
Maybe.
Trump is doing all this under the authority of national security. That is not a blank check, though, and there is an oversight mechanism that can be employed to determine if the authority is being used appropriately or not.
Unfortunately, that oversight mechanism lies with Congress, and given that the majority party currently in the Senate is taking the stance of "anything Trump does is right", we can't reasonably expect that the mechanism will actually be used in the next couple of years, at least.
Your explanation doesn't answer the question why Huawei got picked. Huawei products got banned in the US way before the trade war, Huawei's exports to US is pretty small I'd say. It thus has really nothing to do with the existing tariff situation whatsoever.
On the other hand, there are many big Chinese companies exporting to the US in huge sheer volume, Lenovo is probably the best example here, interestingly, Lenovo never got treated in the same way. Why there is such huge difference?
The answer is plain and simple - Huawei managed to lead the 5G development and growing faster than anyone else. US refuses to accept that. Lenovo's business model is what US wants all Chinese companies to follow - focusing on low end craps, make money by working hard not working smart. Same goes to those crappy Chinese companies like Xiaomim OPPO, OnePlus.
Or you know, they were stealing trade secrets.
https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/the-complete-list-of-blocked-...
On the other hand, the US is super competitive. They must do as much business with China as possible in order to discourage any new company from spawning over there, because it would create competition.
In other words, Trump is doing exactly the opposite of what is good for the US.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/23/18637836/trump-huawei-ban...
Here's a good video explainer from that verge article: https://youtu.be/DZbSHXSxch0
Huawei or Samsung don't have the option to go there.
Launch could be within months of acquiring everything. And the heavy lifting was already done ( compatibility).
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/24/tech/donald-trump-huawei-...
I don't like it either, just explaining the motivations at play here. Also you must expect any entity (company, individual, etc.) to obey their government, otherwise there's not much point in a government is there (not that the governments decisions are necessarily good ones)?
Yes, copyright is a thing, and if you own a copyright, you are entitled to control its copying through license agreements. To characterize that as an "Iron Grip" is quite strange, as short of releasing all of this investment as open source, there is no other kind of "grip" that Google is entitled to.
Google has invested billions of dollars into applications and infrastructure for their most successful Linux distro, and yes, they own the copyright to that.
As far as I'm aware, Google does not market their current Android distro as "open source" to any great extent, so why is it more of a problem than any other piece of popular proprietary software? What about the millions of Linux-based kiosks, pub games consoles, and giant social media and advertising juggernauts who also have proprietary software that they sell access to?