Isn’t Android open source? So why can’t Huawei simply fork it?
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.
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.
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.