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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

As an operating system Android is continuing to get a little more modular, allowing more "user observable functionality" to be updated independent of an OS version upgrade (or waiting on a carrier or OEM to approve such an upgrade). Unfortunately, even more of capability of "Android" is being delivered by the very-closed-source Google Mobile Service (GMS) while the feature set of AOSP is dwindling to being "mere phone without the smarts." At this point what we call Android is about as closed source as Apple's iOS. It's too bad the tribes and factions wanting to build a truly open Linux phone can't bury the hatchet and rally behind a single implementation.

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> At this point what we call Android is about as closed source as Apple's iOS.

On iOS you can’t side-load apps. You can only run native code if it has been manually approved by Apple and acquired via their special App Store. There are a handful of exceptions but they have their own limitations.

Android is at worst as closed as Windows, but not more. Some perspective is called for.

Side-loading on iOS is possible: https://www.notebookcheck.net/You-can-now-sideload-unverifie...

And it's always been possible if you have a developer account (and I might be wrong, because I quit mobile development to focus on cloud but I think you don't even need a paid developer account to build and load an app from source code anymore -- but I could be wrong).

Subject to ridiculous restrictions, like an app only lasting 7 days before being disabled.

The OP is talking about Android becoming closed "source". Not about it becoming a closed ecosystem.

GMS however, even though the code is closed, has an open interface. This allows projects such as MicroG and HMS to replicate the functionality of GMS almost to a T, and makes it in practice very possible to have a modern Android phone running a fully open OS and compatible with the vast majority of apps.

I agree it's better than nothing (iOS), but it's correct what OP wrote: important parts of Android are now as closed source as iOS.

True, but these important parts largely have open source interpretations. There's no real reason for GMS to be more Android than microG.

But it means a group of volunteers (which fortunately exists, I depend on them for my phones) needs to keep tracking and duplicating an ever expanding component of Android, without have any say in the direction of its development. It's getting to be more Wine than Windows at this point.

It's problematic at minimum.

That is true.

/e/ uses an open implementation of GMS, called microG. You can combine this with an easily self-serviceable smartphone such as Fairphone 3. It just recently got an update to Android 10.

>At this point what we call Android is about as closed source as Apple's iOS.

Meh. Load LineageOS or GrapheneOS onto a phone without Google Apps, you won't get the same map functionality or on-device voice-to-text. But it's still android and 100% open source.

It sucks they are adding cool stuff to the GApps side, but pretending like this makes the OS as closed-source as iOS is absurd.

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