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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

I'd love any major competition to Android & iOS. Microsoft is resurgent these days, can I get my windows phone back?

Interesting idea.

On one hand, I think the world's attitude towards the tech companies has changed sufficiently that Google's "sinking Windows Phone by making Gmail and Youtube not work on it" trick might not work out for them this time.

On the other hand, given the sorry state of Windows - all the privacy issues, integrated ads, forced upgrades, whatever else - the Windows Phone would probably end up being terrible experience.

Gmail was usable on Windows Phone in the built-in mail app, YouTube had some okay third party apps, but in my opinion what really killed Windows Phone was not having Google Maps. People underestimate how critical this app is. Why do you think Apple created their own mapping app out of nowhere? They were terrified that Google could turn off the switch and cripple iOS overnight after watching Windows Phone wither on the vine.

There were additional things that caused Windows Phone to fail, but I really feel Google Maps was the first nail in the coffin.

Absolutely but I'd hate for it to be windows. I'd love a good, OSS Linux phone.

Isn't Android good OSS Linux?

Google is slowly cripling everything opensource and replacing it with its own closed source stuff. Many, many apps won't run without google blobs on the phone and it's all by design.

You can always swap those our with other apps from f-droid or something though and if you're willing to run an open source phone you're largely going to be dealing with the same problems in that department - lack of apps. And that's not to mention MicroG which makes many such apps work anyways.

This is true for eg. a browser, alarm app and an irc client.

If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.

> If you want banking apps to work, you're fucked. Even getting some of the mainstream social network and chat apps to work without google play services is a pain.

GrapheneOS seems to do pretty well with this. It is a bit more involved and you have to check the docs but you can generally get banking apps to work just fine.

While I don't disagree with your sentiment, this is kinda like claiming that Canonical is crippling Open Source by offering Snaps on Ubuntu. There is still a significant portion of Android that is perfectly usable in an open fashion. In fact, I might even say that there is no clear path for Google to close off Android as a project.

But even now, many social networks, chat apps, and especially banking apps don't work without google play services. Yes, you can circumvent some of the requirements using different workarounds and hacks (micro G, app patching, etc.), but in some cases, even the basics (such as notifications on new messages) don't work without some google-based blob somewhere.

Banking apps et al have decided that without remote attestation, they do not want to expose the functionality their customers expect from them. Mostly because of confused threat models, and banks being banks are often erring on the side of safety. And chat/socials just want to evade the bots. An open source platform would have to provide similar attestation capabilities, as stupid as they are, people in suits will manage risks.

Not just attestation, also location services are usually via play services and also notifications (because noone wants to implement their own). I agree about the banks... if you root the phone after the banking app works, you can still extract all the keys, and usually with a magisk plugin or two, you can use the app too on a rooted phone... but not without google play services.

Maybe we need some more economic conflicts, for huawei and xiaomi to switch to their own "play services", and the developers will have to code apps that work on all android variants, not just google-based ones.

> There is still a significant portion of Android that is perfectly usable in an open fashion

There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP, you can't really compare it to Ubuntu. It's not made for tinkering or user ownership.

> There's not a single phone on earth running AOSP

Sure there are: https://developer.android.com/topic/generic-system-image/

Can you point me a reference to a single phone? A phone running AOSP with open-source kernel drivers and not a single Google closed-source binary. Good luck to find that.

The only project I know about doing that is Replicant and targets ancient phones. It's also a community run project, none of those phone came fully open from the factory either.

Android is pretty open as far as I know. You can even run Linux distributions on it with Termux - although its future is looking unstable with Android's new OS versions changing the services it depends on.

I think (guessing) the main thing an OSS advocate might take issue with is that decisions are made by corporate bodies that might not benefit end-users in every case. For example, the aforementioned Termux issue and how Google recently deprecated the open source Messages and Dialler apps on Android, with vendors like Samsung giving proprietary alternatives.

That seems to me to be an issue with some other open source projects too (people complain about GNOME for example not listening to its users) but it possibly happens there on a lower scale since Android's a bigger project (likely most people in the world have seen or held or used an Android phone once in their lives).

Android is not pure OSS and it's heavily tied to everything Google. Phones with custom ROMs are hardly available so it's far from being the ideal model.

The reason you don't get phones with custom ROMs is that those can't get a license for preloading Google Play Services, Google Play Store, Google Maps, etc., and without those nobody would buy the phone. The monopoly of the Google Play Store has allowed Google to keep a tight grip on the ecosystem of their "Open Source" OS.

> Android is not pure OSS

The kernel modifications are all GPL-licensed and the userland is Apache. Android is pure OSS, it's distributions are not.

After multiple Google services being closed, awful, etc... I'm urgently wanting someone to Fork android and not attempt to bring it back to the Google branch.

I'm not sure how difficult it is to keep an OS going. What upgrades have I needed in the last 6 years? Security sure, but outside some phone system upgrades and messaging, I'm not sure what we even need to upgrade at this point.

Absolutely not, it's royal PITA to do anything else than "run android app" or "show a webpage".

Microsoft itself is an Android vendor these days:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-duo-2/9408kgxp4xjl

Maybe there’s a long game here where the Surface line will become all-Windows one day again.

If I recall correctly, the Surface Duo was supposed to be a Windows device (hence the odd selections like native UEFI and lack of certain hardware that would be on a contemporary Android device in the same class eg NFC).

Microsoft was getting frustrated they couldn't get a good Windows experience on the metal and ended up contracting Movial, a software/embedded engineering firm, that they ended up partially acquiring to basically accelerate the Android port to the hardware and get it shipped.

https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-acquires-the-surface-duo-d...

At the same time they were rushing the half-baked Android release out to the Duo they were all together working on what they actually wanted to ship in the Duo 2. (I was a Day 1 Duo user. I promptly returned it only two months into the ownership experience.)

Microsoft did partner up with Amazon to provide Windows users with Android apps. It's not entirely unimaginable that the Amazon Store + Bing Maps + Outlook + Edge + OneDrive + Office can become an alternative to Google Play + Google Maps + Gmail + Chrome + Drive + Docs.

Windows Mobile the OS was so good. What let it down was that it was lacking many critical apps.

Never used Windows Mobile, but WindowsPhone 7 & 8 were great. Moving to Android was a major step town in ergonomics for me.

Once I learned that Android was supposed to be a BlackBerry OS clone that got pivoted at the last minute in a panic to compete with iOS it all makes sense.

Hypothetical: now that the web technologies are so much more powerful than they were 10 years ago, wouldn’t we all be much better off if most things ceased to be “Apps” anyway and became websites?

The interesting thing I see is that most companies that ship a Mac app (that isn’t a game) now ship a web app in a thin Electron wrapper. And even though at least on iOS things seem slightly less HTML-ish, nobody uses any standard controls/UI anymore anyway, because everything must be branded and distinctive. I would kind of love to have a few competing OSs which were each supportable by essentially a checkbox in the cross-platform mobile app tooling people already seem to be using.

I don't know why you were downvoted, you are absolutely right. Lots of apps could be web pages and they would be tiny and have much better control of permissions and updates. Apple knows this which is why they try to make sure it doesn't happen and threaten their app store.

Microsoft didn't help by resetting the ecosystem 3 times with backwards-incompatible changes. Windows Phone 7 wasn't compatible with earlier Windows Mobile apps, Windows Phone 8 wasn't compatible with WP7, and Windows 10 wasn't compatible with WP8.

> Microsoft is resurgent these days,

Where is it resurging?

What you don't want a Facebook Phone? But it had that nice littel round LCD on the front to show your face icon for anyone calling you!

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