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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

I'm not talking about the Google Maps app or the YouTube app here. I'm talking about the API's which Google Play services offer which all apps use. API's which for example allows your app to get the location of the user. Or allows your app to be updated.

Simply said probably none of the apps you installed on your phone are going to work without Google Play services installed. Google Play services are closed source. Which is why manufactures like Samsung need to sign a contract with Google and can't simply "install opensource Android". Samsung could live without Google Maps being installed and they could even live without the Google play store but they can't live with none of your apps (like your bank app, your Netflix app, etc.) working.

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Can you name an OS that gives more support to OEMs than Android?

> Can you name an OS that gives more support to OEMs than Android?

I don't see how this is relevant for this discussion? The whole point is that Android is only opensource in name. You must license Google Play services from Google otherwise Android is practically useless since you can't run 99.9% of the Android apps. When you license Google Play services Google will also impose all kinds of other restrictions on you which have nothing to do with Google Play services. Like for example mandating you don't set Perplexity AI as the default...

Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.

> Imagine Microsoft "open-sourcing" Windows (by doing some source drops at regular intervals) but you wouldn't be able to run all the existing Windows applications on it without licensing closed source software and online services from Microsoft.

Or building your own services, presumably?

building your own services doesn't help any existing app OSes live and die from 3rd party apps so unless you can convince 10k developers to port their apps to a platform with no users, you're dead in the water

You're talking as though Android owes other phone developers free apps. I don't see why it does.

+1. The entitlement on some of these people are out of the world. There's a perfectly capably operating system being made freely available for everyone, but nope - they want the source code of google maps, google search or whatever.

lol no.

> Or building your own services, presumably?

In case of Android and Google Play services that is never going to work reliably. Your users will experience breakage on a regular interval and you will make yourself wildly unpopular with app developers (since they will be getting the bug reports of the subtle incompatibilities). Probably to a point where they might just block their app from running on your phone.

All this stuff works on paper but it is going to be a constant up hill battle which you will loose in the end because your users will become fed-up with the constant needling of broken stuff and having to wait for you to fix it. It similar to using Wine on Linux. It works _a lot_ of the time but not all the time.

If you want to experience using reverse engineered Google play services, try an Android phone (or emulator) with microG on it [1].

[1] https://microg.org/

Counter argument then.

Why can’t I as a laptop manufacturer decide to install a different default browser on Windows for my devices? Or change the start menu?

The phone manufacturer can choose to ship another OS.

Now sure there is absolutely an argument about their monopoly causing other apps to not be compatible on your own custom os but the same argument applies to windows and the only way to make apps run on linux is through an emulation/compatibility layer and even then it might not work.

So by that argument Microsoft should also be taken up for antitrust, which Im all for but I doubt thats going to happen.

Windows Phone, before Android and iOS killed it.

Incidentally, version 8 was vastly superior to current iOS or Android, even after those OS’s stole a few UI innovations.

If only the team responsible for that got to run Windows, and not the other way around!

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