Google threatened Acer with Android excommunication
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Google needs to be harder on these manufacturers for the good of the consumers, the ecosystem, and ultimately the manufacturers as well. What will the "Android ecosystem" become if they create bigger and bigger incompatibilities and make developers jobs that much harder?
If manufacturers really wanted to customize their own OS, then they would never even try using WP8. And Acer is one of the WP8 licenses, too. So Acer wants their cake and eat it, too? Sorry, but no. Google needs to take actions against further fragmentation, and for removing any opportunities Microsoft might have with their more unified OS.
I believe they can use the OS, but I don't believe they'd be able to use the "Android" trademark and logo. They'd have to call it something else, which'd probably cut sales dramatically.
I wish Android worked like Chrome and Chromium. There should've been a version (Chromium-like) that manufacturers could use and do anything they wanted with it, and a version (Chrome-like) that could only be modified by Google alone, and be the only version Google actually promotes. They're sort of doing it with the "Google experience" Nexus devices, but that seems more like an afterthought more than something that was thought up from the beginning and as main strategy.
Instead of trying to build a Nexus brand, it might be more effective for Google to emulate the Signature program.
>If Google wants to standardize the ecosystem and is cracking down on these manufacturers who mess too much with Android then I'm 100% on Google's side. Google needs to be harder on these manufacturers for the good of the consumers, the ecosystem, and ultimately the manufacturers as well. What will the "Android ecosystem" become if they create bigger and bigger incompatibilities and make developers jobs that much harder?
Err, is this related to this article?
>If manufacturers really wanted to customize their own OS, then they would never even try using WP8. And Acer is one of the WP8 licenses, too. So Acer wants their cake and eat it, too? Sorry, but no. Google needs to take actions against further fragmentation, and for removing any opportunities Microsoft might have with their more unified OS.
Again, I totally lost you here. What has using WP8 got to do with Android or Aliyun? How will Acer using WP8 fragment Android?
>and for removing any opportunities Microsoft might have with their more unified OS.
I thought this is considered anticompetitive and generally frowned on by the HN crowd(regardless of it being legal or not)? If Google does something like that while calling Android "open", it'll become a running joke.
Devil's advocate: How has Kindle Fire hurt consumers? It hasn't but it has hurt Google. This is the same (minus the market share) like Microsoft saying to Samsung, Sony and Acer "Release Android phones and no Windows licenses for you" or something to that effect, considering the Google Apps /vs Android code.
That kind of behavior certainly can be anticompetetive if it's preventing the entrance of new products into the market. If my guess is right and "Aliyun" is an Android fork, then cry me a river -- if Acer wants to sell an official Android device they shouldn't expect to make money selling gray market clones on the side. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if their contracts included a clause covering exactly this (i.e. ship only official Android if you ship any Android at all).
But yes: if Alibaba is really trying to sell a home-grown OS, and Google is trying to kill it, then that's bad.
The name Aliyun: Ali is Alibaba, Yun is cloud in Chinese.
Lots of speculation from all of us, but assuming that the story is true, you are wrong. First Google says that Android is open source and free to improve so what's the big deal?
Secondly, Google holds a large percentage of the-mobile market through the official Android so anti-trust is listening. A clear case of anti-competitive behavior since Google would not be able to control the non-official forks.
Alibaba needs to pick an unencumbered hardware partner if they want to go down this road. Amazon (and whoever the Kindle OEM is) made it work, so it's not like it's impossible.
(Edit for clarity: again, this is presupposing that Alibaba is shipping modified Google-written software without a contract with Google. It's also presupposing that there are manufacturers -- like the Kindle's -- willing/able to take business making unbranded Android devices. If either becomes untrue, then this is definitely anticompetitive.)
If Alibaba's product can't reach market, then that's a problem. But given that many unlicensed Android-derived devices are in production right now, I don't see the problem. They picked the wrong OEM (or Acer misjudged its relationship with Google, or both). Oops.
The whole Chinese market is anti-competitive to outsiders.
There are many good reasons to impose such an agreement: The more OEM "customize" Android phones, the most difficult it is to keep them up to date, and that, as another current story points out, leads to unpatched vulnerabilities hanging out there longer than they should.
But, if Acer and Alibaba were making a different product, with a different ecosystem, where vulnerabilities would not be blamed on Google, that's not a good thing. That will have Amazon wondering if their ODMs are in line for a threat like that.
There's also market fragmentation, but I'd say carrier dumbassery is almost a worse problem.
This "differentiation" or "branding" or "experience" or whatever buzzword-compliant term chosen to describe it almost always makes the device less useful and less functional.
Not just by being ugly, slapdash-looking "let's slap our identity all over this" abominations, but by harming performance. The canonical example was MOTOBlur on the Droid 2. The hardware was decent, it was an incremental upgrade over the original Droid, but it's made almost unusable by the preloaded Moto garbage. Compare a Droid 2 stock vs a Droid 2 running the AOSP version of the same Android release and try to say they're even remotely comparable. Worse battery life, sluggish performance..
Jellybean all on its own is a beautiful system. A fantasy of mine is that, for the next major release, Google enforces the kind of UI requirements being imposed by Microsoft - how much carrier dickery do you think will appear on Windows phones?
Unfortunately, the carrier duopoly (i.e. lack of competition) is the underlying cause of this problem. Due to the subsidies and pricing power that their market position permits, carriers are able to dictate what devices they offer. If devices from HTC and LG are only differentiated by hardware, in the carrier's eyes, it makes no economic sense to give consumers the choice when they can limit costs by using only one vendor.
The only long-term solution will be a fundamental restructuring of the regulatory regime surrounding wireless spectrum, however, the incumbents are so flush with cash that Washington is having too much fun lining their pockets.
[Not surprised this has already gotten downvoted. Anyone got a mirror?]
I'd almost be for a total ban on anything that mentions "Apple" or "Android" from HN. I'll bet the site would improve 10-fold with no loss of useful info.
[0] http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...
OSM was a satisfactory equivalent to AAPL -- to the point of deliberately not acknowledging it (ie. worth stealing). As for f-droid, with all the iFart App clones culled is a definite win for mental health epidemiology.
Most companies in this space have the capital to replace these apps, but not the will or the ability. You only have to look at the Android UIs they produce to see that you're really going to have to commit if you want to function as primary app provider for your phones. Most companies aren't willing to do this, or take forever and fail (poor meego...)
EDIT: also posted upthread; a breakdown of the Google Apps licenses as seen from the Skyhook case http://www.theverge.com/2011/05/12/google-android-skyhook-la...
AOSP is OSS. Google's proprietary apps, for their propreitary services (GMail, Google Calendar, Google Play), are not. Why d you so wrongly act like Google has to provide those applications? Especially if someone has forked Android to compete with traditional Android offerings?