Why Codeworkx ceased Development of CyanogenMod 10 for the Galaxy S3
androidnext.de
androidnext.de
I'm kind of surprised Microsoft hasn't released an Android UI library for Modern apps on Android, as I think it could push more Android users into choosing Windows Phone when its time to purchase their next device.
They still make it damn impossible to run the windows phone simulator on Mac (even with a virtual machine, can't run the game part), so no iOS devs bother with the platform.
Microsoft DOES go around to iOS devs.
It is ok for Apple to force me to buy a Mac, but not for Microsoft to do the same?
At least Microsoft does not force me to buy a specific hardware for their operating system.
Talk about double standards...
It may not be fair the people who came out with a C# only phone 3 years after the iPhone can't convince the vast majority of mobile developers to swap, or even develop for it too, but they can't because they made their tools require onerous effort to get up an running.
It most certainly IS a double standard. You have a different standard trying to take away from the incumbent. The incumbent MOBILE development platform is a mac, running OS X, and this is because mobile developers want to release on iOS (as there is a ton of money there and it was "the first"), and Android is supported great on mac as well.
To do Windows phone development, buying a virtualizing tool such as VMWare isn't good enough: The simulator only half works for windows phone 7, it can't use any of the 3D APIs.
So in the age of macbook airs (with small SSDs) and developers who replaced their optical drives with SSDs in MBPs (A HUGE pile of people were doing this in 2010-2011), they're saying "Give us a huge space to install windows and the tools, and go through complicated basecamp setups to make our shit work".
When told to do all this work, THEN having to port our games and apps (which can often be made cross-platform to Android with far less work), most of us just skipped the platform.
So I am still waiting for a Mac hardware free version of Mac OS X.
"Normal" iOS dev rates pay for a macbook air in a day of work. Easy to get rates pay for a macbook air in 2-3 days of work.
Google's whole play on the Android thing was to ensure Apple didn't triumph too far, and they've succeeded. It was never about putting Linux on phones. Look, Nokia's died. (Though last time I mentioned this someone on HN got upset.) The other device manufacturers (including Smart TVs now) are essentially presently dependent on Google (though Samsung is trying very hard not to be), and our mobiles are all online without us buying Apple devices.
Second, the whole lockdown thing is dual-faced. First, the carriers in the US and other markets that subsidise phones (advertising: $0!) with long term lock-in contracts don't want people hacking the phone. Therefore there's a requirement for them to make it a bit hard to open up. On the other hand, often a content licensing requirements from content partners force them to include this stuff, typically Hollywood studios. (I have it on good information that Microsoft paid a hundred million dollars up front to Samsung to convince them to introduce their new DRM solution in the Galaxy series. So the DRM thing is basically a moot point, if you are paid that much!) And finally, the devices do need some secure storage for cryptographic purposes, for example storing passwords.
Net result: the consumer is shafted. Thanks, industry. I hope FirefoxOS can get some traction.
Here's what I believe 'should' happen: - Carriers realize their value-add is the consumer relationship, actually provide decent billing interfaces to all and sundry, replace PayPal and the credit card companies. (Problem: They can't. Their internal billing systems are generally a mess, custom hacks layered on to black boxes they outsourced to AMDOCS) - Device manufacturers should embrace openness, encouraging people to load whatever they want with an OPTIONAL vector for validating cryptographic trust of a codebase. The manufacturers should actually invest in facilitating this. In most of the world, people are super keen to muck with phones, there is a community that will fix bugs and improve things, and those who sell the devices have time to customize. - AOSP people should join FirefoxOS and work for a more open world instead of working on Google's pretend-open platform (step 1: upload everything to google, step 2: see step 1) for free. Work on there a year or so, then pimp yourself out to a device manufacturer. Guaranteed cash, feel good about your work, help break the unhealthy Googopoly.
But these phones aren't being released in America - they're being released in China. Why? Because the American carriers won't play ball (because the phones run stock Android), so they're forced to take their product overseas. In China, you can just buy a phone, put a SIM card in it, and you're off to the races.
Think about that for a second. A rare American hardware upstart success story is forced to sell its first phones in China because American carriers won't accept them.
Hopefully GSM will die soon and we can all use some kind of public, tor-rerouted, bandwidth-metered cryptophones over wifi. I'm sure the NSA will love that.
There's not much sense in fighting for something that is largely irrelevant to most people.
Next/somewhat in parallel, the EU forced national phone companies to be privatized and allow competition.
The net result is GSM, where companies share their networks, and subscriptions are tied to SIM cards.
For China, I guess they just made the right choice, looking at the USA and Europe as options.
1. Chinese carriers are all government-run, basically. There's basically two: China Unicom and China Mobile. Almost everyone used to use the latter, but Unicom is getting better recently (last few years). It takes a lot of effort to follow though, so I'm not 100% on all that (I'm back to China for Chinese new year in a couple of weeks, living in Thailand now!)
2. Nearly everyone uses prepay.
3. Most people aren't living in debt.
4. There is a massive market for cheap and/or stolen phones.
5. A not insignificant number of phones, particularly at the luxury end, are 're-routed' from the Hong Kong 'export' market back in to the mainland.
6. Chinese save a lot of money and don't tend to live beyond their means as much as Americans.
7. The entire mobile infrastructure is generally less than ten years old.
8. The Chinese produce their own infrastructure hardware (chiefly Huawei).
9. The Chinese government wisely sees infrastructure as a political and security tool, and so probably subsidises it in many ways. (This also goes for roads, electricity, etc.)
10. Coverage is far better than the US. You almost never have no coverage, even waaaay out in the hills. And in 10 or so years, I've never had a dropped call.
Similarly, I wonder how the the age or creator of the mobile infrastructure (7 & 8) figures into offering of mobile devices independent of network access by carriers - maybe in the homogeneity of the mobile network?
Seriously: Buy. A. Nexus. Phone. Almost everything else is going to bite you.
And getting a Nexus isn't an option for me, not anymore. I have a Galaxy Nexus on Verizon (a great phone) at the moment, and none of the other carriers have as good coverage where I live. They definitely don't have 4G, which Verizon does. Plus, I have grandfathered unlimited data, which I'm never giving up.
I'd love to get another Nexus, but that's not an option for me. After the fiasco with the Galaxy Nexus on Verizon, I don't see Google releasing another Verizon Nexus, not for a long time.
So I'll probably buy a phone that's 6-8 months old, has been unlocked/rooted, is quite popular, and was a premium model when it was released. Then I'll install CM on it and go on my merry way.
Plus most of CM gripes with the S3 are related to Exynos SoC and not the Qualcomm SoC.
Though to be fair, the CM 10.1 builds on toro work just fine. I sweat a little at every update though.
The article is 3 months old. In that time, CM10 hit stable release for all US carriers (and international, IIRC) and is honestly rock-solid. All those "unsolvable" issues were solved. I'd recommend it without hesitation to every GS3 owner.
10.1 is buggy/crash-prone, admittedly, but the team's only been working on it for a few weeks. Bluetooth and Wifi tethering work solidly, some of the newer Google Apps (like Gallery and Photosphere) are a little hacky. Touch to focus works great.
Every issue Codeworkx cites as his frustrations with the S3 have been resolved by the great folks at the CM/TeamHacksung. The article is a non-issue.
And yet, in comparison with it's cousin the N4, it's not nearly as well supported or trouble free. Buy. A. Nexus. Phone.
I have an N4 and I am very happy with it, the extra RAM and the quadcore processor make a big difference.
Also, the N4 had an extra 48 lines of pixels that are used for the navigation bar, so effective screen real estate is the same on both devices.
Nice to hear that you like WP8 UI better, but it's got nothing to do with freedom or linux.
If you look at the Linux "ecosystem", it's a lot more fragmented than Android, and every vendors does whatever they want to their own distro, and can completely change the UI, and they don't even have the same app extension across distros. So yeah, it seems to me like you wanted the opposite of all of that all along and not really the freedom/flexibility of such an ecosystem (that by default comes with many people doing different things in the ecosystem).
The GPU is accessible under license to ARM partners according to ARM, though I've not seen it, and I think it's not Samsung's to give away unilaterally. There's competitive advantage issues involved no doubt, including the fact that Imagination GPU design, just down the M1 motorway from ARM, and used in the OMAP5, are locked down as well.
The Exynos 5 dual core is a great device, but as in so much to do with ARM licenses, the peripherals are the work of the licensee. Texas Instruments use dual Cortex-m4's along with A15's in the OMAP5 which is a very capable approach when combined with good peripherals.
I can see why Samsung would be cautious, but I do think they've been misleading in promising more than they could deliver. So far it just looks like a fork of Android Jellybean.
That being said, I'm a bit thorn on this. From the developer side, Samsung seem a bit too prickly, specially when Android is touted as an "open" platform. On Samsung's side, it has no obligation whatsoever to provide all the data and source when asked.
Links to the other parts are contained in each post.
Google has wielded the "Anti-fragmentation Agreement" as a whip to keep Android OEMs from straying into temptations like Aliyun. Surely a bit of love for AOSP-based Android distributions that grow the system integration talent pool are within the scope of not being evil.
Samsung is becoming very big and powerful, and seems to be acting very different than they have in the past, just like other big companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google.
Um, isn't TI exiting the phone market?
The only hope for OMAP in the open-source/AOSP world is if maybe Amazon picks it up. Or, as a longshot, maybe someone making automotive systems (although Freescale is doing better there).
If Qualcomm or Broadcom happens to want it, um, I wouldn't hold out for any new releases.
EDIT: not sure about the current state of things, seems that this is a translation from an interview that happened several months ago, which explains why the Xperia T wasn't out yet.
damn you all to hell.