Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by estel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

On the other hand, Google Play Services largely encompasses those features that were /always/ closed source in Android: maps, google+ and GCM. The Google applications that are core to the "standard" Android experience for most users have also always been closed source: Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar.

There are still a lot of new features being introduced to the core Android APIs, with fragmentation issues being mitigated by a provided support library [0] which essentially backports the newer APIs to older versions of Android (some new features are only in the support library).

Android as it's sold in most consumer devices obviously isn't entirely open, but Google still seem to be attempting to strike a balance between supporting the open-source platform on the other, and building up a suite of closed userland features on the other. You might disagree with their judgement on where the balance is, but I think it's unfair to say it's being developed as a completely closed product.

[0] http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/index.htm...

They're also migrating some functionality from core Android into Play Services. For example, the replacement for the (effectively broken) proximity alerts is the new geofencing API. But that's not in core Android, it's in Play Services, even though it's all on-device functionality, that doesn't need to interact with any Google central machinery.

That's inaccurate. Location services doesn't just use GPS - it depends on data from Google when determining location via wifi, which is more battery efficient. So there are definitely Google-specific elements in there.

Proximity Alerts are part of the released AOSP core source. The replacement is not. They can interact with the WIFI location provider, but don't have to, and are still functional even if it's disabled (which is easy to do from the stock UI). So, this is a function which has been moved from core AOSP to Play Services.

Outside of APIs to interact with GPS and sensor data, the location APIs in the Android framework have always operated with Google APIs for determining things like locations, addresses, etc. This is really nothing new and devs are free to write their own geofencing API.

Not just that, Google is devoting its energy to develop the closed platform rather than developing android. The example you give are relatively minor updates with major new functionality now being developed outside of core android as the author points out.

Google also devotes energy to search, email, robot cars, internet balloons... the idea that having a closed source set of APIs for google products is stealing resources away from android is specious.

The point is that more energy being put on closed source Android development rather. Yes, Google has a lot of money but money is not it's only resource. Unnecessary projects have been closed off like Google Labs, Reader etc etc. Google has a limited range of focus, Google's Android developers have a limited range of focus and Google would seek to guard them against unsupported distribution systems (open source ones). Maybe Google will open source more?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com