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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

> FOSS aren't even a player

I strongly disagree. FOSS is a huge force for both backend development and front end web development. One can also argue that Android is mostly open. EDIT: The large majority of servers in the world are running on FOSS. I can also predict a large number of upcoming devices like the internet of things to be running on it. Whether or not they run Android is another story.

The only reason FOSS may not be a "player" is because it's not a single monolithic organization, but instead it's a very loose coalition of thousands of individuals, organizations, and companies.

> How many languages can you use to write apps for your iPhone or Android device? Objective C and Java respectively and that's about it.

This may be the case for clients, but a lot of mobile apps also depend on server side apps.

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Agree re development but whether Android is open depends where you are in the world and where you draw the lines on what constitutes Android.

In North America and Europe it's theoretically open but OEM's dependence on Google's services (which for many people are part and parcel of the Android experience) and the control Google exert through that means that there are real limitations on how open it is in reality. This week showed just how much freedom Samsung, the largest smartphone maker in the world, has to do what it wants with Android - almost none.

You can argue that that's not really Android, it's the services, but until there are solid FOSS alternatives to those services you can't use Android to put together a compelling smartphone without Google.

That may change over time but for now for a majority of people it's a relatively closed platform.

In China and much of Asia where Google services are either unavailable or less compelling it is far closer to open. OEMs use the OS, bundle what they want and ship it without Google knowing or controlling anything and that's maybe a third of Android shipments worldwide so not insignificant.

I don't disagree with anything that you're saying; I've already hinted at it with my previous post.

That said, yes Android isn't technically Android without Google services but it doesn't mean that stripped down it's still not useful. Just ask Amazon or one of the many companies in Asia that have forked it.

> until there are solid FOSS alternatives to those services you can't use Android to put together a compelling smartphone without Google.

You've made my argument in the same post.

> In China and much of Asia where Google services are either unavailable or less compelling it is far closer to open. OEMs use the OS, bundle what they want and ship it without Google knowing or controlling anything and that's maybe a third of Android shipments worldwide so not insignificant.

Yep, I don't think we're disagreeing, I'm more commenting on - I'm certainly not saying that Android isn't open, more that open should be seen as a continuum rather than a binary switch.

The interesting thing for me is how Google react to the areas where they're losing control of Android. For them Android is (or was) a means to an end - it stopped Apple getting control of the mobile space which would have made Google beholden to Apple for traffic to their services.

I personally don't believe Google have particularly strong feelings about Android as an open source property, they care about it for what it does for them in areas they do care about. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out over the next few years and what that means for Android.

> you can't use Android to put together a compelling smartphone without Google

I actually have an older Galaxy S and I installed CyanogenMod on it without Google's services, so no Google Play, no GMail, etc... The phone is actually usable. I have more apps on it than I have on another Win Phone 8, a Lumia that I received as a gift.

As a browser, I'm using Firefox, which I happen to believe it's the best mobile browser right now. For email I'm using K-9 Mail, a pretty good open-source email client that can also do PGP encryption btw. My contacts and my calendar are synced fairly OK, since I'm connected to my Google account through the Exchange protocol.

For maps I'm using OsmAnd - extremely awful interface, but the maps are from OSM and are awesome and because it helped me get to where I wanted, I have tolerated the UI. For music and movies I'm using Apollo and VLC.

For Facebook and Twitter and other high-profile apps, I could have gone with Amazon's Appstore, however I preferred to use the web interfaces, packaged as apps in Firefox's marketplace. Not as snappy as the native interfaces, but they work and you also get better sandboxing.

The amount of work to go from zero to open-source Android is huge. You could fork Android and release something usable today. Amazon did it ;-)

This is exactly it. Many people don't realize this when they say Android is not open. But you could install F-Droid, which is a repository of open source Android apps and you could pretty much live without Google at all on Android. You would lose many conveniences but you will still be able to make use of all your phone's smarts.

Technically yes but:

1) This is really an option for a relatively small part of Android's install base most of whom don't know F-Droid exists, let alone how to install it or why they might want to.

2) Any company wanting to produce a phone on this basis is (a) depending on a lot of other products and organisations and (b) putting out a product with - for instance - a substandard maps product next to the competition.

So yes it's open, but not in the way that I think many would like it to be (that is where a genuinely open phone that the average punter can and does use exists).

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