Every time I use the Play store, it tries to get me to enter a phone number. The way it does this is by popping up a dialog, with no buttons except continue. It makes it look like you MUST do this (there's no indication you can back out), even though it's optional. That's deceptive.
And of course, the idiotic permissions system. Want to check to see if a user's on the phone? Gotta also get access to who they call and their IMEI and other permanent identifiers.
Basically, all the time I'm on my Android device, I feel like I've gotta be extra cautious, that Google's out to screw me over. Unfortunately, MS is just flubbing their system by pumping it full of crap. (They were paying devs in 3rd world countries $2000 to push out junk apps. They refuse to take down garbage/scams. They even published fake Windows Updates on the store, and other stuff that falsely claims to be by MS.) MS could fix it all immediately by offering Android app compatibility. I'd switch in a minute.
I use Firefox as my browser, mainly because of this. I wish I could switch to another smartphone platform.
Try F-Droid, a repository of FOSS apps with a focus on user confidentiality. They offer some security assurance by building and signing the apps from the orginal source, and offer nice functionality such as automatic updates (which you can disable, of course). Their store and related app is a fork of Aptoide. I often can find good solutions on F-Droid, but the repository is small.
This bothers me the most about Android. What is the point of individual Permissions if it's all or nothing!!
0. Reading through all our email (We were so naive back then)
1. Google saying it would never link data from its other websites (Youtube, bloggr) with our Gmail id, and then going ahead and doing just that
2. Google announcing Android as Free, Open-source Operating System, then with each update removing functionality to Google Play Services,
3. Google sabotaging the permissions system, by clubbing innocuous, essential permissions with down-right dangerous/malicious ones
4. Creating amazing tech that could provide a quantum leap in the quality of life (for the first world at least) but will further enable Google's all-seeing eye to impinge over our daily life (Self-driving cars, Google Glass)
5. Acquiring home automation companies, robotics company with large defense contracts,
... is that Google is well on its way to becoming truly Evil.
People say that the NSA's unsaid motto is 'to collect it all'. I say that motto sum's up perfectly Google's vision.
Did you also switch over to the Blackberry and Jolla?
I don't see it happening though, MS would have to declare that their unified Windows 10 OS is a failure before it even launches.
If it weren't just Amazon's AOSP, but also (for instance) if Microsoft and Firefox also offered their own, and combined they took a respectable share of the Android install base AND their respective app stores could all be targeted by Android devs with a single deployment then we would have something.
Just realised you think I'm objecting to the term "3rd world countries". The term is outdated and no longer relevant today, but is not the issue. Re-read my comment - I agreed with the point but didn't like the finger pointing at devs in poorer countries. I'm not sure why that seems to have provoked a bunch of downvotes.
Use XPrivacy. It should be mandatory for anyone who uses a phone and has a clue about privacy.
It filters permission requests so when an app tries to use one, it gives you a popup with allow/deny temporarily/permanently options, so if an app wants to access something it shouldn't (location, contacts, device ID, etc.), you can feed it empty/fake data transparently to it.
Pry-fi (randomise MAC address when probing for wireless networks), Titanium Backup (backup that doesn't suck), most advanced network tools, changing FDE password to be different to lock screen password, running an sshd, detecting IMSI catchers, most performance fixes/optimisations, even just basic full filesystem access - all need root too.
Do you have a link for that? I can't seem to find any reference to it.
But from using the Store, the overwhelming majority of crap appears to be distinctly from not the US. Having dealt with local MS subsidiaries, I'd be surprised if they didn't do similar stuff. The ones I've seen are quite eager to promote and can get cash from Redmond.
Or, seeing as how MS regularly publishes stuff that's a total fake, even when the publisher claims to be Microsoft itself, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't validate US residency here.
Or I might just be biased and the publishers just have terrible English and uncommon names for North America. But some of them used the letters "pvt ltd" in their fake company names, which is not common in the US.
Email me if you want some more details. I've got screenshots of lots of the junk, but I'm on my phone and don't have the links handy.
Being paid is common enough, and I've heard of companies getting 5-6 figures from MS to port stuff. But I think getting paid per app, like the link above shows, is the only explanation for some of the broken shovelware that's dumped on the store. Maybe advertising, but there doesn't seem to be any install volume. (Paid scams are a different story, like fake Netflix or WinRAR.)
The overall experience when you do give Goggle everything is quite good ( Google Now ) but I too second your opinion about Android permissions, its really idiotic.
Privacy while connected to the internet is almost dead but even then it's weak to just surrender. And I think more people are fighting than you might think. Using an app like TextSecure for example is giving back a little privacy.
Some of Google's features may be nice, but I don't want them to track me and get all my private data from my phone.
I'm using CyanogenMod without all the Google apps. It's nice, but the experience just isn't as nice as you have it with Google-Android. Most of the features could be done without tracking users, however.
Apple played a massive part in the success of the mobile web and responsive design. The release of Mobile Safari and WebKit was a watershed moment. Before that point, the mobile web largely consisted of separate, pretty awful sites on WML. Afterwards, most mobile platforms had a default web browser based on WebKit, and the mobile web transformed as a result.
I'm not saying Apple are perfect, but saying that they've "always been awful for the open web" is grossly overstating things.
And based on the their upstream contributions[1] it doesn’t look like it was a gesture of goodwill.
No, they were forced to release parts of it under the same license. There was a lot of original Apple code that could be separated out easily and released under any license they wanted (or kept proprietary) as long as they released them as object files so could modify and relink in the modified LGPL parts.
The parts that Apple was not required to release under LGPL they released under BSD.
Google used the strong weight of Youtube to make sure all web browsers implemented a replacement, a long and tiresome process that took the better part of ten years. They bought companies and gave patents away along the way.
I'm not sure exactly what Apple did. Please enlighten me.
It definitely wasn't just Apple. Google and Mozilla certainly played a huge role, and I definitely consider them much better web citizens than Apple (Mozilla best of all, obviously), but a lot of sites switched to HTML5 video only because they wanted to be watchable on iOS devices.
Adobe could have struck a deal there, given Apple their 30% and only allowed blessed scripts through the App Store. But they didn't. I would be surprised if there weren't neogiations about this, but in the end Adobe refused.
(Other scripting languages budged, which is why you can find Unity games in the App Store, but not Adobe Flash games. Unity was also banned at the same time Flash was.)
So if anyone kept Adobe Flash off the iPhone, that honor should probably go to Adobe itself.
I believe it's fair to say Firefox OS SDK will get better. I suspect we'll see interesting things happen just because it is primarily JavaScript+HTML5. There are a half dozen (or more) projects to make it possible to make Android and iOS apps in JavaScript, and they're popular, despite having dramatically less support and tooling available (as much as I hate Java, and I really do hate Java, Android Studio almost makes it tolerable).
I haven't seen the Firefox OS SDK yet, though I plan to check it out, and pick up some kind of dev phone soonish, but I would bet that it's at least on par with some of the early JavaScript+native frameworks cropping up lately. Stuff like Ionic, React Native, etc. All of those are new and sloppy and don't have settled toolchains, etc. But, the desire to work in JavaScript instead of ObjC or Java is pretty strong for many people, as evidenced by the huge quantity of people doing it despite it probably being more effort than coding in the standard language of the platform.
I think it's kinda like desire paths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path
JavaScript is the path a lot of people want to walk for making mobile apps. Firefox OS is the first to make it the primary way to develop apps for the platform. I suspect the application developer uptake will be very rapid; probably more rapid than previous platforms, and more rapid than the actual user uptake. This is a platform that allows you to use your existing web development skills right out of the box...and there are a lot more web developers than Java or ObjC developers in the world.
Not true at all, actually; I was doing this back in 2009 on Palm's webOS platform as one of the first wave of devs with early SDK access.
IMO, webOS' adoption of HTML5/JS apps as "native" was too ahead of its time, and unfortunately early enough where the intersection of hardware of the time and browser JS performance left it looking pretty janky compared to IOS and Android. Still, I loved developing for the platform in spite of everything that happened around the OS.
All that said, I'll probably give FFOS a shot as a development target in the near future.
It was definitely ahead of its' time.. I didn't stick with it long, as the browser became very dated, very quickly.. but overall it is still one of the better devices I've used (aside from HP's choice for a janky proprietary charger).
While I really like a lot of where the current Android has gone, I think some choices are just difficult for power users.. for more than 2 email accounts (let alone 5+) the gmail interface truly sucks... some of the flyover buttons (like new message) are just awkward, and some of the other apps are weird too.
The experience in google maps seems to be getting worse with time and more use as well. Hangouts as a replacement for google voice is cumbersome and incomplete... I think of this era of android to be akin to Windows Vista at release... some great ideas, but half baked... Hopefully it gets better not worse.
I haven't used iOS on a regular basis enough to comment there. I prefer JS + HTML for apps, it's not a bad idea all around... It (webos) was one of the earlier places for node development (before it got really good).
It has been possible to write fully native (not webview wrappers) Windows Phone apps in HTML and JavaScript for the last four or so years, but web developers didn't really adopt the platform (and those that did primarily used C# and XAML). You can scoff that it was something to do with Windows Phone OS's abysmal market share but then I don't see how you would be able to draw a different conclusion that FFOS will fare any better.
1. I had no idea you could make native Windows Phone apps in HTML. This may be a failing on my part for having less than zero interest in Windows Phone (though I find my dislike of Microsoft has faded quite a bit, as they've embraced more openness and more fair dealings with the rest of the world).
2. I don't think we mean the same thing when I say "the primary way to develop apps for the platform". I googled "how to develop windows phone apps" and followed the trail to the most obvious seeming instructions, and found this in the Microsoft Dev Center:
"When you create a new project, you also make the following selections:
Your preferred programming language - Visual C#, Visual Basic, or Visual C++."
So, if JavaScript+HTML5 is a good, and "official", way to make apps for Windows Phone, somebody needs to tell Microsoft, because they don't seem to realize it.
"Get started with Windows Runtime apps. You can write a Windows Runtime app in a variety of languages, such as C# or C++ with XAML, C++ with DirectX, and JavaScript with HTML/CSS. Now you can easily create apps for Windows devices and Windows Phone from a single project."
Taken from https://dev.windows.com/en-us/getstarted
Free trainings and ebooks:
http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/deve...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2012/10/29/f...
I like JavaScript just fine for what it was originally designed for.
Web OS and Windows Phone support for JavaScript are a living proof people don't really want to.
This has played out in many other markets, including desktops and servers, where higher levels of abstraction won mindshare over time as technology (both hardware and software) advanced to make it feasible. When I started using person computers (8 bit machines), software of any seriousness was written in assembly. The next generation (16 bit machines) brought good C and Pascal compilers, and applications built with those tools. Only now are we seeing serious talk of replacing C/C++ with something else for systems programming (maybe Rust, maybe Go, etc.).
Being right but at the wrong time is just as bad as being wrong. Maybe WebOS was right, but at the wrong time...maybe apps made in JavaScript five years ago weren't snappy enough on a phone. Maybe the tooling wasn't there. Maybe the VMs weren't good enough. Maybe they are, now.
I don't know. But, Mozilla has shown itself capable of taking on the biggest companies in the world with open web technologies, and holding their ground tenaciously. I believe they have the clarity of vision and the technical chops to pull it off.
Finally, I just want a Firefox phone. So, I may have rose-colored glasses. I think Firefox is the bee's knees, and I think Mozilla truly represents one of the most positive forces for good in technology today. I want Firefox OS to win. If it can't win, I want it to be a serious contender.
There are zero switching costs associated with a browser. It costs nothing to download and run Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, etc... The switching costs associated with phones is obviously much higher. Mozilla has to win ground in the mobile OS wars before they can even think about defending it.
Not trying to be a downer, I would like a viable mobile OS to break up the current duopoly, especially one that really embraces the web. I just think Mozilla has a hell of a fight ahead of it and it can't win it on merit alone.
You can totally write FirefoxOS apps in Notepad if you want to. It is just HTML, CSS and Javascript (and a JSON manifest that tells the OS where the entry point for your app is).
This might sound funny, but considering Moore's law and where we currently are on that exponential curve, making a fully virtual OS will be the next step in the PC evolution. You shouldn't have to write low level interrupts or accept that apps need full root access anymore.
In case you haven't noticed, the exponential curve has already started to level off. Moore's Law is done. Every incremental improvement from Intel offers smaller and smaller improvements, as transistor sizes run into fundamental physical limitations imposed by quantum mechanics and thermal and battery-life constraints impose limitations on the amount of power a chip can use. Combine that with fact that RAM speed stopped scaling about a decade ago, and the conclusion is clear. Moore's Law isn't ending. It's already gone. As far as desktop application developers are concerned, Moore's Law ended about a decade ago when single-thread performance plateaued.
Yes, we have more and more cores, and more and more cache. But the cache is only there to make up (poorly) for the fact that RAM speeds haven't scaled. And more cores don't help, because most desktop applications don't parallelize easily beyond ~2 threads. Yes, the user is able to run more applications at the same time, but each individual application is still running at about the same speed.
In Firefox OS, an OS designed from the start with the idea of JS/HTML apps? I don't know, we'll see, I guess!
http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/ndk/index.html
> If you write native code, your applications are still packaged into an .apk file and they still run inside of a virtual machine on the device.