ricardolopes

Or via any IM app you and your group of friends are already using.

The site doesn't say a lot, so I can only guess, but the only way this could be useful or at least add something new would be to not require the receiver to use the app (receive by mail, by fb message, etc) and to add semantic (e.g. tags) and archiving (kind of social shared bookmarks?) capabilities.

Or maybe it's just an early released MVP not to be taken very seriously. I hope it's this last option, as I don't see no added value so far.

This would, IMO, be the best approach. We already have players (Amazon, Nokia, etc) that would certainly be interested in having such a layer that they could apply on top of their services.

Then, having an open source community contributing with open implementations could help filling the gaps to make life easier to those players (and probably lowering the bar to allow new ones to join) and, who knows, to make it possible to have an AOSP device fully compatible with Play Services APIs without the need for gapps, probably just using some private server or other custom solution. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something somewhere, but that seems to be the goal of this project. If it is, then I really hope for its success.

I have to agree. Interesting topic, but not a lot of new content there.

Google is frequently pushing new Google Play Services that developers can use for their apps. Those services have the massive advantage over AOSP APIs of having OTA updates for all, not having to rely on carriers and manufacturers for full OS upgrades. In addition, those services offer new and useful functionality that is not always present in AOSP. Therefore, it is only natural that, on a general basis, developers start using more and more of Google's proprietary APIs.

This is not to say that pure AOSP is broken, or that it is impossible to have products like Kindle Fire and Nokia X. But it is a growing problem, and the fact that Amazon has to spend so much time replicating Play Services' APIs to have a decent app store (that is still considerable smaller than Google Play Store) is concerning.

Great project. The importance of something like this is increasingly growing, as Android ecosystem is getting more and more dependent on Google's proprietary software. For the next steps, it would be nice to have some onboarding document for this project, as otherwise it will probably look to complex and unwelcoming. I see that most of the replacements are in a very early phase (and one of them is empty), so I hope that this project manages to survive this early state to grow into something we can actually rely on.

Yes! This!

We all know that those silly apps/games/etc aren't solving any big world problem, but neither are watching TV, browsing cat gifs, etc. What we do during our chill out time is up to us, and I'd say there are way worse things to do than coming up with silly coding projects.

Let the Yos and fart buttons of today help these developers improve their skills in a fun way during their spare time, so that tomorrow some of them might be able to move to those big problem solving projects.

Yep, that's me, too. Always coming up with new ideas for great projects, moved by a great spark of curiosity, but usually those projects just tend to die because after some time I've learned most of what I wanted to (I start getting into the boring details, like polishing, bug fixing, etc) and also because new ideas and new stuff to learn just appear and take all my attention. Even though I know that for every new project the chances of completion are close to 0, I still start them every time because it's still fun to experiment and useful to learn. And, who knows, maybe one of them might spark my curiosity long enough to make it a more serious project that might actually get to somewhere.

Nothing very new here, but it still amazes me the sheer amount of devs that ignore these simple best practises. So it's always nice to have these reminders every now and then.