Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a "if the worst happens" plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.
LG has the Palm/HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.
Everyone else? They're too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.
Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn't do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.
It’s possible that Google cutting off Huawei will actually backfire, because it makes having a viable alternative to Android a MUST HAVE instead of just NICE TO HAVE.
Perhaps it’s possible to resurrect Blackberry 10 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_10 ) for example, which seemed to be an impressive piece of engineering that got trampled by Blackberrys failing business. I played with a demo once that could run Android apps and was amazing at multi-tasking thanks to its microkernel architecture. Plus would be governed by Canadian export laws I guess. Perhaps I’m just daydreaming though.
Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing
I have both an S9 and a BlackBerry Q10 on me every day. The BB10 OS, even though its now defunct, was designed in a way that it is FAR easier and more practical to use. I really, really hate the Android interface as a result.
1: BlackBerry hub is a lot nicer to view messages
2: Smart use of Bezel gestures makes it much easier to actually interact with the phone:
-If you want to access the hub while using an app, you take your thumb from the bottom of the screen and swipe up and to the right. The interface is very forgiving of where you swipe, you can do it without even looking, yet you wont accidentally do it either. If you don't want to fully enter the hub and just take a peak without leaving your app, just do a partial swipe.
-If you want to view all your running apps, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to the middle of the screen, and voila , you get a tile arrangement of your running apps (easier to view than a Rolodex), as well as phone and camera access. And you are also less likely to lose track of what windows you have open. I find lots of peoples android phones have like 30 windows open - this is a fault of its interface.
-If you want to access your apps, swipe up from bottom bezel (shows running apps), and then swipe left, now you can view all your other apps.
-Every app is expected to have its settings menu accessible by swiping down from the top bezel.
There are no silly little cumbersome function buttons at the bottom like Android has (the back/home/apps buttons). Smart use of bezel gestures make this unnecessary.
Everything can be accessed easily in a simple, comfortable gesture with your thumb. As a result, it is a lot faster to use day in day out. And it is not as cluttered as Android.
I am sad the whole world chose Android. It's a crappy interface.
BB10 is nice. Meego, as seen in the Nokia N9 was a really good UI too. Extremely elegant card interface, that meshed so well with a curved OLED screen. In 2011.
I would love to see an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly. One way to go would be a better F-Droid ecosystem, and pure AOSP.
But perhaps, even better, a true Linux userland. Maemo lives on with Jolla. Although I hate they still have many closed components.
I personally don't like gestures. You have to remember and get used to them. Then suddenly in a major update they will change everything to new "cooler" gesture, re-learn and get used to it again. Year after year that happens.
Compare that to buttons. You can always see them, so no need to remember anything. Older people also able to use them.
Of course new shiny mobile os have mixed both together and now we are guinea pigs of modern UI.
I'm with you. I couldn't make gestures into something that was good for me. My current phone lacks physical buttons (except for power and volume up/down), and I've never stopped missing them -- it's my #1 complaint about the phone.
The android buttons in most cases these days are not hard buttons but soft ones that could just as likely change at the whim of Android, using your own hypothetical situation you came up with. They are cumbersome because usually it takes two hands to press them, as they are small buttons at the bottom. You end up needing one hand to hold the phone and the other to accurately press the button. With thumb-gestures, you can do it blindfolded in one hand. In addition, the buttons take up screen real estate.
Also, have you actually used the BlackBerry gestures? Upon getting a BlackBerry, the very first thing it does is a 1 minute tutorial explaining how to use the gestures. There are only a few. They really aren't complicated. They just take a brief explanation and the reward is you get a more functional interface.
I was a BB Classic user for about 2 years before jumping ship to iOS for practical reasons.
Aside from what you mentioned, I would also bring up that, at least on the Classic, the little touch nub/joystick/trackpad thing was actually incredibly handy. It could act as a mouse, which meant that you could use "Desktop" websites very easily, since you didn't have to try to fat finger tiny little buttons. And since it was essentially a real mouse, hovering worked to, which is nice for sites that required that.
For those that have never seen one, it was a small button, about the size of an iPhone home button, but the surface doubled as a capactive trackpad, I assume with similar tech to those used in laptops, but far more sensitive. I still used the touch-screen a fair amount, but having a mouse was wonderful when you needed it.
The hardware on the Classic was just fantastic... long battery life, good build quality, and a SIM+microSD slot.
> And you are also less likely to lose track of what windows you have open. I find lots of peoples android phones have like 30 windows open - this is a fault of its interface.
There is no need to keep track of them or close them, since the app lifecycle is managed automatically by the system – having a window (called activity on Android) open doesn't mean that the app is running.
Non-foreground activities are automatically suspended by the system and resumed when you return to them. Processes with suspended activites are automacially killed when resources run low.
>It’s possible that Google cutting off Huawei will actually backfire, because it makes having a viable alternative to Android a MUST HAVE instead of just NICE TO HAVE.
I got the impression that the United States forced their hand.
Yeah, the narrative on a lot of these stories "Google bans Huawei from Android", "Microsoft drops Huawei laptop from store", etc. are kinda silly, as the headlines suggest these companies had anything to do with it. They're following the law.
It would not be surprising if Huawei attempts several strategies in parallel and buys several small mobile OS and mobile UI technology companies at once.
Buying both Sailfish and Qt would be peanuts for Huawei.
Really? Do you think Samsung and LG would be more likely to develop not to mention support an Android competitor? This ban is the best thing that happened to Korean mobile phone manufacturers for years.
Huawei was breathing down Sammy’s neck things are looking much bright for them now.
Not really.
The situation is much more opening the space for OTHER Chinese vendors to jump in and grab the market.
Samsung is already selling in all channels where Huawei is, so they have their shelf-space allocated already.
That slot will not remain vacant.
LG can surely grab a bit more business in short-term for sales-channels they were not selling to, because even if they are not in a specific channel, they have products ready and tested for the market to fill the gap immediately.
TCL/Alcatel has maybe some opportunities in low-price device-tier as well, because they have established relationships with many carriers and retailers.
On the other hand, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, Xiaomi are all not sanctioned by US, all of them offer comparable products with a very similar price and aggressively try to expand their international presence.
So I expect mainly a Oppo/Vivo/OnePlus vs. Xiaomi vs. TCL/Alcatel fight for every slot Huawei is at risk to lose...
After this fiasco, I'm more than ever willing to change to Huawei. Best yet if they change to a platform not based on Android. I'm done with Google (and Android soon) in every possible way.
Netflix, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Chromecast, Dropbox, OneDrive, YouTube, Twitter, Google search ( or duck duck go), Amazon, Amazon video, 2fa authenticator, iftt, Wikipedia, Skype, messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Waze, Google maps, Ted, Wolfram Alpha, ... I'm pretty sure there is one of them that you use recurringly.
You're going to use that OS?
The only Chinese app I use is eWelink and I really want to flash that device to be more flexible and dump it.
You don't need apps for Google search, Wikipedia or Amazon, and I don't think this ban is going to extend to blocking websites for western consumers using Huawei devices.
That, to me, seems like the real barrier for any new smartphone platform. It happened with Windows Phone, a platform backed by a huge company and even using a very popular language and platform.
I think WebOS and Firefox OS were before their time a little given the rise of progressive web apps, but I still don't think they're a complete answer until they can use native UI elements.
yeah. this discussion seems to mix up android's success as an ecosystem and android's quality as an OS and a technical achievement.
android's large market share is attributable to many things beyond the software itself, which, in any case, owes a heavy debt to Linux. replacing android as an ecosystem will require enticing a large 3rd party developer base to write apps. the worldwide android developer community is full of developers eager to you know, like, make actual money on their apps. if Huawei can create a new app marketplace where that happens for these developers, they should be able to attract abundant talent. they should imitate Apple, not Google.
Oh sure - short term yes this is a win for Samsung over Huawei but long term it sends a very clear message that the future of their business depends highly on Google and the winds of US foreign policy. You don't want to be the person presenting to the Samsung board "Future Risks: Donald Trump"
US foreign policy doesn't change on a whim as some people like to make it out to be. The economic dispute with China has been in the making for decades at this point.
All the craziness about preventing American internet companies from dominating the Domestic Chinese market makes total sense now, doesn't it? If the Chinese economy had been built around Facebook, Google etc. the US would have a lot of leverage, since they're all US-based companies and _must_ comply with whatever US Government asks them to do.
The Chinese government has prevented plenty of US companies from doing business in China including Google, but more importantly is the rejection of patents and intellectual property and espionage conducted by Chinese government, which has cost US companies billions and the US government hundreds of lives.
> which has cost US companies billions and the US government hundreds of lives.
Can you tell me with a straight face that the CIA, NSA etc. do _not_ have active espionage activities in China? Do you think valuable intellectual property and state secrets exist only in the US? That as a result of these activities, the Chinese Government has not also lost lives?
Do not buy so easily into propaganda. Nations will promote themselves as the only "Good" nation to their own people throughout the world. Because the US is a democracy, the US Government has to be very careful and frame the narrative in a way that's not an outright power grab.
IANAL and it's not clear to me exactly what method was used to "force" Google. We ignore the FUD over Huawei's telco equipment because that has precisely nothing to do with their smartphones. What's left, then? Sure, they probably have all sorts of monitoring tools built into their phones, but so does every other smartphone manufacturer. What made Huawei different, and what legal instrument conveyed this difference to Google's lawyers?
BB10 is based on QNX platform, I strongly doubt that QNX is independent from any US assets, patents, licenses, so moving from Android to BB10 is just "more of the same"
QNX developer here. I don't think what you're saying is true. QNX has patents registered in the USA, and in other countries, but that's hardly relevant. It's a Canadian company owned by a Canadian corporation.
BB10, on the other hand, is dead and buried. It would be easier to port something like UBPort's Ubuntu Touch to QNX as an alternative to Android.
You can run your in-car infotainment system on Linux, Mac OS, or Windows. QNX can run your brakes and your ignition. Your car dashboard (cockpit console). Your insulin pump. You cancer treatment radiotherapy device. Interplanetary space probes. High-speed rail systems. Everywhere you need software to just always work without a "Windows has experienced a problem and needs to restart" or the Linux equivalent of just silently hanging and requiring a hard power cycle. QNX predates phones by decades, the BB10 was just a passing thing.
But sure, it's also in infotainment systems and at the heart of self-driving cars.
Had blackberry made messenger multi-platform 15 years ago, and released an email app for iOS and Android they would still own the business market.
Even in 2019 email sucks on a modern smartphone compared to blackberry in 2004.
I'm still hoping Apple wakes up and releases messenger for Windows and Android before that ship sails. They claim to be a services company but they still can't seem to let go of tying it to devices.
> They claim to be a services company but they still can't seem to let go of tying it to devices.
They've shipped apple music on Andriod since day 1, have had it on Sonos for several years, and in the last 6 months have announced & started to ship TV on tons of actual TVs and non-apple straming boxes.
They've 'let go' of tying services to devices, but iMessage isn't a paid service so the advantage to shipping it on other platforms is lower.
It’s possible that Google cutting off Huawei will actually backfire, because it makes having a viable alternative to Android a MUST HAVE instead of just NICE TO HAVE.
It's a must-have for the small companies like Xiaomi that only or mostly make smartphones. But they can't afford to develop an android alternative.
Huawei and Samsung make lots of things other than smartphones and can just leave the market if need be. It's less expensive for both of them to shutter their smartphone business than it is to develop a viable android alternative that developers would want to code for and that consumers would want to use.
Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing
Google has spent the last decade cutting apart the open part of Android and making it more and more proprietary.
Launcher, Phone app, Messages, Contacts, Calendar. All proprietary.
Notification API, Location API, SMS APIs and step counter APIs, and even the new app format. All proprietary.
It's a huge undertaking building an app for Android today without using Google's services, and sometimes even impossible.
If you want to verify a user by sending a code through SMS (think Whatsapp sign-up) you either have to use the proprietary API, or you'll be banned from the play store. Using the open source API instead gets you banned because it allows you to read all SMS — and Google never cared to build a new open source API because they already have their proprietary API anyway.
And nowadays you don't have APKs anymore but often app bundles, a special format which only the Play Store can parse.
And if you create a new app today, per default you don't even get the signing key to publish APKs yourself, but only Google gets to keep it.
Yes, microG exists and is amazing — but even it is only replacing an absolutely tiny part of the APIs, and even those it can’t replace fully yet and a lot of work is still to be done.
I remember days when Android was still open, nowadays I’m fighting against the ever-increasing restrictions with my open source apps with every single OS update.
There are? Now that’s interesting, because I’ve spent the past 5 years developing open source Android apps and such projects. (And e.g. my app Quasseldroid is also on F-Droid)
I’d be interested in what existing, working solution for a FCM replacement there is? Replacing the apps is simple, replacing the services is the hard part.
If there is a working open FCM alternative, please link it, I’d immediately add support for it in my apps.
Phone companies tried to replace the open versions first. Google was faced with either: a different version of Android on each phone (with the apps replaced,) or making their own versions.
Note too that they could have gone the Microsoft IE route and declared various apps as part of the OS. Instead they made their apps separate from Android, and let them succeed by bundling them together. Amazon Fire is at least one example where the Play Store et al. are not installed.
To answer the big question in this thread. Yes, Huawei can simply fork Android. It will be a pain in the ass, expensive, and not as usable, but they certainly can.
Google's "iron grip" in this instance is only ostensible, not literal and complete. HN is not immune to clickbait.
They kind of actually already did, like all the chinese companies. Because CCP banned google from chinese market years ago. Banning all CCP related corporations should have been implemented as a part of opening to china. or at least as an answer to CCP's censorship protectionism, etc.
> different version of Android on each phone (with the apps replaced)
No, their action actually lead to this in the first place — previously, each manufacturer slightly modified the AOSP apps, now each manufacturer actually builds their entirely custom apps for this purpose, as most can’t or don’t want to license Google’s apps for that purpose (they license the base Google Play apps, but e.g. not messages or the phone app or the launcher).
> It's a huge undertaking building an app for Android today without using Google's services, and sometimes even impossible.
F-Droid developers manage to do it. Sure, they might not publish their apps on the Google-Play Store (some do, actually) but so what? Any Android user can freely download these entirely open apps and install them on their own, by pre-checking a box in the phone settings. That's still more than you can say about iOS!
I’m a publishing apps on F-Droid myself, so I’m speaking from experience there.
Right now I’ve spent months on getting a full clean-room reversed version of Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging system’s client library working, and we’re still nowhere close to that.
The final goal being that we can have one, fully GPL app, which can utilize FCM if it’s installed on the phone, either through the proprietary Google Play Services, or through microG, but which can also work without it otherwise (while also avoiding any tracking or telemetry)
And trust me if I say Google’s making this for us devs harder with every update.
Huawei did the same thing. Started out with their phones being unlockable (not that it did much good, the hardware was hell to work with), then took that away. Even on existing hardware. That's when people in the consumer tech community figured out "okay, these clowns definitely can't be trusted". We didn't need Trump to tell us that!
All 'Android' phones sold in China did not rely a tiny bit of those Google stuff, as Google's existence in China has been negligible since it was blocked.
All major 'Android' manufacturers in China somewhat customized launchers with unique UXs. Notification services were always chaotic and every platform provider woke the phone up to checkout pending notifications and drained the battery. And this list of abyss easily expanded to App Markets and other features.
So blocking Huawei from Android might create some troubles but it would definitely not be around these proprietary features where other proprietary counterparts existed, at least in China, Huawei's home market.
> If you want to verify a user by sending a code through SMS[..]you either have to use the proprietary API, or you'll be banned from the play store.
Is this only in cases where the app reads the SMS as soon as it's received, and authorizes the user without any further user input?
Because I've done similar authentication stuff for some website logins (like a real estate listings one) where they require me to punch in the code I received via SMS. This was an interaction that occurred independently of Play Services I would imagine.
The OS is open source, Google Play Services isn't.
When you are developing Android apps, you can leverage Google Play Services for all sorts of functionality, such as push notifications and maps, and I would say more apps do use these than don't.
Huawei can still put Android on their phones, but not with Google Play Services. This means that many Android apps just won't work. They also can't supply the Google Play Store, which means that they need an alternate way to distribute apps.
Google Play can be rewritten from scratch to look like the real one and point to open source repositories, but the real hassle are device drivers: they're tight closed to the point there's not a single person in the world who managed to install a 100% open OS on a phone or tablet; even Purism themselves had to use some closed blobs here and there.
Closed firmware/blobs/drivers are the #1 problem; that's the battle to send more troops to, not play stores or apps. The day we eradicate them from devices is the day we can consider those devices really open and trustworthy, the day no entity in the world, not even the original manufacturers, can suddenly decide to make a device obsolete forcing the user to buy a new one.
I understand carriers don't want the average Joe to mess with the radio, I'd be totally ok with that, so I would agree on closed source firmware on baseband if it was limited only to that use: a fully separated system that deals with connections and nothing else. All data could be en/decrypted on main device CPU, so that the radio closed firmware would essentially have full access to noise. Of course IP addresses could not be masked, but they would be available anyway to authorities with full access to cell towers and traffic.
Oh man, the Fire Phone has so many problems as a product. As someone who turned a large Android Google Play app into a Fire Phone compatible one, I think it took me literally a day to swap out the Google Maps implementation with the Amazon Maps one and that was very nearly it. I'm convinced that the hijacking the swipe to go home was the real killer of that thing. I honestly don't know how people actually used that thing because scrolling on any list in any app basically left you with 50:50 odds of heading back to the home page.
I'm not stating that the problem isn't hard, just that the Fire Phone had other issues.
Well, yes, but maybe the failure was more due to not many users being willing to accept that much vendor lock-in, rather than issues with Amazon's Android version?
They not only forked it, they also improved it. They are e.g. the only one who built their own secure Annex K C11 extensions, besides Android Bionic. Android first did it with an old HP stlport, and then Bionic did it with C++ (Google style). Huawei did it in 1998 already in C.
They also are using safer xen compartments, as Amazon did until recently or Qubes is doing. kvm is fast, but certainly not secure.
Personally I trust Huawei more than Google, and esp. LG, Sony or Samsung. The current war on Huawei looks like Huawei is denying the US their backdoors into the baseband layer on 5G. Loosing 5G would be big for US intelligence, and good for privacy. China getting access into 5G backdoors is not as worrying as continued US abuse.
The play store is not the sole way to distribute apps. You can download the .apk files, or get them by mail, or use another play store that has the same apps. The play store is just a repository of some apps.
On a phone licensing the Play Store sure. But on a Huawei phone free of those restrictions they can make it use any store they want without any special restrictions. Of course, it becomes a question what that means for security, but still.
I did not root my phone yet, and I install apps with f-droid just fine. The only thing I had to do, if I recall correctly, was enabling third party apps instalation
Why do you think Google is working on Fuschia? The second a major competitor forks android in any meaningful way, I guarantee they switch to Fushia and stop all further contributions to Android.
Google kinda pulled a "bait-and-switch" with Android.
When they released it, it was pretty much 100% Open Source, then they moved more and more elements to their proprietary GApps suite, included the Play Services required to run even many 3rd party apps.
At this point Android is barely more Open Source than iOS and its Mach kernel, but the difference is that Google got its market share by selling to manufacturers the fact that they're independant because it's Open Source.
> Google kinda pulled a "bait-and-switch" with Android.
> When they released it, it was pretty much 100% Open Source, then they moved more and more elements to their proprietary GApps suite, included the Play Services required to run even many 3rd party apps.
I thought the reason they did this was because third party phone makers were controlling when/whether users could update the OS on their device. So users were often several Android releases behind, even on a phone that was only a year old. By moving a lot of the core functionality into apps, users could update these apps and have access to newer features even on older OS versions.
Though, I guess that doesn't explain why the apps themselves aren't open source.
This is not what happened. From 2007-2009 HW manufacturers had no answer to the iPhones Software.
Sure you could build a phone on top of Windows Mobile, Sonys Xperia X1 is my favorite entry from this time period, but you had no consolidated Software Vision for a mobile OS. Customers were craving phones that were as accessible as iPhones were, with a good example being the datepickers in mobile safari. You couldn't fix this with a Custom Windows Mobile Homescreen. Neither Nokia, nor anyone else in Mobile Phones at the time had thought about the software part as much as about the hardware. Even Andy Rubin got smacked in the face by the iPhone Keynote, but his advantage was the lack of organizational and technological debt that anyone else watching this keynote in a position to act plagued.
Apple was highly regarded inside Google when it comes to design decisions and is so until this very day (Why again does my Pixel 2 lack an 3.5mm socket?) so for Rubin simply adopting the design and ui vision while following different engineering principles was a path that had less hurdles for him than for everyone else in the position to do something about it in 2007.
That's why Android is where it is, not because Google decided to go the OpenSource way with it. Customers decided this was the only viable alternative, they brought money to the platform and developers followed.
Sure it was a lot fun stuff happening on the platform aswell that gave it the positive look, but this didn't affect the relevant apps to stay iOS only until they couldn't afford to anymore, simple market share decided that.
Device Manufacturers were desperate for anything, if they had to pay license fees for closed source software or not wouldn't have mattered if there had been a viable answer to iOS in 2007.
Are you aware of the microG project? It is entirely possible to run Android apps without Play Services. Is it perfect? Far from it but it's disingenuous to say "Android is barely more Open Source than iOS".
If you want to add in the Play Store into the mix, things change slightly.
> Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn't do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.
Google's biggest trick was developers. They leveraged the decaying state of Java, and it being the default CS language in a lot of places. They simple showed a more attractive opportunity to tenths of thousands of Java devs stuck in ungainful employment in "enterprise software" sector.
Nobody else in the world managed to get so much of developer mindshare overnight ever.
Developers, developers, developers, developers... Balmer got the idea, but did not know how to get it.
Jobs realised it too late, and spent too much effort toying with Internet only apps in time when most of USA was on class 2 GPRS.
Andy Rubin, well I'd say, got the right solution almost by accident, and only realised its value later in Android's life.
Makes me think whoever comes up with a mainstreamed way to do cross-platform mobile apps in Python will easily capture a large share of recent college grads, too, then.
Well, Jolla was a meme company. The best shot a normal Linux had on mobile was during N9 era, and late Meegos.
After that things went sour:
- GTK+/glib dev community began to wither simply because of older members retiring, and no new blood
- DRM flamewar with record labels
- Android diverted a great amount of community resources
- Monopolisation of smartphone SoC market.
- Elop...
RIP the late Meego OS. Im still salty with how Nokia murder it. Its like a healthy beautiful baby just born and then the parent buried it alive to focus on their terminally ill older brother.
However, the parents cant handle the debt and commit suicide, entrusting older brother to his rich uncle.
Sure enough, the older bro didnt live long either. After a long coma, the plug was pulled on the older brother's life. Even his rich uncle cant save him.
Not Elop really. The Nokia board had already decided to sell to MSFT and brought in Elop to do it. If the N9 hadn't been delayed by years, things could have gone very differently. In retrospect, the biggest surprise was that the years delayed N9 actually turned out to be very good. Extremely delayed products are more often bad than good when they are finally released.
I wonder at what point it makes sense for Samsung, HP, Huawei, LG etc. to get together to make another OS... they sell a lot of phones across the globe.
If those companies were interested in investing the billions required for such a venture, they wouldn’t have gotten into this situation in the first place.
I don't think it's that. After network effects kick in, the chances for creating a viable OS are extremely slim. They could have invested three times what Google has invested in Android and still fail.
Almost 3 billion people will be online in India and China alone, and they aren't strongly interested in sharing domestic private data with foreign entities (Facebook, Google, Apple).
I'm wondering whether it would make sense for the Chinese government to sponsor a phone OS. That would take care of the collective action problem a single manufacturer would face, would make it harder for other countries to employ the strong arm tactics current used with Android, and would help the Chinese government enforce their own censorship and surveillance priorities.
windows Phone was a viable OS and none of them jumped in completely. I don't see collaboration happening now. It's still more profitable to play ball with Google and profit from Android.
Why not? Microsoft and Google partner on TypeScript. Sony and Microsoft are partnering in online gaming. Many of the automakers have partnerships with each other for supplying engines and/or transmissions... sometimes they even build complete vehicles for both manufacturers: Chrysler/VW, BMW/Toyota, GM/Toyota, Chrysler/Mazda. Sometimes there are good reasons to work with your competitors.
Isn’t KaiOS [nee FirefoxOS] open-source in a way where any of these companies could just... use it? (In the same way they can “just use” Android now?) Why do they need to make their own?
I am getting ready to leave the commercial smartphone world entirely, in large part to escape Android. I want to escape Android primarily (but not only) because of the very thing you said here.
Google is making it harder and harder to use Android devices in a secure way, and for me, the cost/benefit of using it became too high a while back.
I'm glad that nails are starting to be placed in Google Play's coffin.
As it stands, Android's whole notification system (3rd party apps included) relies almost completely on communicating with Google servers. Seems like a bad design if privacy is a concern.
Is not most of android open-source enough to fork? Sure you'd lose all the google integration and the binary blobs of the play store, but if you were 'going alone' you'd not care that much about the play store anyway as you'd diverge from android prime over time.
> A made-in-Europe non-Google-led OS might gain more ground among risk averse governments and enterprises — as a sensible hedge against Trump-fueled global uncertainty.
> “Sailfish OS, as a non-American, open-source based, secure mobile OS platform, is naturally an interesting option for different players — currently the interest is stronger among corporate and governmental customers and partners, as our product offering is clearly focused on this segment,” says Jolla co-founder and CEO Sami Pienimäki .
> “Overall, there definitely has been increased interest towards Sailfish OS as a mobile OS platform in different parts of the world, partly triggered by the on-going political activity in many locations. We have also had clearly more discussions with e.g. Chinese device manufacturers, and Jolla has also recently started new corporate and governmental customer projects in Europe.”
This is different from Korean manufacturers this time. This is China caught in a national security issue.
- China has a huge domestic market and it may be sufficient in itself for a profitable venture
- About half of Android phones are manufactured by Chinese brands.
- China has deep pockets and are willing to play the long game.
- They have no choice. Trump's used the nuclear option, which may well work in the short term but in the long term this has shown China and others that they have to get rid of their reliance on US tech and companies as a matter of national security.
I think Trump's move has set a ball rolling and that in 10 years we'll see the results of that... And that won't be a pretty picture for the US.
I don't get why you're being downvoted. China just needs a Deng Xiaoping moment for software. If they try top-down control, even with all the Chinese brands behind it, it will still founder behind Android.
But if they relinquish some control for the sake of getting a competitive OS where they can't be cut off, what you're saying is true. I do see them capable making an OS, technically, I'm more worried about their worldwide soft skills/soft power. Which I'm guessing they'd also want to improve, so you never know.
Trump's used the nuclear option, which may well work in the short term but in the long term this has shown China and others that they have to get rid of their reliance on US tech and companies as a matter of national security.
Indeed. Trump's heavy-handed approach in recent weeks seems likely to have far-reaching implications, and presumably the results won't be favourable for Western businesses hoping to expand more into fast-growing Asian markets in the years ahead. He's shown that any business with strong connections to the US can't be relied upon to be an economically rational trading partner, because the US is now demonstrably willing to conflate national security issues with trade policy.
That policy is also putting US allies in awkward positions. Here in the UK, we are faced with questionable demands from a long-time ally (the US) and thinly veiled threats from a big investor (China) if we comply with those demands. Presumably other allies such as Australia feel similar opposing pressures. The only rational long-term strategy I can see for nations in this position is to be clear that they will always make their own strategic decisions on security matters and which global suppliers to use for national infrastructure projects (and then to actually do so, throwing a proverbial elbow at the US if necessary). At least that way you maintain some credibility with future governments around the world as a reasonable partner.
In the meantime, it seems that the current hostile stance toward China from the Trump administration in the US is hurting the global economy, and ironically it also seems like US consumers are the ones ultimately paying most of the cost of those trade barriers.
> ironically it also seems like US consumers are the ones ultimately paying most of the cost of those trade barriers
Consumers will pay more but I'm not as sure about the irony. Couldn't it be that the intent is to reduce US consumption of Chinese imported goods? Couldn't the policy's intent simply be to shift the economy ever so slightly away from consumption and toward production?
Couldn't the policy's intent simply be to shift the economy ever so slightly away from consumption and toward production?
It certainly could be, but I think how credible that is depends on the goods affected. If they are essentials and there is competition from elsewhere, the barriers make China less competitive, and US customers will presumably go for the best deal to minimise their losses. If they are non-essentials, the barriers also make them less attractive, and again China loses out. But if they are essentials and China is the only game in town, import tariffs look a lot like a tax on the US market.
This was always China's desire, to basically build home grown tech's that could replace the ones they were using from the west. Unless the Chinese government mandates use of a single os (no android) in the domestic market then it won't work, if they do then they still don't have a viable os for the rest of the world because the rest of the world wants google, facebook and other apps which are banned in china. Facebook e.t.c. aren't going to make apps for a primarily domestic only phone where they are legally banned.
China is shifting its factories to Africa, eventually growing a market there. It won't matter what apps irrelevant markets like North America or Europe want while the rest is using Chinese services.
Why would it cause a GDP decline? A strong Africa is good for the entire world economy. Another billion wealthy people to buy goods and services, travel and invest.
Chinese brands also have about 50% of the market in Thailand, followed by Samsung and then Apple. Not as big as India, but annual sales of around 20 million units is still a decent chunk of change.
I think Google can compete on its own merit without having to be viewed as a monopolist, so I disagree that it won't be pretty for the US. Google will do fine on a more level playing field.
I think the post you replied to may not be referring to Google, but to all the other companies that will have a choice to build for a future Asian giant or US giant (Google). Knowing that they can be cut off by US Gov, may push investment east.
The problem is not Google per se, but the power the US government yields through Google and tech companies in general.
If 50% of Android phones are by Chinese brands then once an alternative exists they will have a big incentive in dropping Android. The end result can only be a massive market share loss for Google.
The same goes for other tech companies like Qualcomm, ARM (not US but in same boat). Anything that can be weaponised.
This is geopolitics and a global strategic issue. Google is just caught in it.
It is certainly a national security issue for China (and the world) to see that the US Government is able to 'flip the switch' on so many critical tech so easily.
Sure. But for South Korea and Japan it's less so; those nations already take a national security posture that leaves them exposed if the US were to turn against them.
There are lots of reason for a company or a country to have alternative independent supply chain (hardware or software or tech or anything).
Japan has to sign the Plaza Accord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord#Effects when it positioned to challenge US economy. It is attributed as the main reason to their Lost Decades. You bet that Japanese forgot about this, and Korean and Chinese do not know this.
What US gov initially wanted probably is something like Plaza Accord with Chinese, but they have the size to resist, so Trump showed the nuclear option. Like some commenters pointed out here, it may work in short term, but it will hurt US companies in long term.
I'd say it rather reveals most users' unhealthy addiction to Google's services, without which, this whole thing wouldn't be the 'tragedy' and wake up call it's turning out to be for many.
I have used Android for a decade now completely Google-free and no one could pay me enough money to be tracked and to run pure spyware 24/7 at this point... I enjoy immensely having a laptop replacement always on, always with me, in my pocket. No use for Play Services, advertising companies data mining all I do at all times, or 27, 42 or 59 'social media' applications running to give purpose to my life and 'communicate' with my 'friends'...
File manager, web browser, terminal, editor, LTE... That's what I need or care about. I guess not many of us left.
Unless you get an iPhone, you have really haveno other choice....at least not without forgoing most apps. This is the problem with walled gardens in general. Even if Microsoft kills certain things for Chinese made laptops...the OS still allows you to run programs which are not reliant at all on these APIs, because Windows is generally not a walled garden.
My hope is that Chinese companies start making a new OS, and Google sees this and makes their APIs more open and free so in such an event not everything is rendered inoperable.
I use several devices, lately usually HTC or SONY. I run my own build based on a barebones cleaned up LineageOS ( no Lineage applications or many libraries ), just need the core OS and monthly security patches up to date. Applications are my own binaries, packages available through Termux, and from developers either through F-Droid, GitHub or XDA forums.
I only need LTE and very rarely WiFi, so Bluetooth and NFC if available on device are disabled and neutered. Devices are encrypted but hold no data other than that in use, all data is always kept on external encrypted cards, and those go up to a tera now, so no issues even with large, very large files. Makes no sense to me that people tie data to a device, be it laptop, smartphone, tablet or desktop.
The 'phone' part is just for emergencies; police, ambulance, that sort of thing. Otherwise even a mid-range device works as a fully fledged laptop substitute for me, can be my main computer, and has for years.
Edit : Most of what I use is open source, and no adware, spyware, analytics, or crash reporters anywhere on my system. The current software business model based on data mining needs to die. Also, a decent web browser does, and better, what 90% of so-called 'apps' do.
You could use signal for messaging. But why not SMS? It is not like text messaging is owned by anyone like WhatsApp or Telegram.
I found that my only requirement for a smart phone is the Uber and Lyft apps. If I can get somehow free of them I can switch to a Nokia 1100 and be happy.
What I find interesting is that Apache Licensed software can be relicensed even in proprietary form (as long as you make it a derivative work, with your derivative bits with a proprietary license), thus the easy way out seems to be to have a non-US entity make a proprietary fork of AOSP. I do not see a legal reason why this company would not be able to sell AOSP to Huawei under these conditions.
I am sure plenty of us remember the days when free and open source encryption software was distributed exclusively through non-US servers due to US export restrictions.
IANAL, so I wonder if I am missing something?
As for alternative platforms, I imagine plenty are US based/originating (QNX, webOS from Palm/HP originally, Android), but there are alternatives like Jolla and Ubuntu Touch which aren't.
While I dislike Huawei since they decided to stop sharing unlock codes for their phones, Huawei has one killer app that's not very much reliant on Android: camera.
Getting that camera app on one of the less known platforms and enabling Huawei phones for them would still make them appealing to a large number of customers in eg. Europe.
> What I find interesting is that Apache Licensed software can be relicensed even in proprietary form (as long as you make it a derivative work, with your derivative bits with a proprietary license), thus the easy way out seems to be to have a non-US entity make a proprietary fork of AOSP. I do not see a legal reason why this company would not be able to sell AOSP to Huawei under these conditions.
IANAL, but: any such fork would remain a Derivative Work of AOSP in which Google would hold some copyright. When Huawei came to redistribute it, they would need licenses from all the copyright holders - this company, Google, any other contributors. Normally this does not matter: the Apache license states "each Contributor hereby grants You...", and You is defined as "an individual or Legal Entity exercising permissions granted by this License".
No doubt the US government can enforce whatever capricious fines it likes within the US. But I find it hard to imagine a European court finding Huawei guilty of copyright infringement for distributing Google work that came with a clear, simple license granting them permission to distribute. If the US government wants to say that Google can't grant that permission, that's between Google and the USG. And given that the Apache license states that the grant of permission is "perpetual, ..., irrevocable" and came with a copy of AOSP that Huawei has no doubt downloaded and read years before the current crisis, trying to revoke that permission now doesn't work either.
" A country banning its resident companies from engaging in contracts with a specific company breaks how our copyright system works, and as a result, breaks how open source licenses work. -- If Huawei cannot enter into a contract with Google, then they cannot enter into the Apache 2.0 licensing agreement with Google, which means that they would not have a license to distribute the AOSP codebase."
Very interesting. So if this lawyer is right about the US, we need a new open source license that is explicitly designed to be not contract-like, to defend against Trump?
> Getting that camera app on one of the less known platforms and enabling Huawei phones for them would still make them appealing to a large number of customers in eg. Europe.
Except that camera itself is not a killer-app.
The major use-case of a mobile camera BY FAR is not just to capture content, but to share the content on social media, also in Europe.
So whatever less-known platform the camera-app would be moved to, that platform would still also have to provide a good user-experience for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.
So in the end, that less-known platform would need a SocialMedia app-ecosystem comparable to Android just to match the Android-experience for Camera...
Lock-in through privileges in access to infrastructure, control via default services, "system as a service" etc means OSS licences no longer provide much of a guarantee towards the ownership and control of your own software and hardware.
But this has been the case of a long time already.
Maybe a consortium of China-backed companies (Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus, etc) could create a viable fork of Android and/or put enough weight behind an alternative app store that it could be a viable alternative for the mainstream (say, F-Droid, Aptoide, etc).
Thing is, on such short notice they will struggle and it doesn't seem like they have preemptively prepared to a full-blown switch of OS/ecosystem AND also an architecture switch (British ARM also joining the US sanctions).
I believe that if Google doesn't license AOSP to Huawei (whether by their own free choice or not), it might be that they are in violation of the Linux kernel GPL2 agreement that they have made with Linus / Linux Foundation.
As long as no one distributes it (binary or code) to Huawei I don't think they would be in violation of the license. They aren't personally required to do so.
But anyone with access to the binaries (not in the US I guess) is allowed to redistribute it to Huawei, and the GPL then requires google to grant Huawei a license, not doing so would appear to be in violation of the license.
> 3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided [irrelevant terms here]
> 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
Users of GPL licensed software such as the Linux kernel, are bound by the terms of that license to release modifications under the same license. Android and AOSP incorporates and uses the Linux kernel; this is the entire reason AOSP exists. You cannot pick and choose which users you distribute sources to under the GPL.
I think that article is taking the wrong approach. If Huawei doesn't have a US presence, which they won't after this, and if they really are an arm of the Chinese espionage complex then what's to stop them from just downloading ASOP source and doing whatever they like with it, based on ARM's reaction is unlikely other western countries are gonna allow Huawei much longer so it really only has access to the Chinese market where it's protected. Now it's role will be more FBI vs CIA.
It reveals the value Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen created in the GPL, how much market forces will tend toward monopoly, and how we've let up on resisting those trends.
Yeah, and it also reveals what the world would look like if Windows phone won instead of android. Atleast for Android you have AOSP, which is atleast somewhat open source. If Windows phone and iOS were the only two alternatives, a ban on a phone company like huwaei would be a death sentence. Can't do much with windows or iOS.
The app ecosystem is a mess on AOSP. It feels like google just uses it to show a faux openness but there is no way that a non-enthusiast will get the experience they have in one of the 2 (formerly 3) major brand app stores. And that's really what this is about: app ecosystems. Making a good OS is easy, but getting mindshare/appshare is difficult (as microsoft learned the hard way).
AOSP makes no difference I think. If you are locked out of the official store, you are locked out of "Android" as people recognize it.
Yeah, the entire Chinese android ecosystem is doing Okay with the official store. Would the same have been possible without Windows Phone? What would huwaei be able to do at all if they were selling Windows laptops. Android may not be linux but it is miles better than other mainstream mobile OSes.
I would assume any regulation will need to be vendor neutral so yes. I am just pointing out that Europe is not powerless even though I think the odds isn't high that they will do something like this.
This is an intellectually dishonest argument as it conflates the definition of "malware" between platforms.
Mobile application permission systems don't cease to exist in the absence of a sanctioned app store. The only thing that disappears is the ability for Google or others to completely remove an application that is abusing the permissions a user granted: but the permissions are still there.
Even in the worst-case scenario, malware on modern phone operating systems is substantially more limited in disruptive and destructive power than what one can achieve on Windows without a UAC grant.
>Mobile application permission systems don't cease to exist in the absence of a sanctioned app store.
Permissions systems definitely do not anything against malware. See: all the flashlight apps with every permission under the sun.
>Even in the worst-case scenario, malware on modern phone operating systems is substantially more limited in disruptive and destructive power than what one can achieve on Windows without a UAC grant.
Sure, but it can still collect all your pictures, have access to your microphone/cameras, and tarck your location. It's better than full control of your device, but it's not that much better.
I assume a large company like Huawei can replicate the play store experience. Is there anything stopping them from creating a mirror of the most popular .apks?
There shouldn't be any problem than. Huwaei or anyone else can make their own "proprietary" operating system, since it is better than "a bullshit opensource software", and they can happily get higher margins there and be happy forever.
Do not forget that Huawei is ahead with 5G. So with plenty of resources Huawei has shown to be the leader in one area and there is no reason to assume it cannot do that in other areas.
I for one have been using a Honor (Huawei) phone for over 3 months with DNSFilter app running 24x7. Blocked all google domains after I installed the necessary apps from playstore. I don't see any problems if google shuts of Honor/Huawei devices permanently. I'd say it will be a benefit of Honor/Huawei phones. It will be the most privacy friendly phone out of the box.
Edit-
I use Newpipe instead of Youtube. So thats the alternative for the last google service I'd need everyday.
In my experience it is relatively easy to migrate off of Google services, except for the cloud messaging stuff. Unless you don't care when you get messages and only want to see them when you check (or god forbid only use email), you want GCM/firebase to work.
It’d be a better world if Europe could give people more choices by... giving them more choices, instead of regulating the choices that other countries provide and fundamentally control.
I'd really love to see that as well, but at the same time I have zero trust in our governments' ability to choose the right project/company/people to support/fund/subsidize.
I do hope they consider pushing alternatives, but also that it's a more organic process where "the market" has some say and not a move to give plenty of money to a university/company only to shut the project down after a few years of failure.
The purpose of regulation is to change the environment to allow for a more level playing field. Where would Spotify have been if the EC didn't force MS to unbundle Windows Media Player from installs of Win XP in 2004? For those who don't remember, WMP 9 already had streaming radio via the MSN entertainment arm.
Competition doesn't happen overnight. The changes need to be in place for some period of time before entrepreneurs consider a new product/software in that sector to be viable.
Spotify started in 2008 with 40 million tracks and desktop and web clients only. Back then mobile streaming was a non-entity as the iOS and Android app stores had not launched.
So the business case for Spotify was very much focused on desktop users, where WMP would have been the dominant competitor had it not been for the Microsoft case.
Huawei is a massive company with a large lineup of affordable Android phones. Why can't they just fork Android just like Amazon and Microsoft?
I guess they would have to come up with alternative to google play marketplace, gmaps, gmail, etc. but it's not really a big deal with the resources they have. Not to mention that the open source equivalent of these apps are serviceable.
Don't think it is that simple for a couple of reasons:
1) Without GMS, developers will need to fork their apps and reimplement everything they use Play services for today. That's non-trvial and I suspect a substantial number of developers would not be willing to do this.
2) Even if Huawei developed their own app store, IAP framework, etc, as I understand it the order in the US prevents Huawei from entering into any new business with US companies without a license. So, does that mean that FB, Twitter, et all would be prohibited from listing their apps? I believe so.
>1) Without GMS, developers will need to fork their apps and reimplement everything they use Play services for today. That's non-trvial and I suspect a substantial number of developers would not be willing to do this.
True but Hawuei has the resources to actually make great open source alternatives that developers can take advantage of.
>2) Even if Huawei developed their own app store, IAP framework, etc, as I understand it the order in the US prevents Huawei from entering into any new business with US companies without a license. So, does that mean that FB, Twitter, et all would be prohibited from listing their apps? I believe so.
I guess but that's not their business.
They will have to come up with a alternative to Arm due to licensing. A RISC-V chipset developed by a major company is an interesting prospect.
I mean my point is that it is a total show stopper for their business if they cannot have US apps on their store! Good luck selling a £800 Android phone in the UK with no Instagram! Or a $200 one in India with no WhatsApp.
True - it definitely will be a big hit but the chinese are used to sideloading their apps and in the long run, this will mostly hurt American companies as it will teach its users how to bypass these restrictions and even come up with better alternatives.
It's a huge deal because consumers will have a host of other Android alternatives in competitors where they won't have to deal with "serviceable" open source alternatives.
Additionally, Huawei has has done so well because the OS and consumer experience is generally the same across Android, so consumers choose based on hardware. Now Huawei will have to compete not only in hardware (their main advantage), but also in software.
“Consumers are attached to the Google products and services that sit on top of the operating system,”
I doubt that. Google is pretty bad at keeping users. (Probably GMail is the strongest anchor point, but as we have seen with the G+ real name gotcha, it's better to be prepared to stop using that. Though of course most GMail users are not prepared for that.) Users will use whatever is the default.
Probably the YouTube app is what users would miss the most. And I don't know whether it works without Play Services. But it certainly works on iOS, so if there were a new platform, Google/Alphabet/YT would make apps for that platform too.
The issue with Windows Phone was that it was a Microsoft venture, and Google was already paying MS around $5 in license fees for every activated Android device [0]. They weren't in any hurry to make WP more competitive by offering a Youtube app. I had a WP device in 2011, and there were third party apps (MetroTube I think) that were like Newpipe in that you could watching and download YT videos for offline viewing. Not surprisingly, Google changed their APIs and broke the download capability.
That said, Google didn't build third-party YT apps for BB10 or WebOS either.
You can look at the difference between iOS and WP. Since iOS was a big market Google wanted [and wants] to be in they made the YT app. And since WP was small and late to the game Google had the upper hand, because MS wanted any users more than G wanted the small number of WP users.
Such iron, much grip. You can trivially install Google play store and services on 98% of the non-licensed phones in China.
The fact that a $50B Chinese domestic Android market is thriving with zero control by Google proves the thesis to be untrue.
Then there's Amazon's fire product line. The only reason it lags Google's play store is quality. If Amazon's hardware and software/store selection were 80% as good, they'd be a serious contender - again one needs to look at China for evidence of this, where Tencent, Baidu etc. run their own successful app stores agnostic to hardware
Google's Play store is Google property, isn't a part of AOSP and isn't open source. One voluntarily chooses to install play store on phones without it, or, if you're philosophically against it, use a competitor's store.
Better, go build your own store, as many companies have. Or sideload apps. Heck, build your own phone when. All possible because Google does NOT exert influence on the open source parts of Android, specifically AOSP.
There is no point you are making about the OS (Android) by claiming Google controls an app (Play Store) running on top of the OS. The OS itself is free and open source and devoid of Google control - ample examples have been cited in my comments.
> You can trivially install Google play store and services on 98% of the non-licensed phones in China.
You can. I can. My mother and 95% (99? 99.9?) of the android users cannot.
> The fact that a $50B Chinese domestic Android market is thriving with zero control by Google proves the thesis to be untrue.
In Western countries it's true. You also can't build an online business in Europe if you're blocked by Google because they have a monopoly on search and nobody will find you. You can in China, but that doesn't change the situation in Europe (or, to a lesser extent, the US, I hear bing has some market share still).
> You can. I can. My mother and 95% (99? 99.9?) of the android users cannot.
My mom is quick to install shitload of stuff on her phone that would be much harder for me to do (I once tried shutting down Facebook group notifications on her phone and gave up after manually going through a 100 or so ;)). She will gladly follow a tutorial on the web, download apks from unsafe sources, allow all permissions the app asks for etc.
I, on the other hand, would look for a trusted source which would be much harder to find, would be weary of giving my credentials to any app, and would be even more weary of giving permissions that I do not find strictly necessary to an app that's coming on my phone.
Your mother sounds like she trusts herself to be able to do it, then looks for information (with you hoping she chooses trustworthy people) on how to do it. Most people I know pretty much shut down when they hit something they haven't encountered before, so they won't even search for the error message. Trust out of the way, a more open android is a good option for tech savvy people, but I fear the majority wouldn't be able to work with that.
Chinese phones come without Google apps in quite a number of countries other than China, and those are not only African countries. Last time I saw google free Xiaomi's in Malaysia and Indonesia for example
Agree that the install process is convoluted. Like someone else noted, if one's not signatory to Google's partnership, there are ways to remove most, if not all, of the friction.
Arguably Huawei wouldn’t be where they were today if they wrote their own OS from scratch. People complain about the power of Google. They’re complaining about the power of a great product. Anyone is welcome to build on top of Android it’s just really really hard so they let Google do that work.
Is this really an issue? Presumably you need some sort of privilege escalation exploit to modify zygote. At that point you could also modify other processes as well. It might make exploitation slightly easier, but it's not really a vulurability.
I have a few comments on this. First, Google as a money making corporation would probably not like this restriction enforced by the US government. Second, I used to use Android and when I did I avoided installing any apps, preferring to use web versions of the services I needed. The Huawei phones could be functional with some thoughtful default setups, home screen icons linked to appropriate web URIs, etc. The big kicker would be lack of games.
I concur. Google ws forced to force their hand for almost no value. If anything they will lose client/data base.
Also google product lost trust, as a business platform in result. So imho they lose double time here. Because they are forcing out 3rd biggest phone seller to competition.
The fact that this competition is practically non existent makes things even more unpredictable imho, which businesses doesn't like.
I would like to see an open source project taking the spot here, not Huawei doing the same (actually probably worst) thing as Google and create their own semi-closed OS.
In fact, in Huawei's particular case, I don't even think it will be a push to create momentum for a truly open smartphone OS out of necessity, after all, Huawei goes through great lengths to keep the bootloader in their phones locked.
Curious to know, are there ways that a country (in fact mainly the U.S.) can 'flip the switch' (weaponize, if you will) on fundamental internet tech, such as DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP and many many others, to severely affect a foreign adversary's business (either a company or a country)?
Sure those are merely standards/protocols, still, is it possible these tech and their current world-wide setup be effectively used in conflicts by issuing government executive orders or enacting new laws?
Edit: just found this on reddit. Not exactly what I was asking (fundamental internet standards/protocols), but still somewhat related.
From a reddit post --
"Huawei is no longer able or allowed to work on standards for Wi-Fi, USB and SD cards. "Temporarily restricted" by Wi-Fi Alliance, voluntarily withdrew from JEDEC (USB etc) and no longer a member of SD Associaton (which technically means no more SD slots)"
Fundamentally I would say yes, however most of the countries that the US would likely do this to (Russia, Iran, China, Cuba) have contingencies in place through the implementation of country wide intranets[0][1]. Within those countries you also have localized social, financial and e-commerce services that minimize the general populations dependency on foreign companies and services.
So the US could cut cut them off or manipulate their connectivity to the global internet through something like BGP or DNS, but the impact would be far less than the US doing that against a country such as Canada that has a deep reliance on US infrastructure and services.
China's economy is very export dependent. If Chinese businesses cannot use internet to access a lot of U.S. allies, it would suffer badly.
For example if, say, all U.K's companies are not allowed to use email or skype to talk to the Chinese, or all U.S., Canada and Australia, etc. web sites are not accessible from China because of some executive orders or laws by the U.S. (similar to google complying with the order currently), then I guess China's economy would be severely affected.
In defense of Google none of the smartphone makers have tried to make their own mobile OS based on Android.
Besides I think it more reveals how Google is in the grip of US politics- it might be time for Google to draw up some contingency plans for when America goes completely nuts.
They've moved a lot of their profits out of US tax jurisdiction, is that possible with patents and technology as well so they wouldn't be affected by US export/business restrictions?
I'm pretty sure that if you operate in the US, you can't bypass sanctions by having your corporations registered somewhere else. At the very least you have to ensure none of your US division isn't violating the sanctions.
It is not an accident that successful tech companies that provide devices for their users control their own destiny from the hardware to the UI level, great examples Apple, Microsoft. You can team up with Google but then your destiny is controlled by them.
My feeling is that this whole silliness will backfire spectacularly! Huawei will develop their own OS. It's hard but not impossible. Who cares if there's buy-in from the entire developer community...nowadays people don't use apps that much anyways. Apps are just another way of consumption. Most apps can probably be replaced with webviews with little lost of functionality. I don't know enough about the technical difficulties they'll have in developing a brand new os, but it's been done multiple times. In any case, this sux for all parties.
Let's be honest, if Huawei (sponsored by the Chinese government) creates their own open/shared OS together with other Chinese manufacturers, Chinese people will switch eventually.
If WeChat is ported to the new OS, other apps will soon follow. The result: a Chinese OS that's completely independent of American manufacturers.
It's also possible that this will cause Huawei and the Chinese government to pour funding into Chinese chip designs. Eventually, China will become less dependent on the US and the US will lose another point of influence.
Is this bad for Huawei in the short term? Of course. But is this hurting the Chinese economy in the long term? I don't think so.
If there is an app compatability layer (API parity) I'm sure most users won't notice the difference, and app developers wouldn't cry too hard about missing Google play services, provided there is an alternative.
My bet is Huawei will pick up a team or company (lineage team start packing your bags) to move forward with minimal risk. That or partner with a few other b-list manufacturers and create an alternative.
Hell even Google itself is trying to drop Android.
30% of smartphones sold in the EU in 2019Q1 were Huawei.
You can bet that no bank or whatever will abandon such a large fraction of the users of their app, but is already calling people to get the Huawei OS version of their app started.
Especially given that Huawei OS looks to be a fork of AOSP with the proprietary Google Services replaced with proprietary Huawei services. The developpers will just fork the existing app, using Android studio, and the same language!
Many people won't. Many other people couldn't care less about Snapchat or Instagram. That latter set of people almost certainly still constitute a large enough market to be worth addressing.
Lots of corporate structure alternatives could offer a way around that. Perhaps a French company would support that, after making a deal for a certain portion of those apps' European revenue?
There are web replacements for all of these, but people are choosing to use them in app form overwhelmingly. Maybe that will change, but it would be a pain to try a cell today that couldn't run all of these apps very well.
US enterprises are losing reliability with this dirty game of its government. I hope this issue will be taken as a wake up alarm for the necesity of a pluricultural and far more diverse technology market.
Can someone explained what happened recently to cause such aggressive action against Huawei with ARM , Google etc refusing to work with them. Is it related to arrest of their executive recently ?
It's part of the US/China trade war. Trump believed the existing tariff situation with China was unfair and wanted to negotiate a new trade deal. When negotiations failed he started to implement a bunch of tariffs and trade restrictions on chines goods and companies to try to force their hand. This is just a part of that 'negotiation' strategy.
Google, Arm etc. don't want to stop doing business with Huawei (since doing so no doubt costs them a lot of money), they're being banned from doing business with Huawei by the US government.
China has disallowed their citizens from using Google, Netflix, Instagram, but everyone's up in arms over Trump stopping the US from doing business with Huawei. I really don't understand this.
China only bans foreign companies in its domestic markets. Trump is dictating whom third parties can do business with. For example, European firms have to cut normal business ties with huawei, otherwise they will be sanctioned by the US. And the US isn't paying for the cost of breaking their contract with Huawei.
China is not competitive in tech right now, so it needs to block foreign companies in order to have local companies have a chance of emerging, and one day becoming competitive.
On the other hand, the US is super competitive. They must do as much business with China as possible in order to discourage any new company from spawning over there, because it would create competition.
In other words, Trump is doing exactly the opposite of what is good for the US.
I worked for a non-Google tech company and there is literally code which prevents users in any sanctioned countries from being able to use the services.
Unless Sundar Pichai would like to go to jail, there's very little that they can do about this.
I believe there is something called the legal system?
Which companies or people can use to challenge government decisions, if they don't like them. And they can at least openly express their concerns.
But I do not see that hapoening, so something (or quite a lot) is going on behind the scene.
They will fight in court and lose. What the US govt is doing is completely legal, no matter where you stand on the morality or sensibleness of these actions.
Trump is doing all this under the authority of national security. That is not a blank check, though, and there is an oversight mechanism that can be employed to determine if the authority is being used appropriately or not.
Unfortunately, that oversight mechanism lies with Congress, and given that the majority party currently in the Senate is taking the stance of "anything Trump does is right", we can't reasonably expect that the mechanism will actually be used in the next couple of years, at least.
Cause china is an authoritian government that hasn't been too nice to america business in recent years. Why would anyone stand up for them now that the illusion of market openness goes away? Google not even allowed in china so why fight on china behave very hard.
I rather talk standing up for free market.
In a free market system the government can't just order companys to stop doing buisness with someone unless very good reasons are provided. I don't see that with Huawei.
And china is Authorian?
Yeah, so is half the world. But it would be news to me, that only "democracies" are acceptable trade partners.
> This is just a part of that 'negotiation' strategy.
Your explanation doesn't answer the question why Huawei got picked. Huawei products got banned in the US way before the trade war, Huawei's exports to US is pretty small I'd say. It thus has really nothing to do with the existing tariff situation whatsoever.
On the other hand, there are many big Chinese companies exporting to the US in huge sheer volume, Lenovo is probably the best example here, interestingly, Lenovo never got treated in the same way. Why there is such huge difference?
The answer is plain and simple - Huawei managed to lead the 5G development and growing faster than anyone else. US refuses to accept that. Lenovo's business model is what US wants all Chinese companies to follow - focusing on low end craps, make money by working hard not working smart. Same goes to those crappy Chinese companies like Xiaomim OPPO, OnePlus.
You don't really get too much with AOSP. Google's just flexing it off to portray its "open" when in reality Google's using a reasonably different version of AOSP for Android.
I don't see the problem. Android, the operating system, is open source. App developers make a choice to use Google Play services? Why do developers choose to do this? Does Google provide features people want?
If you lose access to google play do you also lose access to Google Cloud Messaging for notifications ? Because if that's the case that's huge. Hosted notification is so important these days.
Everyone acts as if this came out of the blue, in reality there have been problems with China's state owned enterprises for a decade. Everyone has to play by the rules or why have rules at all?
But Google made and owns the Android OS. Why shouldn't they have an iron grip on it? Should Apple not have full rights to iOS or Microsoft to Windows? It is a product that Google made.
They should have pumped more effort into the Web. Would have made it a real competitor in every way and no one would have cared about native apps and stores anymore.
There was no Huawei disaster... it was all FUD for Trump's triumphant trade war. As Trump shows his hand, the world now can see that the real disaster is US hegemony:
The rationale for cutting off Huawei seems to be "No matter how much you claim to not spy, you are forced to comply when the Chinese government tells you to do so" - which so far appears to be the hypothetical worst case scenario. Considering that, it's kinda ironic that Google/Amazon/ARM et al are all _actually_ carrying out Huawei's own (formerly)hypothetical worst-case scenario because the US government told them to do so.
Huawei isn't part of the Five Eyes (or the extensions of it), so any data they collect of Five Eye nations is a threat. Data Five Eye nations collect on each other or themselves isn't a threat because they're allies, often using each other to allow surveillance while loopholing some laws in their respective countries.
I don't like it either, just explaining the motivations at play here. Also you must expect any entity (company, individual, etc.) to obey their government, otherwise there's not much point in a government is there (not that the governments decisions are necessarily good ones)?
This title is an extreme framing of the situation. A similar title would be "The Huawei Travesty Reveals Microsoft's Iron Grip on Windows NT".
Yes, copyright is a thing, and if you own a copyright, you are entitled to control its copying through license agreements. To characterize that as an "Iron Grip" is quite strange, as short of releasing all of this investment as open source, there is no other kind of "grip" that Google is entitled to.
Google has invested billions of dollars into applications and infrastructure for their most successful Linux distro, and yes, they own the copyright to that.
As far as I'm aware, Google does not market their current Android distro as "open source" to any great extent, so why is it more of a problem than any other piece of popular proprietary software? What about the millions of Linux-based kiosks, pub games consoles, and giant social media and advertising juggernauts who also have proprietary software that they sell access to?
Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a "if the worst happens" plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.
LG has the Palm/HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.
Everyone else? They're too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.
Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn't do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.