Google Awards Android Dev Prizes, Introduces App Store

An anonymous reader writes "A group of Canadian engineering students was one of 10 teams to win a $275,000 prize from internet search giant Google Inc. Their program, Ecorio, gives users the ability to reduce their environmental footprint with tools that provide transit options for trips, invest in carbon reduction projects, and share their tips with other users. Other winners included a taxi location app, a price comparison app, and a settings manager than changes your settings based on your location." Google has also started talking about their plans for Android Market, which is similar to the App store used for the iPhone. Ars Technica's coverage points out a blog post by Google's Eric Chu which notes that early handsets running Android will have a beta version of Android Market enabled.

Comments

Cathedral to APTs bazaar?

[IamTheRealMike]

TFA talks a lot about the cathedral vs bazaar model, which I find to be sort of funny. Android supports downloading applications (.apk files) from wherever you want, although it's intended that the market be the primary place you get them. In this sense it's every bit as open as a Linux distribution.

But wait. A typical Linux distribution doesn't actually support you adding other repositories or downloading packages from the web. Sure it might be technically possible, but you're going to encounter a lot of glitches, and if you ask the distro about that they'll just shrug and say it's your own fault for not using the official repositories.

In fact, given that the Android Market is planned to support for-pay software as well as free-beer software, that makes it technically more open than a typical Linux distro, in which the only reliable way of getting your software to end users is to get the distributors to do it for you, and they usually insist on particular kinds of licensing. Doing it yourself is a good way to find yourself in distro-compatibility hell.

(disclaimer: am a googler, but have no more info than the average slashdotter does on this)

Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar?

[IamTheRealMike]

No they don't support it. I've had many, many conversations with distributors over the years about this topic. It "works" simply because of the way the tools are constructed. But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees. In fact it's even possible for you to break peoples systems by distributing software on your own.

Trivial example of how things can go wrong, there's no namespacing in Linux. Let's say I make a game and call it Epiphany, then start distributing it outside the framework of the distributions. What sort of things could happen? Well, somebody else might make a web browser called Epiphany, which then might become a part of the base set of packages. What happens when the user tries to upgrade their distribution? Anything might happen, because you have two packages with the same name (or which both try to provide /usr/bin/epiphany).

In the best case the upgrade will just break and the user will be stuck having to choose one of the two packages. But they can't have both.

In the worst case, I decided not to fuck about with 10 different but somehow identical package management systems and used an autopackage or a Loki Installer. Almost all commercial software for Linux does this sort of thing. Now the package manager will just silently overwrite my game files with the web browser. It won't notify the user it's going to do this - it'll just uncleanly corrupt the game.

So what's the solution? Back when I was involved in distribution of apps for Linux, the usual proposal was to put third party software in /usr/local rather than /usr. Unfortunately no distributor properly supports this prefix, and besides, it just moves the problem around rather than solve it. Sadly there actually isn't a solution for this on UNIX - it's fundamental to the design.

You'll notice that Android doesn't use UNIX style directory trees or package management ... and this is probably one of the reasons why.

Re:Cathedral to APTs bazaar?

[IamTheRealMike]

They guarantee a stable ABI for the lifetime of a particular release of their OS. That's useless, if there are 5 distros you want to support, and each one has 3 versions in common use (pretty conservative estimate) then that's 15 different builds of your program you need to produce, test and distribute. This is completely absurd and is one of the major reasons only the truly dedicated try to distribute binary software on Linux.

Re:First app...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, at least from what I understand, we have...or at least I have, on my N810

Let's hear it for Eco-Friendly!

[bigtallmofo]

Their program, Ecorio, gives users the ability to reduce their environmental footprint with tools that provide transit options for trips, invest in carbon reduction projects, and share their tips with other users.

I invented a diesel engine that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days per week and plays an airhorn reminding people to turn out their lights when not in use. I'm now seriously considering throwing out my current cell phone so I can buy an Android-enabled phone so I can run Ecorio and find out how I can be more environmentally responsible.

APT Repos, Not "App Stores"

[Doc Ruby]

Android software would be much more available if it were served to machines from Debian (or Ubuntu) style APT repositories, rather than Apple style "App Stores". Not just because free software is basically more popular and available than $pay software. But also because anyone can set up an APT repo, and anyone can point their machine at it. The machines ship with a list of tested/approved repos, but the machine's admins can easily add/delete from that list. They can even make their own local repo, or one shared among a user group or developer group, or a website of fanboys.

These repos make SW deployment trivial, even with complex interdependencies (though with some exceptions when the repos and packages are managed badly). Simple, reliable SW management is perhaps Debian-style OS'es best feature, and even more important on something like a mobile "phone", that's supposed to be super-simple for even the lightest weight users to master without thinking too hard.

Since Android is supposed to be a major OSS platform, I hope it quickly gets a F/OSS repo system that all its users can easily use if they want. Because that would kill the "all-proprietary only" SW model that phones now support.