Google Opens Up Android Codebase

rsk writes "It's official: Google has Open Sourced Android. The source code can be downloaded from Android's Git repository. Bugs are handled at the Google Code Android project page with documentation being handled by a collection of Google Site pages. One of the more interesting aspects of Android seems to be the seemingly Eclipse Foundation-like organization of the project, welcoming both Individual and Commercial developers into the Android development pot. One of the benefits of this arrangement is securing the existence of the project by involving commercial interests and their money in the process ... this is also one of the downsides; having commercial entities charter and lead features of a platform that their own commercial offerings provide 'enhanced' versions of, sometimes leaving the free offering always lacking in one obvious way or another. It's hard to say at this point how involved Google will be in this process, or the Open Handset Alliance in general, with managing the health of sub-projects under the Android umbrella as time goes on."

Comments

Let the porting begin!

[Zach978]

We need to port this thing to all kinds of devices, and would also be nice to port the framework to run natively so you could develop Android apps that would run natively on Linux.

Re:Let the porting begin!

[jmcnaught]

The Openmoko isn't ready for prime time at all. It reminds me of using Linux in the nineties--lots of configuring stuff by hand--but at least back then when you got it working it was stable. I'm still getting lots of slowdowns and crashes. The GSM reception drops out every few minutes... sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse depending on the distro you're using and what updates you've applied. Even Qtextended (formerly Qtopia) crashes a lot. I don't think the GSM reception thing is hardware related because I've had it running perfectly before. There are also basic problems like how it doesn't always wake out of suspend when you have a call or a text message, but I think that's been mostly resolved.

Something I discovered the other day was that even if you leave the phone plugged into the wall charger all night you might wake up with a dead battery. Once the battery is charged it starts draining. The best part is that if the battery is completely drained you can't power up the device even when it's plugged in. You actually have to get a new battery if you ever let it completely drain... or have the tools and knowledge to resurrect a dead battery on your own. Thankfully my brother also has a Freerunner so I managed to power on with his battery then swap mine in after it booted.

Watching from the outside it seems like the Openmoko team really lacks leadership. They started working on a GTK+ based system and released it as 2007.2... that one was close to being functional but the GSM parts were unstable. So they started working on ASU (now called 2008.8 or .9) which is a mish-mash of Qtopia ported to X11, Enlightenment and PyGTK. That's what they're focused on right now. But they've also got the project called FreeSmartphone.org, so they have a third distro called FSO. FSO has its own phone stack instead of using the one from Qtopia. Eventually they'll bring the FSO phone stack to 2008.8.

They also just announced that they're going to stop developing the applications they've been working on and focus on stability and reliability of the basic phone functions and suspend/resume. That's the best news I've heard out of the team yet.

Of course there are also community distros. Rasterman releases some of his own experimental builds and so do a few others. There's a distro called Fat and Dirty Openmoko (FDOM) that is just 2008.8 with a bunch of apps installed and some fixes applied. And you can run Debian on it too, but I haven't tried that yet.

As far as applications go, I imagine you could port anything that runs on your Linux desktop to the phone as long as it's not to resource intensive. The phone has X11 and it's even got 3d acceleration.

Right now on my phone the address book, dialer, calendar and sms/email are from Qtopia. I have Pidgin, Pythm (an mplayer front end, untested), Navit and TangoGPS for GPS, Linphone for VoIP (haven't really used it yet). For browsing I've got Minimo 0.2 (it kinda sucks) and Midori (webkit based, just installed it today). And I have Duke Nukem 3d which is controlled by tilting the phone. Sounds like fun, but it's actually a little tiresome. I was thinking of installing Abiword but I don't know how much word processing I'll be doing with the touch screen keyboard.

So I guess to wrap things up you shouldn't get this phone unless you've got money to burn for a cool pocket linux gadget. I still use my cheap Nokia flip phone most days. But the Openmoko is fun to play with and it comes with a really nifty stylus/pen/laser pointer/flash light. Really.

I'll probably try Android on it, but only after someone else releases kernel and rootfs images so I don't have to do much work. I'm still much more interested in the Openmoko platform than in Android because the Openmoko is much closer to a familiar GNU/Linux system than Android ever will be.

One thing that would be nice though is if the market gets flooded with smart phones that boot Linux kernels with all devices working. Because I was thinking that down the line I might buy an Android phone so I can put Debian or an Openmoko derivative on it.

Re:Let the porting begin!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is perfectly usable in almost any way you want, but at this point there are certain sacrifices depending on what you want. If you want to use it as an everyday phone/mp3 player, then you have to use qtopia/qt extended. But no games (worthwhile anyway), a decent but crummy in comparison gps client that's a bitch to install, no accel, basically nothing that makes linux on my phone cool. Using asu (now called 2008.8) I got duke3d running great, numpty physics, 28 other random ass games though some were kinda repeats, remoko to control my pc. I have a map of my entire country stored on an SD card so I can get directions from anywhere using navit. There is a SIP client available so that means VOIP from anywhere where you have wifi. But wifi is kinda buggy (works fine the first time you connect and sometimes at other times, but other times it you have to reboot the phone) and audio in phone calls dies after a day of it being on (i'm sure a fix is imminent though). The alsa-state files are not really kicking in with 2008.8 so you have to do a bunch of crap to get headphones working properly. To change the background image required dismanteling the entire theme (edjgedecc) file then swapping the pic that I wanted, reassemble theme (edjecc), upload to phone. Besides this, there is a debian and gentoo port which is pretty fucking amazing in and of itself (with a usb keyboard that's essentially the power of a laptop in your pocket). Long story short, if you've been using linux for a few years, it's nothing you haven't had to do since before the Ubuntu days: did you have to be a developer to use linux before 2003? If you are comfy with the command line and doing stuff it's pretty good.
P.S. you can use it with any gsm provider, I live in Canada but it worked fine when I was in Africa. Also all the above statements about 2008.8 may change depending on if you use the stable, testing, or unstable branches. I was mostly using testing.

Re:Let the porting begin!

[H0p313ss]

As other people have pointed out, the Freerunner is not a mainstream device and will not be for quite some time, in fact the current revision of the hardware has a number of acknowledged bugs that cannot be worked around in software. The software is hardly beta quality, more like alpha.

My own feelings vary from awe to frustration. We're talking about a handheld device with GSM nad GPS and bluetooth radios that is an order of magnitude more powerful than the first machines I ran linux on. (My first linux machine was a 386dx 33Mhz with 16Mb RAM and 100MB HD and a plain old VGA card, the Freerunner has a 400Mhz ARM4, 128Mb RAM and 256 Mb of flash storage on the motherboard and a microSD slot and a 600x800 touch screen.)

But I have used mine as a daily phone for almost four months with about 90% reliability, which for a alpha/beta product is not so bad really.

In short a cool and geeky device that needs serious TLC and probably presents more potential than actual. What it really needs is more people with the time and skills to improve every aspect of the hardware and software.

And FYI, the Android porting discussion has begun.

Allowing "Banned" Features

[TheMeuge]

When G1 was first introduced, it became painfully clear that it was severely hamstrung by the carrier-dictated limitations on software features.

The Bluetooth stack was totally castrated, leaving out not only tethering and PAN, but also voice features, as well as file transfer.

There are a lot of these glaring omissions in G1s software, that were clearly dictated by T-mobile. My question is this... now that Android has been open-sourced, will Google and T-mobile team up to block 3rd parties from filling in these features? Because as it stands, the G1 actually has less features than the competition, in clear contrast to the wealth of features and freedom of alteration that was touted as the hallmark of the Android platform.

Re:Allowing "Banned" Features

[not already in use]

Here's my take on the situation. Google realizes that carriers want strict control over their devices. This doesn't bother me one bit, nor does it bother 99% of consumers. The 1% is does bother are people who want a profit-seeking corporation to bow to the wants and needs of a small minority.

It bothers me when people complain about this, because the software is open. Branded versions will always be based on the open version, much the way you see MyEclipse staying in tune with the vanilla eclipse releases. Combine this with the fact that there is existing open hardware available (and opportunities to create more) and this supposed "community" that can put it all together, it leaves me wondering, what is there to complain about?

Re:Allowing "Banned" Features

[CdBee]

Apple has a real reason to not implement a full modern Bluetooth stack - if they do it on the iPhone it will be expected/demanded/hacked onto the ipod Touch, and people would then use an iPod Touch with a cheapo bluetooth phone rather than paying the premium for an iPhone

Re:Allowing "Banned" Features

[blahbooboo]

I'm so glad to live in Europe. The utterly retarded US mobile phone market never ceases to amaze me. But, since I don't know anything about programming, let me ask a stupid question: can you in principle port Android to any modern phone out there, or are there hardware requirements?

There are a lot of negatives in the U.S. cell market (mainly with the handsets sucking and all the handset crippling). However, there is one clear winner, the cost of cell phone plans is FAR cheaper than in Europe. Yes, incoming calls might be "free" in Europe, but YIKES the caller pays a lot per minute and the receiver still has a more expensive plan.

I used to think the European cell systems were better, until I saw how much these folks charge versus what the user gets for this charge. The Europeans can't even implement continental wide calling without calling it "roaming" (uh, Orange is in every country) and charging roaming fees which the USA got rid of 10 years ago. I believe the EU is getting involved to finally end this...

In any case, there is no clear winner. Both systems have their pluses and minuses.

Re:Allowing "Banned" Features

[WiseWeasel]

That's not the main reason. Apple is trying to encourage the ubiquity of the iPod connector interface, and including A2DP would severely undermine this, as car and electronics manufacturers would just use that to interface with iPods and iPhones instead of the proprietary iPod port. This would put Apple's competitors on much more equal footing with Apple with accessories and 3rd party electronics integration.

What other devices will we see?

[LWATCDR]

When will we see a port to the Palm Treo?
And how about a lightweight netbook version?
Or just a light weight GP disto based on Android.
The hard part will probably be the JVM/JIT compiler.

I got my G1 yesterday

[cl0s]

Got my G1 yesterday. What I've played with so far is pretty nice, the camera is very light sensitive though, so far the only complain I have.

You can install apps from the market, internet or memory card, and the possibilities are endless just with the original OS. Can't wait for some hacked versions of Android so I can really have some fun though.

Re:Earth to Slashdot

[vux984]

Earth to Slashdot... this is how almost every major OSS project runs; people who pay for developers [such as me] will get the features they want.

No. There is a big difference.

Typically when a commercial entity leads development of OSS where they have a propriety solution that enhances it, they PREVENT those key proprietary feature from EVER being added to the free version. Thus the ONLY way to get it to use their paid version.

Even if the community WANTS the feature in the free version, and volunteer developers are willing to build it, the commercial entity prevents it from happening. Refusing those patches, playing politics, and so on.

Of course the OSS community can always fork the project... but then they lose out on all the good things the commercial entity IS feeding into the development, and you get all the other community fragmentation issues that go along with forking too... there is no win-win.

I want a computer

[kwerle]

I want my General Purpose computer to be able to fit in my pocket, run whatever programs I want, and be able to make phone calls. Why is that hard or unreasonable?

Re:Buy an Openmoko Freerunner

[cl0s]

I really wanted one for the longest but the software is not nearly complete. I mean Android is barely complete as far as apps go and OpenMoko is even farther behind on that.

You should be able to port Android onto your OpenMoko though, I'm sure that will be one of the first non-G1's to have it.

Android though I would say is open enough for me, the HTC hardware is closed and all but I've been able to download separate apps right from the browser and install them on my G1, without even touching T-Mobiles Android Market.