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Google Pressured Acer/Alibaba Because of Android Compatibility Issues
An anonymous reader writes "On Thursday we discussed news that Google pressured Acer and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba to cancel the launch of a phone running the Aliyun OS. Google has now addressed the issue, speaking out on the importance of compatibility for Android devices. Andy Rubin, who runs Android development at Google, said Aliyun was a non-compatible version of Android, which weakens the ecosystem. He pointed out that the Open Handset Alliance provides all the tools necessary to make it compatible. An Alibaba exec fired back, saying, 'Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem so of course Aliyun OS is not and does not have to be compatible with Android. It is ironic that a company that talks freely about openness is espousing a closed ecosystem.'"
It is ironic that a company that talks freely about openness is espousing a closed ecosystem.
Exactly, but Google has been doing so for a long time. They are only little about openness while most of their stuff is actually closed source and closed ecosystem. They have both and in a way that always suits them better. There are in fact more closed systems than open, just see Google's search engine, adwords/adsense, youtube etc.. They only use and support open source when they can't be bothered to do all the work. In a way they steal from open source projects and hardly ever bring anything back.
For me this clearly looks like Microsoftesque move by Google. They try to limit the market and hide behind the curtain of "compatibility issues" when companies rightly call them out of it. But Google does not want to change. Instead, they cry like a baby and try to limit competition in China from growing too much. At the same time we have honest companies like Microsoft who actually adjust to different markets and continue providing services even if they aren't the number #1. Just look at Bing - Microsoft doesn't make a huge hullabaloo about it all the time, no, they continue improving it and providing it to users. Google cries like a baby when it isn't number #1 somewhere.
Just look at what Google did in Russian markets.
Google plays a cunning game when intellectualizing about openness of the internet, says one of the founders of the Russian search engine Yandex. Google’s primary weapons to hinder competitors are its Chrome browser and Android platform.
Speaking with The Guardian, Ilya Segalovich, chief technology officer at Yandex, has accused Google of overindulgent use of its dominant position on the market to shut out rival companies in cyber space.
The California giant's mobile platform Android is a "strange combination of openness and not openness," Segalovich added.
and here about dirty tricks in Chrome browser
Segalovich suggested Google was guilty of foul play with its Chrome browser, which he said made it difficult for users to choose rival search engines, including Yahoo, Bing and Yandex, over its own market-leading product.
"You cannot [send any code] to Android, it's semi-open source. You cannot send anything, just see and watch [how the code is changed by Google] If you download an application it may not work properly if it's not Android marketplace.
So in fact this is old problem with Google's products. Other products too... Hell, just look at Google+. It's a perfect copy of Facebook and a product that greatly emphasizes closedness. They are even more closed than Facebook as currently they only allow very few developers to be make apps and games for Google+. I mean it's been like this for ages. It feels like they've given up all hope about Google+. They're just thinking how to phase it out now that they made the whole thing such a big thing, like including it in search results etc. But Google+ is dying.
Android is about the same shit Google has thrown at us multiple times. They only open it because they used Linux as the base. They wouldn't open it otherwise. In fact they've even ignored GPL multiple times when they've been late to open up their sources as required. Android is only open because it has to be.
Google tries to close it, be no mistaken. They require you to pay lots of money to Google if you want to use any of the Android trademarks, logos or name on your product. You don't get any of the Google apps if you don't pay up and stick to Google's "standards" (which are there to limit competition, like in this case). You don't even get to give your users access to Google Play so that they could buy and download apps and games. No, you don't g