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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 advertises that it runs Android applications?? That seems a little disingenuous as well.
DevRT. The name was a give away. 1 comment and it's trolling.
Watch those corners
This is all due to Android's openness.
Basically this company wants to be part of the Android group, but at the same time, build a competitor to Google's interests in the Android platform... using a forked version of Android. So Google is basically saying "if you want to be dicks and go against our interests, we're going to kick you out of our club."
It should be noted that it won't affect Alibaba or Asus's ability to use the Android codebase, just Google won't be working with them in the future.
Seems fair enough to me.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
If you want to create your own OS, no one is stopping you. If you want to use android, you have to agree to the terms of the license.
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.
LOL. Click Menu -> Settings and then choose your favourite search from a dropbox.
"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.
LOL
At least choose better sources for your FUD, FFS.
They only open it because they used Linux as the base
Only kernel has to be open. Anything else is open under APL
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 get any of that. It's Google's way or Amazon, SlideMe, GetJar, Opera Apps, ...
Good troll, mate! Please, do go on giving Android haters reputation of ignorant FUDders.
He's perfectly consistent. He copied/pasted the same exact text twice.
Please don't be evil.
It's great that you invented Android. You also must have gotten a great payoff when Google bought Android. That's enough, isn't it?
You cleverly screwed Sun out of a few millions of dollars licensing fees, which contributed to its downfall.
Now your megalomania is leading you to beat up on an Android vendor that merely wants to experiment with an Android variant?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
There's that word again. These "walled gardens" are more akin to zoos than true ecosystems -- all they offer is the convenience of finding the different flora and fauna together in one spot, with the restriction being how you interact with them. Some people could benefit from more direct interaction; still many others would be eaten by lions if given a chance.
As I understand it Google's side of the story is they said something because Acer is a member of the Open Handset Alliance. Amazon is not a member of the AHA therefore Google hasn't said a thing to them.
Read into it yourself YMMV.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
No, what weakens the ecosystem are the Open Handset Alliance members who promise to keep their phones up to date, then renege.
I bought an Xperia Pro in 2011 because Sony announced they'd be getting Android 4. It's currently running Android 2.3, released in 2010, because Sony have completely cocked up the rollout. The rollout started back in May, then mysteriously stopped. It might have something to do with it being so buggy it's unusable (hardcoded to AZERTY keyboards, even if you've got a QWERTY keyboard), but we have no way of knowing because Sony won't talk. They announced it was being rolled out a second time at the beginning of August, but there's no evidence of that in their shitty update software. Customer support stonewall, just saying that the rollout is ongoing. This isn't even for the latest version of Android, it's for last year's version.
This is what's damaging the ecosystem. iOS developers can happily target iOS 5+, released a year ago, and get the vast majority of users (more than 80%). If you targeted the year old Android 4+, you'd only be getting about 22% of users.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Oracle was suing Google over patents and copyright infringement.
Google was never a part of the Oracle PartnerNetwork, so Oracle could not kick them out.
This is not like Oracle suing Google at all, in any way.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Well, if we're going to play Microsoft analogies, you could say that Alibaba is attempting to play "embrace and extingush". They wan to take advantage of the Android ecosystem while channeling users onto their proprietary platform.
In any case, You haven't established the validity of your analogy. What Microsoft did was refuse to sell Windows to OEMs who also offered competitive products like DR-DOS. Plenty of vendors offer Android competitors on their phones. What Google is doing is withholding cooperation from a company that is effectively using Android as the basis for a competitive product. The competitive product would be bootstrapped by having access to Android apps while steering customers toward apps that run exclusively on the network operator's service.
Where have we seen that carrier lock-in strategy before? Everywhere. That was the world of smartphone apps before iPhone, and having developed such apps before iPhone I can tell you it sucked for everyone except the carrier and handset maker.
IIRC Android is licensed under Apache, so Google can't "cut off" Alibaba from Android. Alibaba can continue to offer Android devices, even develop non-compatible Android derivatives, but they won't get help from Google. No technical assistance, no advance notice of plans, no labeling their products as "android" phones, no offering on-line access to the Android app store (although users could still side-load). Is that evil? Maybe, maybe not.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So remind me how Google make an incompatible implementation of Java?
Android uses the Java language and some Java core libraries, but the implementation is neither a complete implementation of Java SE (e.g. no AWT or Swing compatibility) nor of Java ME (e.g. no MIDlet compatibility), and it uses Dalvik bytecode instead of JVM bytecode.
They build an open source operating system. When they refuse to release Honeycomb, people start claiming they're going back on the open source commitment. They release ICS and JB source code less than a week after the official announcement. They literally give Android away for free - http://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429
Yet they get far more criticism than Microsoft and Apple running increasingly closed ecosystems. They get blamed for Android fragmentation. Now, when they decide to do something about fragmentation, they get blamed again. It's pretty simple isn't it, you join OHA and you maintain compatibility with Android. Or you don't, like Amazon, and take the source code for free and whatever the hell you want with it. Is that really so onerous for Acer?
When Android OEMs get sued with crap patents, Google gets blamed. Even when it's Samsung, a far bigger company who is making the majority of profits off Android (Google isn't making nearly as much), Google is somehow supposed to show up and save the day for them. When Google registers patents of their own, every time there's a Slashdot story about the pot calling the kettle black although Google have NEVER used patents to sue anyone except in retaliation, not their search patents, not their Hadoop, Mapreduce, etc. patents.
If you're an Android device used, you should be glad Google is doing this. The last thing we need is another Amazon. Try playing with a Kindle Fire - Amazon completely skinned Amazon and made it incompatible with normal Android apps. I have tried putting many in through apks, most install but almost none work properly. Despite coming with a powerful dual core processor, the devices are terribly slow and laggy. The browser is awful compared to Chrome or Safari on mobile devices. They could have gone with a completely skinned version of compatible Android, with their own skin but retain compatibility with apps. Instead, we get different versions of Android apps for the Kindle Fire. I am not sure this even works in Amazon's favour, they could still have sold all the content and made proper tablets offering real tablet functionality, not glorified content consumption devices with terribly proprietary software.
Here's the kicker:
You don't have to pay Google a cent to retain Android compatibility. Amazon could do exactly what they are doing now: run their own app store instead of using Google Play, use Nokia maps, use Bing as the default search engine, put their own browser in that tracks all websites you visit. Google's own Motorola branded handset, the RAZR M ships with the Amazon app store installed. I don't know why Google let this happen, it makes no business sense. But it's good for us consumers, you don't even have to be tied to the Google Play store.
It's Google's way or Amazon, SlideMe, GetJar, Opera Apps
Good luck convincing your bank to offer its application on Amazon or SlideME. I own an Archos 43 Internet Tablet, which didn't come with what was then called Android Market. I called a representative of Chase Bank and asked how to get Chase Quick Deposit working, and I was told that there were no plans to support my device. Nor were there plans to support a PC's flatbed scanner instead of a smartphone's rear camera.
What? Apple's never released an open source OS and had it forked. Seriously, Apple suing the entire mobile world over rounded corners has nothing to do with this. What's going on here is very simple. Google has no problem with an independent company using the open source Android to make their own fork. Amazon and numerous other companies have done it without so much as a complaint from Google. What's not fine is for members of the Open Handset Alliance to support Android forks, because compatibility is part of the stated mission of the OHA. If Acer wants to build devices using an Android fork, then they would have to leave the OHA.
Amazon isn't in the club (OHA), so it cannot be kicked out.
Android as it is most commonly marketed to end users is Android with Gapps, not AOSP. Do most customers (other than hardcore geeks) buy Android devices for the apps that are included with AOSP, or do they buy Android devices for the apps that are available through Google Play Store?
What Microsoft did was refuse to sell Windows to OEMs
Wrong, Microsoft did not do that. They got into trouble for a similar thing that Google is doing now(though Android is not a monopoly so it's a different legal situation here). Microsoft withheld OEM incentives(which included discounts, advertising money etc.) from the OEMs that didn't toe their line. Google is withholding incentives like early code access(and perhaps will increase the price for or remove access to the Android app store, Google apps on the device which are neither free nor Free). Good luck with competition with the other Android OEMs if that happens, which is why Acer backtracker REAL quick and even canceled a scheduled launch event which companies do only in cases of dire need.
I don't see any difference with the Microsoft situation except these three
1. Android doesn't have a monopoly (although it's 67% marketshare in the market and since Acer can't get a iOS license which is the other 22% of the market, it's effectively a monopoly as far as Acer's options to get any revenue are concerned).
2. Android is "open", so they could probably go the Amazon route, fork Android, get AOSP code super late when competitors have already released devices with the latest and greatest OS and features, build an app store from scratch, get hundreds of thousands of developers to submit apps, develop in house replacements for Google Maps, GMail, Currents, etc. etc. etc. Or maybe try to hook up with Amazon and get access to the store. But again, good luck with competing with Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony given these constraints.
Anyway this is pretty ironic coming from Google, given the same Andy Rubin's tweet about being open:
https://twitter.com/bttp/statuses/27864903610
http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/andy-rubin-twitter/
Well would you look at that. Earlier today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular. And you know that couldn’t have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy. But how was he going to respond? Well, he decided to awaken his dormant Twitter account and send his first tweet tonight. And sure enough, it’s clearly (but subtly) in response to Jobs.
Without further ado, here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet:
the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”
For those keeping score at home, that’s Rubin using some geeked-out lingo to explain exactly what open is to Steve Jobs. In other words: Android.
This space for rent.
This is all due to Android's openness.
Basically this company wants to be part of the Android group, but at the same time, build a competitor to Google's interests in the Android platform... using a forked version of Android. So Google is basically saying "if you want to be dicks and go against our interests, we're going to kick you out of our club."
It should be noted that it won't affect Alibaba or Asus's ability to use the Android codebase, just Google won't be working with them in the future.
Seems fair enough to me.
Lots of android manufacturers also developed Windows phones, often on nearly identical hardware. Yet they remain in the OHA.
There's no reason you can't offer the same device on both sides of the fork and be a good member in both camps.
Rubin needs to forget about the other branch of the fork and get over himself.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nice summary. It sounds like Google is behaving reasonably, but they let Asus catch them flatfooted PRwise.
I do wish that they'd address the fragmentation issue with the same vigor.
Back then Microsoft provided 3 choices for OEMs:
Microsoft argued that this was not anti-competitive; they claimed the discount simply represented Microsoft not having to keep track of individual licences and that OEMs where free to buy licences individually instead. They lost that argument because it was found that since Windows already had a majority market share (for the time being) an OEM had to load Windows on a majority of their systems to satisfy consumers. Because of the pricing scheme OEMs could not be competitive with other OEMs if they took option 2, forcing them into 3 where Microsoft's terms made it uncompetitive to sell PCs with another operating systems. So Microsoft was convicted under the Sherman Antitrust Act.
Let's look at Google and its club the Open Handset Alliance (OHA):
The official Android distribution can be seen as something wanted by the majority of customers (looking for a non-Apple/Microsoft or a inexpensive phone) at this time (unless you have something else big enough to get people to come to you, like Amazon) so most Android/android OEMs would be giving up the majority of their customers if they dumped official Android entirely; that removes option 1. Much like the licence discount a membership in the OHA represents a major competitive advantage - the OEMs are already way behind in keeping official Android up to date in their design and production pipelines even with that inside track and help from Google. An OEM on its own trying to make an official Android device is thus at a large disadvantage against OEMs that are part of the OHA. This makes option 2 uncompetitive, forcing any serious OEM into option 3. Option 3 goes even farther then Microsoft in the 90s - it doesn't just apply a tax, it outright bans the alternative.
So does the same 90s logic applied by the court - that regardless of Microsoft/Google's excuse for the 3 choices it isn't really a choice at all, and that the only viable choice blocks competition - still apply today?
You appear correct. It appears the lack of results is still Chase's fault: Amazon was filtering it out of my search results on both devices on Chase's behalf. I'm stumped as to why I'm getting this result from the page you linked:
Compatibility with your devices
(No) asus Nexus 7 2
(No) archos A43
The Archos has a rear facing camera. The Nexus 7 has a front facing camera. Neither is supported. At this point, my cynical guess is that Chase only wants to target customers who are rich enough to be paying $500 or more per year for smartphone service. Should I switch from Chase over this?
What's not clear to me is how the Alibaba handset is positioned. Google is claiming it's an Android fork that will fragment the ecosystem, and Alibaba seems to be claiming it's not part of the ecosystem. Is Alibaba being disingenuous here?
While everyone's Microsoft analogies sound good, they don't really work - because if they were true Google would have kicked Acer out of the OHA for making a Windows phone...
Now if Acer and Alibaba were trying to position their device as an Android phone, and it broke the ecosystem in many ways I could understand Google's behavior. But if it's more of an Amazon thing and Alibaba doesn't want or need anything from Google, then Google really does come off as kind of an asshole by punishing Acer's other business which does comply. That's a classic monopolistic strategy.
In any I guess we all know there's a difference between being truly "Open" and just making the source code available...
You tell us to forget about Google apps and app store and then bring it up again?
Google Play and Google Apps run on Android. They are not open, and no one has ever claimed otherwise. No one is forced to use them. You can use other large app stores like Amazon or getjar.
It's not as open as your pet project? Too bad. The Jelly Bean source code has been out for a while. No other major OEM has released a Jelly Bean device yet (well you can count Asus). Want to beat them to it? Go for it: http://twitter.com/Arubin/status/27808662429
Android is open so long as you only do what Google wants
Perhaps another way to look at it is Android is open so long as you are Android. Once you cease to comply with OHA standards, you cease to be Android.
Standard-compliance is a good thing. Non-compliant innovation is a good thing, too - unless you falsely advertise you do comply.
Yeah, the tutorial cleverly focuses on layout expressed in XML for the first several pages, hiding any actual program code. The first mention of Java appears in a source code filename in Starting an activity: "If you're using a different IDE or the command line tools, create a new file named DisplayMessageActivity.java".
How exactly do you propose that Google kick Amazon out of the Open Handset Allienace when Amazon is not, never has been, and is not trying to be a member of the OHA? Your post is ludicrous.
Amazon has been doing this from the beginning; using the Android codebase as a starting point and releasing a product using their derived version of Android, without any Google support or any of the otehr advantages that OHA members get. They're doing fine, too... but they aren't making a smartphone.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It still doesn't make any sense, given that members of OHA can build devices using different mobile OSes (like Bada or WinPhone). And how is that different from an Android fork, really? Especially the one that's not even advertised as such?
Google's not afraid of the competition. They're not complaining about Amazon's fork of Android. What they mind is that this member of the group organized to build a successful open Android system was trying to both be in the club, getting the benefits of being in the club, and also break the club rules about working counter to the purpose of the club. That's fair. That's not evil. "In or out, Acer buddy, but close the door. We're having a meeting."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Google doesn't have a problem with Alibaba, who is not a member of the Open Handset Alliance, making Aliyun as long as they don't violate the terms of the license, even though it works contrary to the Android ecosystem advantage. What they have a problem with is a member of the Open Handset Alliance which was formed to make Android a viable ecosytem helping them do it while still enjoying the benefits of being a member of that club. That is quite reasonable. A deal is a deal.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
All google is saying is that if you don't want to play by their rules, they won't give you support. Fork it, and you're on your own. Seems fair to me and they're not "going after anyone".
We agree that the Aliyun OS is not part of the Android ecosystem and you're under no requirement to be compatible.
However, the fact is, Aliyun uses the Android runtime, framework and tools. And your app store contains Android apps (including pirated Google apps). So there's really no disputing that Aliyun is based on the Android platform and takes advantage of all the hard work that's gone into that platform by the OHA.
So if you want to benefit from the Android ecosystem, then make the choice to be compatible. [It's] easy, free, and we'll even help you out. But if you don't want to be compatible, then don't expect help from OHA members that are all working to support and build a unified Android ecosystem.