Slashdot Mirror
With Cyanogen Dead, Google's Control Over Android Is Tighter Than Ever (greenbot.com)
Last week, Cyanogen Inc announced it is shutting down all its services. A day later, CyanogenMod announced that it is going away too. Regardless of how you found Cyanogen's commercial operating system or open source fork CyanogenMod, the demise has bigger implications. From a report on GreenBot: Cyanogen might never have seriously threatened to take control of Android, but the upstart's shutdown still represents a major victory for Google. As Google showed with the launch of the Pixel, the company is taking steps to ensure no one ever gets close to stealing Android's soul ever again. [...] In many ways, Cyanogen encapsulated more of the spirit of Google's mobile OS project than Android itself ever did. As an early offshoot of the mainstream project designed and supported by habitual modders, Cyanogen was in many ways more aligned with the iOS jailbreaking community than Android proper, bringing customization and features far beyond those available in the stock OS. But almost as quickly as Android took off, Google began reining it in. By implementing stricter rules for manufacturers to prevent further fragmentation -- including licensing of its apps and mandatory inclusion of its search bar widget -- Google actively worked to keep deviant versions of Android on the fringes. Nonetheless, CyanogenMod persisted, surviving cease-and-desist orders, takeover rumors and general Google-led consternation. And now it's all over. Google won, not by waging war with Cyanogen but by doubling down on its own vision, forging partnerships with manufacturers, and working to ensure that Google's Android remained the world's Android.
Goolge needs to ban carrier builds and let people update there os with out needing to wait for the carrier to do it.
Despite the CEO of cyanogen claiming they were taking away Android from Google, they were always irrelevant. They may have had a few wins with minor players consumers had no relevance with consumers and were never going to replace Google services.
Unless you want to be accused of contributing the the Google-FUD, be sure to make mention of this whenever Cyanogen/CyanogenMod is mentioned:
https://github.com/LineageOS
http://lineageos.org/
http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-...
So CyanogenMod is only closing-down due to trademark stuffs surrounding Cyanogen. The actual OS is going to live on as LineageOS, still organized by Steve Kondik.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Then Android wouldn't be open source anymore. Which do you want? An OS which is open and that anyone can fork and modify if they don't like how the original author made it? Or an OS which is closed and proprietary so you have to take it the way the original author made it, no alterations?
Way I see it, the carrier problem isn't Google's responsibility. It's a market problem - vertical integration causing lack of customer fluidity. The carriers own the towers, the service, and also sell the phones. GSM tackled the problem by requiring SIM cards, basically forcing all phones to be interchangeable between carriers. The U.S. doesn't have that so your phone is frequently tied to your carrier, giving them an unprecedented level of control over your phone.
So long as the OEMs continue to control whether or not, and when, security patches are installed, Google can claim all the control they want. But they do not have that control. Android customers are left in the lurch, subject to the whims of the OEMs and to security issues from unpatched vulnerabilities.
companies like Samsung & etc.. and other hardware makers of Android phones made their own OS based on Linux. and it was a open source co-op method of development where everybody pitched in to develop the OS & apps so they can have something on their phones that was not controlled by another company
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Check out the F-Droid store. K9mail for email, OsmAnd~ for mapping/navigation, firefox, vlc, Face Slim if you really must use facebook. Not using google play store and the related services does wonders for your battery life. It's perfectly feasible to run a productively useful yet google-free android phone.
I really just want to write "WRONG" as the entire content of this post and just leave it at that. The article seems to have some of the facts, but not all. Yes, Cyanogen the company has decided to shut down. And CyanogenMod, the open source version of the OS released by Cyanogen based on Android also decided to change their name because they don't want to get sued. But facts seem to end there. CM will continue on under another name. If you are running CM on any of your devices, rest assured, aside from a name change, the next build will be more of the same.
Where I am getting frustrated with this article is the notion that this is a big win for Google. I have to disagree. Google or alphabet or whatever they want to call themselves may have created the android OS, but they release it in an open source format. They do this to get it out there on as many devices as they can. More importantly, they do this to get it into the hands of as many developers as they can. There are a number of things that I actually thought were part of android, that only later when reading stock android was adding certain features did I realize were actually only part of CM. That's really what open source is about, the ability for a wide variety of people to work to better something together. A lot of times things seem to make sense when one person is working on them, but later we come to find out that they don't make sense to others.
If Google actually wanted to rein in android, they would simply retool with proprietary code, and release the next version of their OS closed source. The only thing they actually seem to be concerned with are phones that are still running old versions of the OS. This makes is hard not for them, but for application developers to support their applications in that ecosystem. We have seen Google take steps in the recent year or two to modularize some of the core components of Android so that those pieces can be updated even if the OS itself has not been.
1) OSMand
2) K9-Mail
3) Yes, K9-Mail supports IMAP-IDLE
4) The Youtube web site works in Firefox (in the background too, if you're into that)
5) F-Droid
6) Many apps are available with embedded ad libraries replaced by dummies.
But then to fix the web required a third-party browser to already exist that adhered to standards to gain marketshare, which came in the form of mobile Safari on the iPhone.
Stop licking Steve Jobs' butt, he did enough without making shit up. Peak IE was around 2004 with 95% market share. In mid-2007 when the first generation iPhone launched it was already down to around 80%, that is non-IE share had quadrupled and the monopoly was cracking all over. The market for $399+ smartphones was nothing compared to the many hundreds of millions of computers in use, the first sign of mobile browsing having any more than a token presence was in 2010 (went from 1.3% to 4.1% that year, according to StatCounter) when IE was down to 60%. The iPhone had absolutely nothing to do with the fall of IE.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We survived the IE near-monopoly and ended up with a nearly-standardized web platform instead of the incompatible mess it was before
Sure, but it took twenty years, and everything is organizing under Google's banner. Even Firefox is practically indistinguishable from Chrome these days, and will be entirely so once they discontinue support for legacy plugins/addons. So instead of having Microsoft dictate terms through outright monopolization of the market, we're allowing Google to dictate terms because...... why? We trust them?
This is a matter of faith; we've traded monopoly for theology.
This is exactly it. Only I fear that this time the technical populace somehow thinks this is a Good Thing. Control by information companies is not any better than control by software companies, and in fact is almost certainly far worse for a whole host of Orwellian reasons.
We fought and fought and fought to remove IE's monopoly, but the biggest work overall was done by Apple. Remember when we wanted to break up Microsoft into an Office/Apps company and an OS company? It's hard to imagine that we shouldn't break Google up into an advertising company, a tech hosting company, a search company, a browser company, a mobile OS company, a cloud computing company, and half a dozen other distinct entities. But this time the Bay Area is fully behind unified, Umbrella Corp, control because "it's easier".
Read a book, guys. Learn your history.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Android is open source and there isn't shit they can do about how you use it
Android is not open source. You have to be a major OEM (Samsung, HTC, etc.) and pay big, big money to get Android source code, as well as agree to bundle in (and pay separately for) other shit like Google's Play store and dozens of Google services and apps. If you want access to the latest and greatest <dessert name> version of Android you need to agree to launch a flagship product with it and advertise that version of Android as being the next coming of Christ Himself, etc.
AOSP is open source, and it's fucking useless to 99.999% of people. You can't legally get any of the Google apps on it, and going forward that includes all the baked-in but needlessly-separate features Android phones will have. See the Pixel for examples - the Assistant, the Launcher, the customization UI, etc.
Not only is AOSP bare and useless, it's often simply fucking broken. It gets lip service support from Google and "lol fuck you" support from hardware manufacturers. The only way to get a free and open and usable Android experience is to do so illegally - use AOSP and inject Google's apps and services, maybe grab some firmware or blobs for specific hardware so the damn thing charges properly or the WiFi actually works, hack some more shit to maybe get Android Pay working or get WiFi calling enabled, and illegally download and share the updated APKs whenever there's a security patch (often), then cry because you have to reformat your phone to flash a new ROM with the latest Android security updates every month because even when someone on XDA uploads an OTA differential patch for your phone it never works quite right.
Android is fucked up in many, many ways and Google is making it worse every day. They're becoming the walled garden of iOS without the garden.
Yep. Most people don't realize that NOT EVEN NEXUS DEVICES have official buildscripts available to create a ROM with everything in the official factory ROM (including binary blobs that aren't open source). You can build and install generic AOSP, but generic AOSP is a subset of what's part of an official Nexus 6P ROM. AOSP on a Nexus 6P is no better than it was on the Galaxy S3 (IMHO, the S3 was the Golden Era of AOSP, and the closest we ever got to being able to flash a semi-device-nonspecific ROM the way you'd boot Debian or Ubuntu on a PC... almost everything since the S3 has been a slide downhill compared to what we had).
> I mean Android is just a use of an OS kernel and some standard services, including application security, and some UI conventions.
And Google's very, very proprietary, non-opensource, and defacto-required (if you don't want your phone to be crippled) Google Play Services, which are required for installing apps from Google Play, using Google Maps, using Google-assisted location services, Google Pay, and plenty of other things. Over the past couple of years, Google has been systematically moving more and more of Android's core functionality into Google Play Services.
Ok but for the sake of argument, other than the following factors:
1) Name recognition and reputation
2) Resources and ability to write good quality software and maintain good databases with quality data (e.g. maps database, wifi IDs database)
Is there anything stopping open organization SPQR from creating
SPQR App Services for Android
and offering equivalents to the Google-branded services?
If resourceful, SPQR could convince phone makers to pre-load their phones with the SPQR app store and services.
My devil's advocate question is: Is this just jealousy that Google out-innovated and out-standardized others, and out-"take my free stuff"-offered others, creating a de-facto monopoly?
Is this just bitterness that the network effect (on adoption) is the network effect, and it's tough to compete with after a while?
Seriously, if there is a strong will (including possibly distributed financial backing) to have a good quality open alternative to Google services on Android, couldn't that be done in theory? There's nothing license-wise or artificial-technical-barrier preventing it, is there?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?