Has anyone here actually gone and looked at the permissions required by these apps?
They are really pretty mild and ordinary. Wow, they want to detect your location and they want Internet access - OMG!
TheRegister is a rag, and the headline of the linked article "Don't download that app: US presidential candidates will STALK you with it" is sensationalist exaggeration. Why are we falling for it?
There are tons of apps out there that require permission to read all your contacts and your SMS, and that have no business doing so. Check out Uber, the taxi service, or Hookt messanger (which starts contacting your contacts as soon as it harvests them from your phone). Neither of the presidential campaign apps require those critical permissions.
The Washington Post did a study a year or two ago (sorry, can't find the link) in which they analzyed lots of high profile apps on Android & iOS. iOS was a bit worse but on both platforms they found that most apps violated their own privacy policies and tracked users without warning - mostly for purposes of advertising.
My point, again, is that the apps that have offended the Register are pretty mild, and when we freak out about the mild ones, we lose our perspective and take our eyes off the important issues (and permissions).
I'm sure this will be welcomed by (most users and developers alike.
However, the more control they exercise, the more danger that they will abuse it (e.g. a carrier partner asks Google to get rid of an app that acts as an SMS gateway, so users don't need to pay for carriers' SMS package).
I believe that the key to keeping this sort of abuse under control (other then clear rules) is for Google to specify which rule was broken for every app that gets rejected.
Piracy is not as big a problem as some devs are making it out to be. The vast majority of Android users wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to pirate an app. The main group involved in piracy is young, techie gamers, but even then it is not a huge portion of users, and I believe that these users buy some games too.
I think the piracy problem is over-blown by game developers who are dissapointed with their Android sales, often due to (a) their game just isn't that good, or (b) Android users are more cost conscious then iOS users and generally spend less online, or (c) they are coming to Android late and the apps that got their earlier have the advantage of incumbency (which I find to be a huge advantage, though less so with games).
Moving away from games (where the Android test suite does better) to general apps the big problem is bugs. Android has tons of bugs (and a very lacking test suite). Since phones don't get update regularly, developers must work around old bugs indefinitely. Look at the average Android app and you will see various users complaining that the app simply doesn't work on their platform. That's the bugs.
Check out the Android bug list http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list and you will see an astonishing # of bugs, and lots of comments from frustrated developers who are shocked that important bugs can take years to even be acknowledged by Google, let alone fixed (sorry for the bad grammer).
The most recent release (4.1.1) still has lots of bugs, but it appears to be much more solid then previous releases (like 4.0 and 2.3.0 which were shameful, in my opinion), so I hope this is an indication that Google is moving to get the bug infestation under control.
Finally, let me add that this problem has nothing to do with openness, open-source, or fragmentation. If Google would just start focussing on killings bugs, and extend the Android Compatibility Test Suite (the official test suite) so that manufacturers will stop introducing so many new bugs, then fragmentation would become diversity, developers would become more productive, and users would have a better experience.
It is going to be really tough for Mozilla to make headway with their own mobile OS. Palm, Nokia, RIM, etc. have all failed in spite of enormous efforts, and the only ones that have succeeded now have complete ecosystems built around their devices.
So, I believe that the chances of Firefox OS succeeding are really slim.
And this is coming from someone who believes that Mozilla saved the Web, and who runs firefox on their phone (which is part of the problem - I already have mobile firefox).
I have no comment on 'wayland good' versus 'wayland bad', but it is certainly a known quantity and it has been waiting in the wings to replace X for a while.
As you said, the dream of replacing X has been around for a very long time. No one has done it because it is a ton of work and because the changes are bound to piss off some developers and users (see "pound sand" post above).
I'm impressed that the Ubuntu folks are going to take this on and I wish them well. If they succeed then the rest of the distro's will probably follow suite.
Microsoft, Google, and Netflix made a proposal for a plug-in system for DRM. It is probably the closest we will come to open-drm, and about the only chance that companies like Netflix will be able to support an HTML5 browser without plug-ins.
I see that the first 5-rated above says that Netflix doesn't use DRM on mobile platforms, and many other herald the arrival of the new DRM free world - both are nothing but wishful thinking.
If we keep up that sort of wishful thinking and freaking out about any DRM then services like Netflix will only be available via apps on locked down platforms in the future.
Would you rather that the browser plug-in was proprietary and locked down, or the entire platform?
Don't get me wrong - that is a good thing - but I want to be able to watch Netflix, Youtube Videos, etc. in my browser and that isn't going to happen unless there is some way for my browser to handle DRM'ed video streams.
So, either HTML5 needs to add support for DRM'ed video, or users will only be able to use these services via 'apps' and obscure platforms will be at a huge disadvantage (e.g. Netflix isn't writing an app for the Playbook because the platform isn't popular enough).
Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.
Yes, even their Search Engine wasn't really that novel.
But Google does still innovate. Actually, looking at web tech (Google main area of expertise) I think people's biggest complaint is that Google innovates too much.
Everybody knows about Chrome, but that is just the beginning - Google has been pushing at every boundary of the web.
Of all of them, I think Dart sound very interesting. I'm impressed that they managed to come up with a new language that has all the modern language features that developers are after, while still maintaining a form of compatibility with Javascript (and therefore all browsers).
And, since this article is about comparing Google to MS, let me point out that this couldn't be further from MS's attempt to change the web. ActiveX was proprietary and non-Web in every way. Dart is both compatible with the existing web (through it's ability to generate js) and is open and unencumbered.
Not only did they never do anything with this payload data, there is no record of them ever planning to do anything with it, and it's actually pretty hard to even think of anything they realistically could have done with it (without devolving into paranoid conspiracy theories). Which all supports the theory that collecting the data was not part of the master-plan.
The penalty should have been calibrated to the size of the company so that it hurt. If you don't like the gov' snooping into the private business of corporations then vote for Ron Paul, but in the mean-time companies must comply with investigations, or face penalties that aren't a joke.
The link takes you to Symantec's website - you know, the company that wants to make everyone think they need to buy anti-virus for Android.
Neither the blog post on Symantec's website, or the/. summary say whether the Trojan is in any Android app store, which is obviously the most important piece of information. After all, any duffus can sit at home and write (some forms) of Android malware and post it to their website.
The fact that Symantec would post something like this on their website is not a surprise - it's their website they can post what they want. But the fact that it got posted on slashdot....
I heard Sony was determined to forge a coherent, integrated strategy, but now I see that their phones (some of which are PS certified) are all Android based, but the PSS is mono/dotNet based. What's going on there?
GDrive has an issue with complexity here - they have to map their existing Google Docs service to Windows & Mac file-systems. Dropbox doesn't have that problem so their service is likely to always be easier to use and understand.
Google is generally great at engineering but pretty bad at making things simple, consistent, and understandable, and this is no exception.
For example, about a year ago Google renamed the organizational labels of Google Docs to collections. I was surprised that they would do this without bringing it into line with any of the other Google services, but I figured they must have given it a lot of thought and decided that 'collections' were the best concept for docs.
Today they renamed it again - to 'folders'. Once again, unlike other Google services, and hard to understand because they are not like folders at all.
Trying out GDrive today I find it is full of confusing, inconsistent, and half-working stuff.
Frankly, I'm really disappointed. Google seemed to take their time bringing this to market and I had hoped that meant that they wanted to get it right before releasing it, like Google+ which I think is one of their best efforts. But my initial impression is that it is half-baked.
Clearly, Google having to pay Oracle millions of dollars is no big deal - chump change to them.
But Oracle has asked for a permanent order preventing Google from continuing to infringe the patents and copyrights. Clearly Oracle is willing to go to the wall to get its way. It would certainly appear that the future of Java is of little import to Oracle compared to winning this battle and getting as much compensation from Google as they can.
If Oracle wins, what they demand will only be limited by the importance of the patents and copyright in question. Leaving the copyright issue aside for now (since it is less clear), how important are the patents? Can Google work around them?
Agreed, this is R&D - it is what companies should be doing!
Looking for some examples of waste? Let us consider the billions that are now being spent in the patent wars, what have become so expensive that they must be seriously undermining companies R&D budgets.
Steve Jobs famously said that he would spend every dollar that Apple has in the bank - now $100 billion - to destroy Android because Google had the temerity to compete with Apple in mobile.
Though I'm not literally expecting them to spend $100 billion on this, Apple has shown that there is almost no limit to what they will spend in trying to destroy Android via patents. Case in point, a month ago it was widely reported that Apple spent $100 million in legal fees just on its U.S. lawsuit against HTC. Remember? The lawsuit that succeeded in blocking HTC from using click-to-email in the U.S. So now HTC will remove that functionality for devices sold in the U.S.
And now people are complaining that Google spends too much on R&D. Well, don't worry. Much of that is already being diverted to legal fees and patent acquisition.
In every election there are candidates who tells the voters they can have their cake and eat it to: tax cuts without spending cuts.
They used to argue that the tax cuts would stimulate the economy thus producing this magic, without any reference to the boundaries and degree of this effect. That didn't work and now most politicians don't even bother trying to explain the fact that their promises don't add it.
Apple is no longer the company that MS had to prop up (with a cash investment and an MS Office port) for the pretence of competition - they are now the biggest company in the world.
But MS seems OK with that - they still act like Google is their real competitor. Is it because Google is competing in the online space and Apple isn't? Or is because Apple has enormous margins and MS sees this as a positive development in the industry - whereas Google tends to offer things for free and push MS towards lower margins?
I have no idea, but one of these days MS should get over their Google fixation and start thinking about competing with Apple too.
And BTW, Kudos to Google. One of the reasons I'm a fan of theirs is that they seem to compete fiercely with everyone!
"Google has offered Native Client and Dart to compete performance-wise, but those are non-standard, Google-specific technologies..."
The conditions surrounding the use of these technologies are no different then SPDY, which is being adopted by Amazon and Mozilla, and is on its way to becoming standardized.
Comparing these to MS's contributions to the Internet (e.g. ActiveX and MSIE) is not appropriate - Google's technologies' are open for adoption by anyone and they have the habit of improving the Internet, not subverting it.
From what I've seen of the reviews, WP is a pretty good OS, and the Lumia phones are being sold at pretty competitive prices with lots of marketing behind them. So, now MS and Nokia are fishing around for explanations for why they aren't selling to consumers.
The answer is the MS brand. After years of pushing crap on users, using nasty and anti-consumer tactics to fight their competitors, and trying to harm the Internet, MS is a tarnished consumer brand - surprise, surprise.
Obviously, I think this is fair, but I also think it is fair that consumers and the industry re-evaulate brands. MS has been much better behaved in recent years (e.g. they are trying to win the browser wars by making their browser better) so maybe they deserve a second chance?
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone here actually gone and looked at the permissions required by these apps?
They are really pretty mild and ordinary. Wow, they want to detect your location and they want Internet access - OMG!
TheRegister is a rag, and the headline of the linked article "Don't download that app: US presidential candidates will STALK you with it" is sensationalist exaggeration. Why are we falling for it?
There are tons of apps out there that require permission to read all your contacts and your SMS, and that have no business doing so. Check out Uber, the taxi service, or Hookt messanger (which starts contacting your contacts as soon as it harvests them from your phone). Neither of the presidential campaign apps require those critical permissions.
The Washington Post did a study a year or two ago (sorry, can't find the link) in which they analzyed lots of high profile apps on Android & iOS. iOS was a bit worse but on both platforms they found that most apps violated their own privacy policies and tracked users without warning - mostly for purposes of advertising.
My point, again, is that the apps that have offended the Register are pretty mild, and when we freak out about the mild ones, we lose our perspective and take our eyes off the important issues (and permissions).
I'm sure this will be welcomed by (most users and developers alike.
However, the more control they exercise, the more danger that they will abuse it (e.g. a carrier partner asks Google to get rid of an app that acts as an SMS gateway, so users don't need to pay for carriers' SMS package).
I believe that the key to keeping this sort of abuse under control (other then clear rules) is for Google to specify which rule was broken for every app that gets rejected.
CommonsGuy wrote a good post about this (no, I'm not him):
http://commonsware.com/blog/2012/02/23/think-about-principles.html
She claims that Apple said they were rejecting her book because of the Amazon references.
If she is lying about that, then she could just as well have made up the whole thing.
I agree that some evidence (e.g. a copy of the communications from Apple) would be helpful, but is she allowed to do that?
But she tried multiple times. According to the blog post she is now past the point of trying - she has given up.
The article is by Cory Doctorow, who is very well known and respected.
I would assume he did some basic vetting of the claim - he is no fool and has a reputation to protect.
Piracy is not as big a problem as some devs are making it out to be. The vast majority of Android users wouldn't have the slightest idea of how to pirate an app. The main group involved in piracy is young, techie gamers, but even then it is not a huge portion of users, and I believe that these users buy some games too.
I think the piracy problem is over-blown by game developers who are dissapointed with their Android sales, often due to (a) their game just isn't that good, or (b) Android users are more cost conscious then iOS users and generally spend less online, or (c) they are coming to Android late and the apps that got their earlier have the advantage of incumbency (which I find to be a huge advantage, though less so with games).
Moving away from games (where the Android test suite does better) to general apps the big problem is bugs. Android has tons of bugs (and a very lacking test suite). Since phones don't get update regularly, developers must work around old bugs indefinitely. Look at the average Android app and you will see various users complaining that the app simply doesn't work on their platform. That's the bugs.
Check out the Android bug list
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/list
and you will see an astonishing # of bugs, and lots of comments from frustrated developers who are shocked that important bugs can take years to even be acknowledged by Google, let alone fixed (sorry for the bad grammer).
The most recent release (4.1.1) still has lots of bugs, but it appears to be much more solid then previous releases (like 4.0 and 2.3.0 which were shameful, in my opinion), so I hope this is an indication that Google is moving to get the bug infestation under control.
Finally, let me add that this problem has nothing to do with openness, open-source, or fragmentation. If Google would just start focussing on killings bugs, and extend the Android Compatibility Test Suite (the official test suite) so that manufacturers will stop introducing so many new bugs, then fragmentation would become diversity, developers would become more productive, and users would have a better experience.
Actually, there was a beta of the SDK that was released during the IO conference - so prior to the Nexus 7 becoming available.
But I do have concern about the general beta quality of all of their stuff (actually I think that Android 4.0.0 was more like alpha).
I'm pleased that, so far, my Nexus 7 seems to be very solid. Hopefully this means they are starting to focus more on quality.
It is going to be really tough for Mozilla to make headway with their own mobile OS. Palm, Nokia, RIM, etc. have all failed in spite of enormous efforts, and the only ones that have succeeded now have complete ecosystems built around their devices.
So, I believe that the chances of Firefox OS succeeding are really slim.
And this is coming from someone who believes that Mozilla saved the Web, and who runs firefox on their phone (which is part of the problem - I already have mobile firefox).
I have no comment on 'wayland good' versus 'wayland bad', but it is certainly a known quantity and it has been waiting in the wings to replace X for a while.
As you said, the dream of replacing X has been around for a very long time. No one has done it because it is a ton of work and because the changes are bound to piss off some developers and users (see "pound sand" post above).
I'm impressed that the Ubuntu folks are going to take this on and I wish them well. If they succeed then the rest of the distro's will probably follow suite.
Well, for starters I'm sure that $4m is actually a small fraction of their actual legal costs.
In some cases, the losing side will just cover the administrative costs - it's possible that the summary is wrong and this is the case here.
Otherwise, Google has decided to super low ball their estimate for some reason.
That summary should win a prize for meaningless stats.
Telling us that "many tasks" are "between 30 and 100 percent faster" tells us nothing at all. And that is the meat of the summary!
Microsoft, Google, and Netflix made a proposal for a plug-in system for DRM. It is probably the closest we will come to open-drm, and about the only chance that companies like Netflix will be able to support an HTML5 browser without plug-ins.
I see that the first 5-rated above says that Netflix doesn't use DRM on mobile platforms, and many other herald the arrival of the new DRM free world - both are nothing but wishful thinking.
If we keep up that sort of wishful thinking and freaking out about any DRM then services like Netflix will only be available via apps on locked down platforms in the future.
Would you rather that the browser plug-in was proprietary and locked down, or the entire platform?
Silverlight, and even Flash, are dying out.
Don't get me wrong - that is a good thing - but I want to be able to watch Netflix, Youtube Videos, etc. in my browser and that isn't going to happen unless there is some way for my browser to handle DRM'ed video streams.
So, either HTML5 needs to add support for DRM'ed video, or users will only be able to use these services via 'apps' and obscure platforms will be at a huge disadvantage (e.g. Netflix isn't writing an app for the Playbook because the platform isn't popular enough).
Personally, I think that the hate that is felt towards DRM should be redirected towards proprietary DRM so we can break down platform lock-in and give the obscure platforms a chance with the average consumer.
How do they handle Android - do they use a completely different technology or do they implement silverlight in their Android app?
Yes, even their Search Engine wasn't really that novel.
But Google does still innovate. Actually, looking at web tech (Google main area of expertise) I think people's biggest complaint is that Google innovates too much.
Everybody knows about Chrome, but that is just the beginning - Google has been pushing at every boundary of the web.
Of all of them, I think Dart sound very interesting. I'm impressed that they managed to come up with a new language that has all the modern language features that developers are after, while still maintaining a form of compatibility with Javascript (and therefore all browsers).
And, since this article is about comparing Google to MS, let me point out that this couldn't be further from MS's attempt to change the web. ActiveX was proprietary and non-Web in every way. Dart is both compatible with the existing web (through it's ability to generate js) and is open and unencumbered.
No, it isn't such a big deal.
Not only did they never do anything with this payload data, there is no record of them ever planning to do anything with it, and it's actually pretty hard to even think of anything they realistically could have done with it (without devolving into paranoid conspiracy theories). Which all supports the theory that collecting the data was not part of the master-plan.
But there is something wrong with Google only paying $50K penalty for non-cooperation.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-pay-25-000-fcc-113025671.html
The penalty should have been calibrated to the size of the company so that it hurt. If you don't like the gov' snooping into the private business of corporations then vote for Ron Paul, but in the mean-time companies must comply with investigations, or face penalties that aren't a joke.
The link takes you to Symantec's website - you know, the company that wants to make everyone think they need to buy anti-virus for Android.
Neither the blog post on Symantec's website, or the /. summary say whether the Trojan is in any Android app store, which is obviously the most important piece of information. After all, any duffus can sit at home and write (some forms) of Android malware and post it to their website.
The fact that Symantec would post something like this on their website is not a surprise - it's their website they can post what they want. But the fact that it got posted on slashdot....
I heard Sony was determined to forge a coherent, integrated strategy, but now I see that their phones (some of which are PS certified) are all Android based, but the PSS is mono/dotNet based. What's going on there?
GDrive has an issue with complexity here - they have to map their existing Google Docs service to Windows & Mac file-systems. Dropbox doesn't have that problem so their service is likely to always be easier to use and understand.
Google is generally great at engineering but pretty bad at making things simple, consistent, and understandable, and this is no exception.
For example, about a year ago Google renamed the organizational labels of Google Docs to collections. I was surprised that they would do this without bringing it into line with any of the other Google services, but I figured they must have given it a lot of thought and decided that 'collections' were the best concept for docs.
Today they renamed it again - to 'folders'. Once again, unlike other Google services, and hard to understand because they are not like folders at all.
Trying out GDrive today I find it is full of confusing, inconsistent, and half-working stuff.
Frankly, I'm really disappointed. Google seemed to take their time bringing this to market and I had hoped that meant that they wanted to get it right before releasing it, like Google+ which I think is one of their best efforts. But my initial impression is that it is half-baked.
Clearly, Google having to pay Oracle millions of dollars is no big deal - chump change to them.
But Oracle has asked for a permanent order preventing Google from continuing to infringe the patents and copyrights. Clearly Oracle is willing to go to the wall to get its way. It would certainly appear that the future of Java is of little import to Oracle compared to winning this battle and getting as much compensation from Google as they can.
If Oracle wins, what they demand will only be limited by the importance of the patents and copyright in question. Leaving the copyright issue aside for now (since it is less clear), how important are the patents? Can Google work around them?
It is my understanding that the principle concern is this patent:
Method and system for performing static initialization.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=18&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6061520&OS=6061520&RS=6061520
How significantly would Davlik be affected if they had to work around this patent?
Agreed, this is R&D - it is what companies should be doing!
Looking for some examples of waste? Let us consider the billions that are now being spent in the patent wars, what have become so expensive that they must be seriously undermining companies R&D budgets.
Steve Jobs famously said that he would spend every dollar that Apple has in the bank - now $100 billion - to destroy Android because Google had the temerity to compete with Apple in mobile.
Though I'm not literally expecting them to spend $100 billion on this, Apple has shown that there is almost no limit to what they will spend in trying to destroy Android via patents. Case in point, a month ago it was widely reported that Apple spent $100 million in legal fees just on its U.S. lawsuit against HTC. Remember? The lawsuit that succeeded in blocking HTC from using click-to-email in the U.S. So now HTC will remove that functionality for devices sold in the U.S.
And now people are complaining that Google spends too much on R&D. Well, don't worry. Much of that is already being diverted to legal fees and patent acquisition.
In every election there are candidates who tells the voters they can have their cake and eat it to: tax cuts without spending cuts.
They used to argue that the tax cuts would stimulate the economy thus producing this magic, without any reference to the boundaries and degree of this effect. That didn't work and now most politicians don't even bother trying to explain the fact that their promises don't add it.
you wouldn't know it.
Apple is no longer the company that MS had to prop up (with a cash investment and an MS Office port) for the pretence of competition - they are now the biggest company in the world.
But MS seems OK with that - they still act like Google is their real competitor. Is it because Google is competing in the online space and Apple isn't? Or is because Apple has enormous margins and MS sees this as a positive development in the industry - whereas Google tends to offer things for free and push MS towards lower margins?
I have no idea, but one of these days MS should get over their Google fixation and start thinking about competing with Apple too.
And BTW, Kudos to Google. One of the reasons I'm a fan of theirs is that they seem to compete fiercely with everyone!
"Google has offered Native Client and Dart to compete performance-wise, but those are non-standard, Google-specific technologies..."
The conditions surrounding the use of these technologies are no different then SPDY, which is being adopted by Amazon and Mozilla, and is on its way to becoming standardized.
Comparing these to MS's contributions to the Internet (e.g. ActiveX and MSIE) is not appropriate - Google's technologies' are open for adoption by anyone and they have the habit of improving the Internet, not subverting it.
From what I've seen of the reviews, WP is a pretty good OS, and the Lumia phones are being sold at pretty competitive prices with lots of marketing behind them. So, now MS and Nokia are fishing around for explanations for why they aren't selling to consumers.
The answer is the MS brand. After years of pushing crap on users, using nasty and anti-consumer tactics to fight their competitors, and trying to harm the Internet, MS is a tarnished consumer brand - surprise, surprise.
Obviously, I think this is fair, but I also think it is fair that consumers and the industry re-evaulate brands. MS has been much better behaved in recent years (e.g. they are trying to win the browser wars by making their browser better) so maybe they deserve a second chance?