A Google employee's critique of the Ars Technica Android unforkable article

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/?comments=1&post=26199423

by patrickaljord • 12 years ago

79 85 12 years ago

arstechnica.com

forgottenpass• 12 years ago

While differing in nitty-gritty details, the googler basically confirms what I interpreted to be the main thrust of the Ars article.

AOSP is the carrot, the compliance necessary for google's value add software is the stick.

The last paragraph concludes saying that Android with google apps is the least bad offering out there. That's why I both use it personally, and why I'm not super pumped about the future of any mobile platform these days.

outside1234• 12 years ago

This. There will continue to be improvements to AOSP, but only as that makes driving Google's proprietary apps easier and faster.

Its exactly like Chromium in other words and we see that with Blink.

mdwrigh29• 12 years ago

This. There will continue to be improvements to AOSP, but only as that makes driving Google's proprietary apps easier and faster.

This isn't remotely true, work continues on the platform in a number of areas beyond just feature requests from other teams. Having application teams able to explain the pain points they feel in the platform and then having the platform team come up with solutions that work for the general use case is a good thing though, it improves everybody's experience. It isn't like there are hidden "makeGmailFaster" APIs that other people can't use.

Agathos• 12 years ago

Yeah, it reads more like an explanation than a rebuttal.

hahainternet7• 12 years ago

No it doesn't, I have no idea how such utter rot makes it onto HN.

Peter is a tabloid journalist, he stopped writing interesting balanced articles a long time ago and now just posts linkbait.

His points are thoroughly refuted, but I guess you didn't bother to read them.

csarva• 12 years ago

AOSP is the carrot, the compliance necessary for google's value add software is the stick.

"Because cloud!" seems to be the answer to most of the points raised in the original article, which kinda sounds ok on the face of it; but why can't those backend services be abstracted out as well? Why shouldn't I be able to choose some other provider for all these services, like location?

It reminds me of a commonly suggested solution to the browser wars in the 90s, when the reasoning for Microsoft's integration of IE directly into the OS was all the new possibilities from such deep integration: why not just allow different browsers/engines (e.g. mozilla) to be swapped in? Well, because then you wouldn't be using MS products anymore!

And I think a lot of that is repeating itself here.

mdwrigh29• 12 years ago

Why shouldn't I be able to choose some other provider for all these services, like location?

You can, just provide an implementation of LocationProvider: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/pack...

zimbatm• 12 years ago

Also the argument: the cloud is proprietary so the app is as well.

If the cloud part is the hard part to implement why not make the app open source ?

fidotron6• 12 years ago

The location example is bothersome, but the point about 4.4 adding the storage API to enable Dropbox (a competitor) access to apps and the systems in precisely the same way as Google Drive does demonstrate they aren't nearly as closed as many like to portray them as being. Android has the most pervasive mechanisms of this kind of any widespread system, and the best approach for adding them with applications. This is, by far, the single most underappreciated part of the platform, including by many Googlers outside the Android team.

That said, it pisses me off violently that to get weather from a non-Google source my device still insists that Google get my location data. The location system very much should be pluggable, and it doesn't present the kind of technical hurdles stuff like a generic purchasing API (discussed elsewhere) would.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

If you make your own location provider, Google will call you non-compatible and not let you have the Google Play store. They consider users using someone else's location services to be terrible for their company, as per internal emails: http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/internal-emails-reveal-go...

stcredzero2• 12 years ago

"Critique."

caniszczyk• 12 years ago

Is it really the least bad offering?

Tizen has potential and is more open: https://www.tizen.org/

The problem is no one uses it on a large scale yet...

hajile• 12 years ago

Tizen has it's own large set of problems according to rasterman (EFL guy who works for Samsung).

https://www.tizen.org/irclogs/%23tizen.2013-01-20.log.html

In addition to those issues, the SDK is not open-source and is instead a proprietary Samsung license that severely restricts and takes control of a programmers applications (despite the software being supported by the linux foundation).

Overall, open webOS or sailfish/mer are much better projects.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Tizen is in a very precarious position at Samsung. If Samsung saw the slightest advantage (or, conversely, threat) to the billions of dollars they make with Android, Tizen would be gone. There is no handset business at Samsung without Android. Samsung lacks an ecosystem like Amazon has so forking is not practical.

Intel, you say? Tell me how many handsets has Intel.

Jolla and Firefox OS are better bets.

fidotron6• 12 years ago

I've said it before, but it really strikes me that Ars simply don't understand the universe outside of Wintel at all, and this deconstruction is merely one of many you can do whenever they start commenting about stuff outside of that sphere. You could get away with being a tech commentator like that for a long time, but not anymore.

protomyth• 12 years ago

but it really strikes me that Ars simply don't understand the universe outside of Wintel at all

Doesn't Ars publish the most detailed review of every new Mac OS? I also notice quite a lot of the technical articles I submit to HN from Ars are quite detailed and truthful.

Schlaefer• 12 years ago

Ars is not one voice. Imho Peter Bright's articles esp. related to OSS and MS should always be read with an "open mind".

Oletros5• 12 years ago

Perhaps he had to write Peter instead of Ars.

Siracusa understands very well Apple ecosystem :)

justizin• 12 years ago

"how would you propose that in-app purchasing not go through GMS? Some general platform API to allow the app to do an in-app purchase with whoever wants to be a “purchase provider?”"

Actually, yes. That is how I would propose that an in-app purchasing system not go through GMS.

blueblob• 12 years ago

Although I generally think most of the arguments in this article are bad, I do believe that having all purchases go through google can add value because even though I don't trust them with my data, I still trust them with my purchases.

fidotron6• 12 years ago

The problem is one of authenticating the store to prevent someone from writing an app that simply said you've bought stuff when you haven't.

As it stands if you've written an Android store you can (and at least Amazon and Verizon have) write your own in app purchase mechanism as well.

ufmace• 12 years ago

That was my first thought too, but there's big problems with that if you think about it for a while.

Say they did something like that. Now, I am going to build my own "purchase provider" that just says I paid without ever charging anything. How are you going to stop me from doing that? Somebody would have to authenticate "purchase providers" as actually charging money and paying it to the developer. Either you'd have to manually embed keys for authorized providers in your app, or trust some third-party to authenticate providers. Either way puts you pretty much where you are now.

Then there's the matter of developer authentication. Now I build a "purchase provider", but I'm an honest one who wants to actually bill the customer and pay the developer. How do I know who to pay? No developer has signed up in my system yet, so I have to use some kind of universal token to identify the developer of an app that somebody is making purchases from and tell them they have money to claim from me. It would have to be email, since what else would work? And we all have seen how secure email is lately. Anybody who managed to put a different address into the app or somehow intercept email to your address could claim the money.

Then we have payment splits. The Google app store has a published payment split between themselves and the developer that you implicitly agree to by publishing there. If you had universal "purchase providers" that anybody could implement, who decides what their payment split is? If I wanted my payment provider to split 90% to me and 10% to you, how do you stop that? If we have a third-party doing provider authentication, what are their standards for what payment splits are acceptable?

There's probably even more issues that I haven't thought of yet. If you want to do purchasing like this, you pretty much have to make your own app store and define a proprietary API for it that app developers must explicitly implement.

RyanZAG• 12 years ago

He's not wrong though - competing with Google on Android is definitely possible. I think the best step would be to create an OSS (GNU?) distribution of Android in the same way we have Linux. While Linux doesn't have all the same proprietary apps and services that Windows does, OSS devs have stepped up and provided some really great alternatives. We need to do the same for Android.

The only thing we are really missing is a large OSS project to serve as a base.

fnordfnordfnord• 12 years ago

Cyanogen?

ZeroGravitas2• 12 years ago

What I was gong to suggest, with F-Droid as the repository/app store.

chestnut-tree• 12 years ago

"The only thing we are really missing is a large OSS project to serve as a base."

What about Firefox OS?

mdwrigh29• 12 years ago

Which uses an Android kernel, and Gonk is mostly based off of Android userspace code (input, rild, most if not all of the HALs, etc.)

adrianlmm6• 12 years ago

Peter Bright gives a very good comeback to the statements that the google employee made.

With Android 4.4 I felt disappointed that it was just an excuse to integrate more the platform to google services, so, google become the real an unquestionable controller of Android.

The "Android is an open platform" is just a fallacy.

hahainternet7• 12 years ago

The "Android is an open platform" is just a fallacy.

No it isn't, you're just lying. The response lays out in detail how Android (ie AOSP) is more open than any alternative.

Stop talking crap.

zwattt4• 12 years ago

AOSP ... is more open

AOSP is not an Android, stop lying, googleboy.

threeseed• 12 years ago

Being "more open" than the alternatives doesn't make it "open".

mdwrigh29• 12 years ago

With Android 4.4 I felt disappointed that it was just an excuse to integrate more the platform to google services, so, google become the real an unquestionable controller of Android.

What parts of the platform became more proprietary in 4.4? The only thing I can think of is Hangouts for SMS, but even then the SMS app still works and is updated to use the new messaging APIs introduced in KK, it just isn't the default on Nexus devices any more.

adrianlmm6• 12 years ago

Google music, the camera, etc.., you need really need to inform your self.

Oletros5• 12 years ago

Peter Bright gives a very good comeback to the statements that the google employee made

No,they are almost as bad as the article.

And it is funny that he tries to discuss about Android implementation with Dianne Hackborn.

adrianlmm6• 12 years ago

That's your opinion, not mine.

alexeisadeski32• 12 years ago

I don't understand how this is even a discussion.

Not only is AOSP completely open and forkable, THERE IS A COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL ANDROID FORK OUT THERE - and it's called Kindle Fire OS.

The existence of this conversation, this "controversy," is confusing to me.

guelo• 12 years ago

The real issue is that the open source world doesn't have an answer to the rise of the cloud. As the integration of the phone and the cloud becomes more central, it becomes impossible for open source to provide a matching experience. The open source movement was born when the pendulum was swinging from the centralized mainframe to the PC revolution. But now as the pendulum is swinging back to centralized computing there will be fewer chances for small individualistic rebels to make an impact.

betterunix8• 12 years ago

There are two free software answers to "the cloud:"

1. Open APIs that allow useful, meaningful, and complete interoperability between different services and local software. This is a compromise that allows cloud services to continue to be proprietary while not locking users in to any one particular service or platform.

2. The Affero GPL, which requires service providers to make their source available to their users.

Personally I think that (1) is not only a more realistic option, but in the long run a more beneficial option for users.

stcredzero2• 12 years ago

1. Open APIs that allow useful, meaningful, and complete interoperability between different services

Also: competition. A lot of people only put up with things Facebook, Google, and Apple get up to because they feel there's no viable alternative that meets their needs. A climate that fosters competition better will encourage upstarts.

lutusp7• 12 years ago

The real issue is that the open source world doesn't have an answer to the rise of the cloud.

Nonsense. you're speaking as though open-source and cloud storage are somehow related or in competition. But they're orthogonal -- one can obviously make open-source applications available from the cloud, and you can construct the cloud's infrastructure out of open-source elements.

The open source movement was born when the pendulum was swinging from the centralized mainframe to the PC revolution.

That's true, but the two were coincidental and unrelated. Correlation doesn't prove causation.

But now as the pendulum is swinging back to centralized computing there will be fewer chances for small individualistic rebels to make an impact.

Wait, what? How does open-source relate to centralized computing? For that matter, how does cloud storage relate to centralized computing? It's not as though cloud storage requires a central repository, any more than the Internet must be a central repository in order to function.

Just one example: Linux (a) dominates the Internet's servers and (b) is open-source.

betterunix8• 12 years ago

"Just one example: Linux (a) dominates the Internet's servers and (b) is open-source."

...and untold millions of lines of changes to the Linux kernel are kept secret and are not at all available to other Linux users or even to Linux contributors. That is exactly the sort of the thing the GPL was meant to prevent.

Furthermore, while it is true that quite a bit of web services and "cloud computing" was built with free software, the effect is very different than distributing free software on desktops. If you do not like some new feature of the Linux kernel, you can just not use it -- nobody forces you to upgrade, and in extreme cases it is possible to fork the project. On the other hand, if you do not like a new feature in Facebook...tough luck, you have no authority. Similarly, if you want a new feature in the Linux kernel, you can add it -- maybe Linus won't merge it with the official source, but you can still have the feature and distribute it to others. Your next great idea for a GMail feature is irrelevant, because you cannot add features to GMail.

falcolas2• 12 years ago

I'm going to freely admit, this is a biased comment, which probably doesn't belong here, but I think it has to be said.

This isn't the first time that Ars Technica, an otherwise reasonable source of information, has published an utter crap article written by Peter Bright.

If Ars wants to maintain any shred of credibility (and a technically intelligent readership) in the future, they need to can this author, or label all of his articles as "op-ed", because that's the best that can be said of them. These articles contain no facts, no intelligent reasoning; just a spewing of one man's ill-formed opinions. Ars has already lost my paid subscription (and my ad revenue) due to other crap articles by this author, and I can't imagine them not losing more as a result of this article.

Get rid of him, Ars. You'll be better off for it.

ZeroGravitas2• 12 years ago

I'd love to think they would be better off, but I assume their analytics are telling them right now that cheap trolling increases ad impressions more than journalistic hard work.

falcolas2• 12 years ago

I would hope that Ars' editorial staff realizes that short term gains at the cost of long term losses is not worth it.

Then again, this is hardly the first P.B. story that's caused controversy and caused Ars readership/legitimacy, so I am probably wrong.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

ART is in AOSP. Had Google intended to create a two-speed Android, that would have been the place to turn AOSP into a second class citizen.

Kindle Fire will run on ART. Heck of a technology to give to an ecosystem competitor.

A Google employee's critique of the Ars Technica Android unforkable article

Related Stories