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I've never seen Google put out that vibe. If anything they're proud of it. I'm not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?

Exactly this. This situation has nothing to do with hackers or programming or even work of any kind. It's just about certain people who think differently when in certain situations and that leads people to label them "introverts" when in fact it's just that you can say their mental faculties lie elsewhere.

What exactly do you feel it's lacking?

It's not good to attribute all that credit to iTunes. Amazon and Google may have been able to negotiate other terms. Because unlike Apple, neither Amazon or Google had a separate MP3 player and thus no incentive to enforce DRM.

Seems that every thread has someone claim that if it wasn't for Apple, X would never exist and I'm frankly tired of it.

Nokia is actually discouraging devs from using Windows Phone design patterns and encouraging Android design guidelines on the Nokia X.

http://developer.nokia.com/resources/library/nokia-x-ui/ux-c...

Substitute magazines instead of webpages and you've got an answer to one of the most famous interview questions.

dammit, when did trolls like this make their way to HN?

...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

Kept secret by whom?

AOSP is open source, period. Just because Google apps aren't doesn't make the entire thing closed. The binary blobs and baseband firmware might as well be on any "open" phone. The issue here is not whether Android phones are open or not, it's whether phones in general can truly be "open" or not.

But if Walmart decides not to stock your item, there's still Target or somewhere else for a customer to go to to get it. But if Apple bans your app, the entire iOS userbase will never see it.

This is exactly it. Many people don't realize this when they say Android is not open. But you could install F-Droid, which is a repository of open source Android apps and you could pretty much live without Google at all on Android. You would lose many conveniences but you will still be able to make use of all your phone's smarts.

I don't think the openness of the desktop world was because of Microsoft. If any other company had taken over, we would've seen pretty much the same thing imo.

In today's mobile world, Apple and others could learn from the drawbacks of the desktop world and implement a "better" system, at least in some respects. It has certainly helped their revenue.

I just had an OS course with this textbook this last semester. Really good book. I'm surprised to see this on HN.

Are you kidding me? They tell me exactly what data they collect and for what purpose. To say that is malware is either extreme sarcasm or extreme stupidity.

I don't see why such a big deal is being made of this. If users want it, they can install the app from the CM website. The Windows app is also being installed from their website.

Google doesn't want people to hold it liable for potential bricking of devices and took it off its store. What's the issue here?

Well for me personally, it's been a long series of small stuff that convinced me that they were an engineering organization first and a for-profit company next.

I remember when Android 2.3 was released and at one of the Google dev conferences, a Google engineer answering a question about why "X feature doesn't exist in stock Anroid" answered that Google thought that was too confusing for the lay user and that one could look to the custom ROM community for adding that feature later. It was something that no large company would ever do it seemed to me, That's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I read something of this nature about Google. I'm sure I could pull up others. But that's the one that comes to mind.

But yeah, that was a more open Google undeniably. Before Larry Page took over. Maybe there were a few oases of ideality hiding the vast curtain of reality. But it gave them a soul and connected people to the company. But that's maybe gone now.

I think the problem comes from the fact of treating Google+ like any other social network like Facebook. Google+ is supposed to be an identity layer for all of Google. The fact that they have status update posting, etc is secondary.

Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone number associated with every Google account will help Hangouts. Maybe it will enable sending SMS from the web to any phone and also Voice users can cal from the web from their Google account. Thus, Google achieves their aim of disrupting the carriers and making the phone number irrelevant.

That's just the way I see it anyway.

I highly doubt that malware could brick a phone.

Users in China don't have access to the Play Store and aren't even counted among the activations that Google reports. The reason that there is more piracy in China is because of no access to the Play Store.

Apple still haven't even released a console and Apple apologists are already quick to jump on the "Apple invented everything under the sun" train. Why am I not surprised?

If anything, it's Apple that's copying others here.

Well no I don't agree with it, at least not in the way that you suggest.

And I frankly don't think that Samsung is taking any design clues from anywhere. They don't care what Apple is doing - they do their own thing. And with the next Touchwiz, they will revolutionize Touchwiz UX. That's a fact /s

But seriously, the amount of snark (and hypocrisy imo) in your comment was too much to take.

Which specific Android UI are you talking about? Touchwiz? Sense? LG's UI? Sony's UI? Stock Android?

Personally I can't talk about the other stuff but think stock Android looks and feels great while being extremely functional at the same time.

Sorry to go OT but those lines are not Oppenheimer's originally. They are from the Bhagavad Gita.

So good to see you here. I agree that your app is the best HN app. But please make it remember list scroll position. This one major flaw downgrades an otherwise superb experience.

How did they just hack that billboard with just their phones?

Thanks, I've been looking for something like this.

That's insanely brilliant if you ask me. And on a site called Hacker News, mos people should agree!

Oh I think it's very contestable. I use my Galaxy Nexus one handed all the time in many situations, including on public transport. Can iPhone users please stop saying that their device has the best ergonomics of all time as if the ratio came down from the heavens. I don't see how people can even think something like a perfect size exists suitable for every human being. To each their own.

> Configurability is a huge plus for me. Could you imagine recompiling your phone's kernel? Configuring your phone with dotfiles? Serving webpages and email? Not everyone's cup of tea, and I hope there are more user-friendly options available, but having that power is enticing. I'm looking forward to better multitasking, and multiple user accounts. Also a more open hardware ecosystem, such as USB and HDMI ports, docks, chargers, USB keyboards, maybe a laptop "shell" I can insert my phone into?

FWIW, you can do all these on Android in some form or another.