Hacker News Reader

Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

90% of the objections here seem to be "I can't use Google's online services very easily without using Google Play", which is precisely why Google's spent the past few years piping as much of Android's runtime as possible through Google Play. The rest are mainly just that the main streaming and social media companies don't have open source clients.

View on HN

I'd always heard that moving more and more functionality into play services was their strategy for end-running the carrier fragmentation problem.

That's the crux of it.

Though Google have fixed it in such a way that's benefited them by consolidating services and potential data collection for revenue raising.

I've not used anything but a Nexus of Pixel in years. But carrier fragmentation (and with it, the difficulty for OTA patching!) is a much bigger risk to the Android ecosystem and it's uses than closed source code.

The problem more generally seems to be “I'm locked into proprietary services that don't allow me to use libre software”. I suggest that those services therefore aren't very good.

If libre software fails to compete with a proprietary alternative in terms of features, it's reasonable to criticise the libre software. Similarly, if a proprietary service fails to compete with a libre alternative in terms of choice of how you use it, it's reasonable to criticise the proprietary service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com