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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

All Huawei has to do is get it adopted as a standard in China. Then suddenly Samsung, Apple, Sony, and all the other non-Chinese companies have to add it to their devices to keep a billion customers. Then it gets used outside of China because it is ubiquitous.

This is a classic embrace, extend, extinguish play.

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Or it could end up like the Chinese GPS, as in phones in China can use it but outside no one cares.

Phones and devices can support that, but if outside China, it has no one to talk to.

Though, even in that case it can lead to backdoors.

Navigation satellites are inherently geo limited. Can the Chinese system be used outside the Chinese mainland?

It depends on the orbit. AFAIK GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo have global coverage (my phone can see all of them in the US).

The Chinese system is BeiDou. If Wikipedia is to be believed, they will only achieve global coverage in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeiDou

That is not my point. It can be Geo limited by the OS.

If !(in China) _disable_

Although even that will cause unnecessary headache for hardware and OS vendors and will/might still lead to new security issues and backdoors.

Problem is...you (the chip-maker) pay licenses to the satellite-owners, if your chip does not work outside china, no money. The Chinese 'GPS' is probably just for military or for the independence from other systems.

Yes, but hardware vendors need to decide if they put the chip in all devices and reduce manufacturing/design/testing costs, or put the chip on a Geo specific model and incur higher mfg/design/testing costs.

It's always a tradeoff and the cost of the chip in itself is not the sole decision driver.

These headaches presumably are from the dizziness induced by introducing location checks inside the location determining code.

No..not really, standard's in a single nation (especially china) will NOT swap over to other nations, Apple etc will probably make a dual-stack, but to give up IP-Support just to run after china is really not a option for most of the country's.

Apple made "sign in with apple" mandatory for all apps with third-party sign in options, which also ends up spreading beyond their app ecosystem into the web since user's who start with the app wouldn't be able to log in elsewhere otherwise.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/06/03/sign-in-with-appl...

This would be a step beyond that, but what if China mandated phones can't be sold there unless manufacturer's phones in other regions support their standard.

Then apple would probably say goodbye to the Chinese-market (witch is already a good idea for a 'privacy' respecting company)

And that sign-in is just for china, not outside of it.

That's why we're all watching EVDs right now.

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