If Android is not freedom what is iOS then? No inter app communication, no exchangeable launcher/lock screen/ keyboard, real multitasking came just since this fall, no real resolution independency, no nothing.
Who cares? The article writes about Android. Just because iOS i even less free does not make Android better.
- Google does not have a war against rooters. They try to close exploits but any pure google android phone can be rooted with no effort.
- Android allows almost ANY application to be installed on non-rooted devices. Exception is applications which require root, which won't function.
- Android allows for things like Humble Bundle, which is impossible on iOS.
- Android allows me to chose any email client I want with full support of cross-application features. Any browser I want. Any instant messaging program I want. Any chat program I want. Etc.
IDK that feels pretty good to me.
The freedom problems with Android are more to do with driver support. Until an app development SDK is self hosting it's a bad sign too, but none of the mobile OS candidates has that right now.
Who cares about the layout of a button and some images in a page (as theres little value in this code) if the real brain in applications will be closed behind the clouds?!
We need more devices that can run independently, with open source code and preferably in a distributed and autonomous way..
Clouds are anti-hacker and anti-opensource; if a user platform help this trend to grow(as FirefoxOS do), it helps for more closed- source and hidden secrets.. completely against the hacker spirit of collaboration and openess
Then it promotes the whole "search" part. That seems to be links to websites mixed in with applications, which does seem confusing and doesn't sit well with having data independence. But that's just the same as using web sites on Android.
On the positive side, I'd trust Mozilla to maintain their first-party code as free software. The core phone apps are not likely to go proprietary, as seems to be happening on Android.
That may seem ridiculous, but the hooks are not there in Web APIs to do peer to peer communication for example, let alone peer to peer based on discovery of nearby devices. Chrome OS even lacks zero conf network support. Aside from Mozilla (who seem overly attached to the support of carriers) the people pushing the advancement of the web platform have zero interest in altering this direction, and in fact would prefer we go further in it.
I would be far keener on FF OS or Chrome OS if they supported sandboxed node.js on the clients, and worked on extending the API from node.js, not the web browser model.
There's a lot of people buying android devices, thinking they are supporting the open-source movement..
So its better not compare the worst(iOS) with the bad(Android) when it comes to openness; lets compare it to how it should be, according to Android PR; what they are saying and what they are practicing are very distant things; and thats the most pure example of hypocrisy
"We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard"
- Steve Jobs, 2010
experience of Android is only on Google's Android, this is my point, if you want to have the true Android Experience, than you have to use Google's Android because Google Apps only run on official Android OS
If you would like to make changes and build your own OS X kernel, instructions to do that are at
http://shantonu.blogspot.com/2013/10/building-xnu-for-os-x-1...