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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

Mobile: dominated by Apple and the faux-open Android.

I have a 3.5 year old phone running Cyanogen Mod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2) and all the sources for it. How is it "faux-open"? It passes the ultimate test: it builds.

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It's faux-open because it's not developed in the open. Google just code-dumps Android after every major release, only OEMs have access to development builds. If you don't get a Google paycheck it's thus very hard to contribute to it as an open project.

It's faux-open because almost every single Android device needs proprietary kernel blobs & firmware to operate almost any non-trivial hardware feature on the device. In practice this pins you to specific kernel versions/APIs, and you're running code you can't change or even audit.

I have a $10 bet with a co-worker that Android 5.0 will remove the ASOP application from standard distribution to force people into the closed source Google+ integrated replacements.

I also have a double down that by Android 6.0, open source Android will effectively be reduced to a boot loader that boots the closed source Google+ Play blob that contains all the system services.

For all the reasons everyone keeps mentioning here: the top apps people want for Android are not open source.

It's not so much that, it's that a rather large percentage of the apps people want for Android won't run on AOSP. They require Android + Google Services, which are all closed.

I think that's what I meant or maybe you mean something else; what kind of thing are you talking about? People want the Google services apps but which apps people want which are not Google apps require Google services?

A large number of apps require Google Services be installed and won't work with bare AOSP anymore. Location services is part of Google Services now, so apps that require it need GS. Every app with in-app purchasing won't work without Google services, so you can forget about most games working on AOSP.

There isn't one Android anymore. There's the base pure open source Android, aka AOSP. There's Android with Google services, which supports things like the Play Store, in-app purchases, location services, etc. There's Amazon's Android fork which has some of their own APIs inserted for in-app purchases and location, but Play Store, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc are unavailable for it. Now there's Nokia's new Android fork which will have its own set of APIs for location, in-app purchases, etc.

If this is an important issue then are there not people working on open source implementations of some of the apps? Maybe we can see a "distribution" of android that comes with f-droid and a host of other open source software preinstalled.

CM is not Android, it's AOSP-based. Android is closed source but it's very similar to AOSP. Same goes for Chrome/ium and Chrome/ium OS.

You can indeed say that most mobile users are on a proprietary OS and most desktop users are on a proprietary browser.

What application did you use to post that comment? Is it Open Source?

I posted from my laptop and used Aurora (Firefox) running on Ubuntu so... technically, yes but in a rather unsatisfying way.

Why is that unsatisfying? And why is it just "technically" open source, is it not open source in spirit as well?

Oh, yeah. Ubuntu and Firefox are completely and satisfyingly opensource but the answer isn't because I didn't use the very phone I was praising. Technically, I used an opensource app but not in a way that would support my point.

There's HN which is MIT licensed.

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=HN&fdid=com....

And HN Droid which is "unlicensed."

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=HN&fdid=com....

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