The only future is a real linux phone, debian or ubuntu mobile, where one day there will be effortless desktop/tablet/mobile unified development. Why push for developers to waste time porting between c++ and java?
Google has open sourced a fully featured mobile operating system, with an already free kernel, an optimized and secure app runtime for mobile applications that they keep on improving, a completely functional and usually well-liked user interface, open development tools and even a set of open source core applications needed for basic smartphone functionality. As this article demonstrates, Android is perfectly usable if you can get over the first world problem of no direct access to Google's services.
People have been absolutely free to do whatever they want with this complete OS what they want for years, and Android comes with no obligation whatsoever to lock down phones. There is absolutely no reason why any alternative to Android, including Ubuntu and FirefoxOS, would be any different at all if or when they gain enough popularity. Phone vendors and carriers will continue to lock down the hardware they sell and be reluctant to share code. There is just nothing different about these alternatives compared to Android.
The problems of locking down and shitty attitude towards open source is a problem with the market, not with Android.
> all the man power being donated to the project is just going to line google's pockets and lock us further into closed hardware and barely opensource phones.
Nobody except Google (and some minor contributions from phone vendors) contributes to core Android. It's an example of an extreme cathedral model[1], where only members of the Open Handset Alliance[2] have access during development. There are many open source forks/derivatives that only help you in increasing the freedom with what you can do with your phone.
> Why push for developers to waste time porting between c++ and java?
Because there are considerable advantages to running in Android's runtime when it comes to resource management, security, and because one consistent application framework is better than many competing libraries creating an inconsistent mess on desktop Linux.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
Its interesting how Google forces handset makers to ship Google's proprietary software if they wish to use the Android "brand". However, they don't care if handset makers ship device driver code thus crippling the ability of anyone wishing to create a fully working AOSP ROM. I suppose in Googles eyes, Android = more data for Google to mine/sell/profit-from. Not surprising or disappointing. The Advertising business is not pretty.
I find it somewhat of a cognitive dissonnance. People complain about Google's increasing grasp on common Android whereas the most compelling parts of the system are fully available for free unlimited use by everyone. Plug in your cloud provider of choice, or none at all, and you're ready to go. Yet people don't complain about the full propietary lock-in on other platforms.
Also, please stop the tiresome meme that "Google/FB/MS/Cloud company X sells your data". These companies sell personalized advertisements, they do not sell your data.
Yeah..AOSP "works".. if you happen to have the driver binary blobs (which are not open source), which only work for some android builds on a handful of devices which are blessed by google. Open source indeed.
Oh and those binary blobs.. those are LICENSED. You are not allowed to make an android build and distribute it, if it contains those blobs. And without those blobs the ROMS are useless because you need drivers for basic things like your camera, phone radio, etc.
Google have taken the Open Source ideology and bastardized it to fit their commercial needs. And look, I have no problems with companies making money, but then you don't get to also say how "open source friendly" you are, when clearly you're just using open source as a marketing ploy.
>These companies sell personalized advertisements, they do not sell your data.
Feel free to explain this clause in Google's privacy policy.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
>We may share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like publishers, advertisers or connected sites.
Ah you're one of the people that thinks open source also comes with a mandatory ideology. That it's not good enough if source is released for everyone unless there are also other strings attached. We can leave this in disagreement then.
> Feel free to explain this clause in Google's privacy policy.
You have to redefine a lot of words if "sharing aggregated non-personally identifiable information" (e.g. statistics of "how many people aged 18-25 are seeing my ad?") is to mean the same as "selling your data".
https://www.google.com/policies/technologies/
> We don’t sell users’ personal information.
Now, who is redefining words?
>That it's not good enough if source is released for everyone unless there are also other strings attached.
Where can I find the source for those binary blobs?
>You have to redefine a lot of words if "sharing aggregated non-personally identifiable information" is to mean the same as "selling your data"
Thankfully, no redefinition is needed. That information is MY DATA. Sharing DOES NOT exclude monetary transactions. My general experience has been that companies do not share anything of value for free.
>(e.g. statistics of "how many people aged 18-25 are seeing my ad?")
e.g. aggregated statistics of people aged 20-21 living in the zipcode XXXXX who have lung cancer. Oops.. turns out, its just one person.
>We don’t sell users’ personal information.
Tell that to Google. They're contradicting themselves.
As well as a monopoly market share of smartphones, it's now expanding into other areas such as cars, TVs (again), robots, internet delivery and so on.
Monopoly market shares are fairly common in technology, but it becomes dangerous when any single company gets to control too many of them....
The Mozilla foundation has our best interests at heart much more than Google and while it's not C++, html5/javascript is certainly an open enough platform which basically everything has started to target anyways.
Sure, a pure linux phone would be cool in some ways, but FirefoxOS seems much closer, realer, and every bit as awesome.
The purpose of reimplementation is generally to screw consumers. There's nothing special about a phone that requires you to put everything into a VM. I don't know why firefox is doing it. I did order a development phone, though, because if it takes off, I want a share:)
To make it more accessible. Way more people can make web page than make QT or GTK GUI. Way more people can do Javascript than can program in C or C++.
That means, that everyone is stuck with html and js, but I think it's worth it.
Linux phones are real. I've been using one exclusively for the past 5 years.
Right now, my only three hopes are Jolla, people attempting to port Freemantle to GTA04, and the people just trying to bring the Hildon UI to jessie which also runs on GTA04.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=93251 http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91308
I probably should mention UbuntuOS as another hope, but I simply don't trust Ubuntu to deliver something that resembles traditional Linux. If they do, I'm in.
My hopes for Tizen were bashed to hell by this: https://www.tizen.org/irclogs/%23tizen.2013-01-20.log.html
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterman - well known for http://www.enlightenment.org/ )
Phone manufacturers aren't interested in being servants, only masters.
If you look at the dividing line between proprietary and open source stuff coming out of Google, the usual deciding factor is whether it relies on their (proprietary) server side components to operate. Google is all about the cloud so a lot of useful stuff does rely on that. In Play services we see things like Maps (needs the servers), Wallet and in-app billing (needs the servers), G+ (needs the servers), multiplayer gaming (you get the idea), GDrive, ads, cloud messaging etc. There's one or two things in there that maybe don't rely on the cloud (I don't know enough about Cast to say) but that's mostly it.
So if you find all your apps are relying on Google Play Services what it really means is that the bar has simply been raised, and now people expect apps that deeply integrate with services provided by huge, expensive datacenters.
Ideally Play Services would be a shim that different providers could satisfy. It isn't, but Android has lots of support for building such things like intent resolution, so if a realistic competitor emerged and developers cared enough to support it, the OS would certainly help them.
In the end, I think it's a good thing that AOSP doesn't have a dependency on some cloud service, be it Google's or someone else's. The unfortunate downside is that developers might forget that the cloud service they want is not available.
Yes, using something like C# and Mono would be a huge win.
It's a shame that the software landscape is so dominated by large corporations, who demand a tithe of our data every time we want to use a device.
We could call the infrastructure that makes this possible ... a virtual machine: