Comment by aselzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aselzer | Hacker News Reader

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Here's what Google says about the location API:

> This API is not the recommended method for accessing Android location.

> The Google Location Services API [...] is the preferred way to add location-awareness to your app.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/pack...

It seems like Google is intentionally encouraging developers to switch to their closed APIs. Most developers will probably follow what the red warning message says instead of spending more time building another solution.

Google wants to keep control of all Android clone OSs, so they add convenience features to their closed-source libraries, encourage developers to use them, and force phone manufacturers to bundle them with their OS.

Bundling an alternative implementation of the API is probably a bad idea because of copyright.

They deprecated a mapping API in AOSP because AOSP is not tied to a cloud service and should not depend on cloud services. AOSP on its own cannot assume that a mapping service is available, and neither can Android apps. For the same reason, there are no app store, social networking or cloud storage APIs in AOSP. AOSP does not depend on a cloud service.

They introduced a mapping API for Google Maps in Play Services because Play Services contains all client libraries for Google's services. The Google Services APIs are a container for all libraries to consume Google's cloud services.

This is not symptomatic of Google's evilness.

Bundling an alternative implementation of the API is probably a bad idea because of copyright.

That'd be a fun case; you could just use their own arguments in Oracle v. Google against them.

Probably because Google got a lot of negative PR for forcing manufactures away from more accurate Location API implementations so now they need to use a private API as an excuse to kill location service competition in the future.

You can see the internal Google emails here where they note SkyHook was more accurate than their implementation http://www.businessinsider.com/google-skyhook-emails-2011-5?...

And they force Motorola to stop shipping devices unless Motorola agrees to not use SkyHook.

> And they force Motorola to stop shipping devices unless Motorola agrees to not use SkyHook

The trial stated that this was not the case

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