edit: nevermind:
"KaiOS is based on the Firefox OS open-source project and we are committed to abide by the rules of the applicable open source licenses. Therefore, we’ll make the source code available to the extent required by the applicable open source licenses."
So that's a no on giving back to the B2G which born thee. Nice. Another closed-source OS is just what the mobile space needs.
That being said, I'm trying to get us to open source the "base" version which is provided to OEMs.
Can I assume you're involved with KaiOS development? Android vendors have a terrible reputation about pushing security updates in a timely manner (or at all for devices that aren't the current flagship). Do you have any plans to contractually force or otherwise encourage vendors to push security updates?
That's a bit disingenous. Android wasn't shipping anything and it always released sources, as far as I know. Same for almost any Linux distribution out there. Common courtesy calls for distributing at least "release" versions, like RedHat and even Apple do.
That, to me, sounds like you're currently taking the minimalist "we'll release the bare minimum we are legally forced to, and nothing else" stance, which is basically equivalent to "we are not going to give back anything if we can avoid it".
I do hope this will change in the future, although given the realities of embedded development (cut-throat and all), I wouldn't be surprised if it never did. I think I'll keep rooting for more open players in the space.
There was this project for FirefoxOS to support J2ME apps -- https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet It would be great to have something like that for "nostalgic" reasons. Many feature phones' users remember J2ME apps, games especially, very fondly. Check out also this J2ME project, which could potentially be ported to KaiOS as well: https://github.com/XerTheSquirrel/SquirrelJME
Also, have you considered some kind of support for "content blocking" (like in iOS, or in the form of typical browser plugin-ins), of course, I'm not saying that ANY content should be blocked by default. But taking into account that devices with KaiOS wouldn't be very powerful, it could be really useful to have such an option to avoid "unnecessary" stuff when browsing the Internet...
Anyway, keep up good work!
If you don't make it open source, that challenge will be levied at every opportunity, and rightly so.
Which is funny because Mozilla tried that shortly before abandoning the whole project.
Or maybe the phone partners figured out that they could run the project themselves and when mozilla axed it they just moved on.
I wish Google would define a "standard" like Intel has with what is and what isn't an "Ultrabook". As in, to be a "Nexus" phone it must have a minimum resolution of ..., it must last for x hours of video playback and x hours of wifi use, it must have the damn alert-killing side switch, it must have a camera of a minimum quality (megapixel/zoom/can record at 1080p@60hz), etc...
Google should be defining what an Android phone is in terms of hardware; define a brand other makers can adopt so customers can trust the standard to at least cater to those needs. And that isn't even getting into how fucking awful the Google Play store is. What a malware magnet.
Sorry this is somewhat off-topic, I just feel this is how Google has lost us and why we seek alternatives.
Famous quote: "quantity has a quality all its own".
The strength of Android is that you can customize it. Some people like Touchwizz. I prefer oxygenOS.
OnePlus's phones have that, and it's great. Of course, OnePlus also have some nasty privacy failures … but then, Apple have some nasty openness failures.
I'd love to be able to just buy a decent phone, with a replaceable battery (because the batteries fail first), which I, not some vendor, own.
Sadly, the newer generation does not have that. Google given up the update to the vendor, which in turn do what they do best, not updating the goddamn phone.
If I were to add to the brief spec I defined above I'd also require speakers at both ends of the phone for stereo output, and require keeping the 3.5mm jack (yay S9?). I still think Samsung likes to make slippery bar-soap phones that I cant hold.
I still don't like how permissions are done even on LineageOS - I wish I could grant access to the camera for an app "for the next 5 minutes".
Now I'm really off topic. I shall diminish ~
https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/treble
Large parts of Android-the-OS is implemented in middleware running on the same runtime as Android's apps, which should have made this kind of portability possible earlier in the development of Android. But here it is.
It's about as responsive as my Pixel (i.e. not very responsive, not even close to iPhone) and it's a great size.
The problem is, as always, the battery. If I could replace that and install PostMarket, I might use it as my daily driver.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Motorola+Moto+X+Battery+Replace...
I haven't used Postmarket because no software can fix the battery issues with that phone.
If I could easily swap out the battery and also install Postmarket, I would do both. As of now, I can't get a new battery and will therefore do neither.
It is somewhat ironical that the Wintel monopoly that standardized so much of PC space ultimately ended up helping Linux desktops, despite the grumblings of UNIX greybeards.
In contrast, there is no obvious need to move away from Android, and if you don't like it, you can move to the iPhone. The Mac was not a good alternative 15 years ago.
Also, I think terrible security and user experience applies to Android now too.
My main reason to use Linux distributions was to be able to do university work at home.
After all I wouldn't be able to buy an Aix or DG/UX license, the UNIXes we had on campus before computing department started to deploy Linux based PCs.
I always dual booted and tried a few times to just use it as desktop, but eventually gave up on it.
My travel netbook and mobile devices are the only gear still running some form of Linux.
I partially switched to Linux just as an adventure, because I could.
After I got past the initial "This is really weird"-phase, Linux was an eye opener. Other than that I use Windows at work, I have not looked back since.
Strictly speaking it is not about GNU/Linux per se, but Windows vs. Unix. One of the BSDs could fill that place just as well, but on Linux, hardware support is usually better, plus the mainstream Linux distros tend to be more friendly to lazy or non-techie users.
Are you serious? Android still has a massive fragmentation problem because OEMs/carriers don't provide updates.
I don't disagree as of now.
If there'll ever come a time when Android has its Windows security moment, the trigger this time should be Privacy.
Just my humble opinion.
OTOH, the Linux- / free Unix-desktop has come a long way since then. For my personal machines, I think GNU/Linux plus MATE makes for a much better desktop than Windows these days. (Admittedly, my taste might be slightly non-mainstream.)
No std msc or service manager gui available either. Some of these existed but were lost in a CADT.
You can get plenty of info about the health of the drive while the system is running.
There isn't much reason to run a filesystem check unless something is wrong.
Speaking of services it's extremely easy to query which services are running and enable and disable stuff. Plus there aren't 85 different things running.
If you insist you can run something like https://github.com/mmstick/systemd-manager
I’m not a fan of Microsoft biz practices but if you think Linux has nothing to learn from windows (especially on the desktop) you are mistaken.
Basically you were holding it wrong.
https://rthomsen6.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/introducing-syste...
Unrelated to WebOS, but the Pre's wireless charging accessory is IMHO still the best to date.
On the MeeGo OS used on the Nokia N9, it requires swiping in one direction a couple of times to get to the open tasks screen. You can then press and hold on the screen to allow for closing any app(s) you want and click on the done button after you're finished.
Closing an app requires just swiping from the top to the bottom. IIRC, WebOS required you to swipe upward to get to the task screen and then swipe upward again to close the app.
I much prefer WebOS's approach. On the other hand, in those days you wouldn't really have more than a few apps open at once, unlike iPads which could have dozens of apps or browser tabs. So who knows if WebOS's style would translate well to today's usage patterns.
> Hardware Kill Switches for Camera, Microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and Baseband
but is somewhat unclear on the baseband firmware:
> The mobile baseband will most likely use ROM loaded firmware, but a free software kernel driver.
About baseband, as others note, I get that it's a minefield.
But really, hardware is not a problem from a marketing point of view, from a competition point of view. You can make FxOS to run on the best hardware with supported drivers, but the ecosystem is so behind, eventually users would move away from it. That was the real problem. Consequently, developers would likely give up on FxOS.
Samsung's are all based on Android - which tops iOS's market share by nearly 70%. Neither Ubuntu Touch nor FxOS had any real chances.
If IBM could have chosen a free and open DOS for its first PCs, the market would look very different today.
If Mozilla had simply acquired LineageOS, worked on MicroG to reach feature parity with Play Services, added Firefox for Android and their own app store in addition to Google Play via MicroG, and resold flagship Android phones with that as well as offering it to OEMs, they would have had significant success at very little cost.
In fact, they still could do that.
So, while Samsung may ship Tizen and Windows Phone, they may not build phones for Amazon (which caused Amazon a lot of problems back in the day - where will you find a company making portable electronics that will make them a white-label product and not making android phones).
2. MicroG depends on Google's servers, so Google can pull the carpet out of them at any time. And where will you get those millions of apps if Google doesn't let you access the App store? Look at the difficulty Amazon has at getting apps into its store, and it's a larger company willing to pay devs to switch apps to Amazon store. And all the hacks that people use will be closed by Google once they get popular.
Now sure, you can use MicroG as a porting library (so if I have a closed source app relying on firebase I can trivially switch to relying on MicroG and Mozilla's back end - kind of like wine), but you'll still have to recreate all of Google's apps anyways (there's no way Google will publish their apps on an Android fork) and also those apps written by those who don't care to port (unlike wine - where I can use the OEM CD or EXE from the OEM website, there's no official way to get apks out of Play Store)
As for Play Services, they could just have a team whose job is to make MicroG work exactly like Play Services so that all apps work including the Google apps.
The only Google app that you need to replicate is the Play Store client (or really, the downloader, since you can just use the Play Store website for the UI) and then the user can install all the Google apps from the Play Store.
As for getting developers to put apps in their store, it's certainly much easier than getting them to write another app.
Instead, they could have gotten all the Android apps and the popularity of Android essentially for free.
It's even possible they could have overtaken Google and became the effective steward of the Android platform, since Google doesn't offer a version that can be installed by users and also doesn't offer their version to OEMs with no strings attached.
Again, they still can do that now, since there still isn't a version of Android that runs on any phone other than LineageOS, which is relatively underfunded.
[obviously what Mozilla would gain from this is market share for Firefox for Android]
On the other hand, I'm already a KaiOS customer because they power the phone I want: the one that makes calls and handles text messages, and then gives me a high-speed network for my computer. I spend about a quarter of my time in India; while there I got a Jio phone and liked it so much I found a KaiOS device that works in the US as well.
No they wouldn't have. They would not get Google Play Services and your MicroG "solution" is ridiculous from a commercial perspective and a violation from a TOS perspective that would be shut down by Google.
>It's even possible they could have overtaken Google and became the effective steward of the Android platform
I don't think you understand the army of developers it takes to maintain and enhance Android on an annual basis nor the millions of dollars it costs Google. To even suggest that they would have overtaken Google and become the steward of the Android platform is ridiculous.
If I have Firefox and thus can load up any Google web page, do I need Google Play Services?
There's no point in having Android if you can't run Android apps, and most Android apps users want are now dependent on Google's proprietary libraries (Play Services). So why would you want an Android fork if you aren't going to be able to run Android apps? Might as well go with KaiOS at that point.
If one does want or need native apps (e.g. for security), then is it possible for a third party to emulate Google Play Services? Or do they use a certificate to prevent third-party clones?
Why would they need to acquire LineageOS when they can just fork it for free?
>worked on MicroG to reach feature parity with Play Services
That would have been a TOS violation and would have been instantly shut down by Google.
>their own app store
You can't really compete with the Play store and developers wouldn't bother with it.
>they would have had significant success at very little cost.
No they wouldn't have. It would have reached the same outcome as their Android based FireFox OS did and even faster due to the TOS violations your suggesting.
I know the person behind this, but not sure of the status
FirefoxOS and Ubuntu Touch looked promising, but they lacked good hardware to run on. I'd really like to try Plasma, but I don't like any of the devices it supports.
PostmarketOS is just a way to turn an old phone into a Raspberry Pi type device, but maybe that's the first step in a truly unified mainline kernel for all mobile devices.