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A comment on Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?. Parent comment

Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by ikeboy on Sunday December 09, 2018 @08:34AM (#18640775)
Those apps are making a conscious decision to exclude phones/roms not certified by Google. That's their choice.

Generally hardware warranty will remain if it's purely a hardware issue - you can always flash back anyway.

Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions. If app vendors choose to discriminate against those versions that doesn't make it unfree any more than software supporting windows and not Linux makes Linux unfree

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Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by notacoward on Sunday December 09, 2018 @08:46AM (#18640822)
> Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions.

I don't think that's enough to make it free software, and "free software in the sense..." is nonsensical. Free software would guarantee the continuance of that freedom. Since that guarantee doesn't exist, Google could place limitations on the Play Store at any time. The fact that they haven't makes the example less clear, but it doesn't make Android free software. Even Google doesn't claim that it is.

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Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by ikeboy on Sunday December 09, 2018 @08:48AM (#18640828)
Play store isn't part of Android. Even if it was only available to specific phones, that wouldn't make Android unfree.

Play store isn't open source at all.

Amazon was able to take Android and put it on their extremely popular devices with 0 support from Google, no play store. That's what I call freedom

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Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by SSLy on Sunday December 09, 2018 @03:57PM (#18643215)
Play store isn't part of AOSP.
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Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by zamazingo on Sunday December 09, 2018 @03:27PM (#18643070)
> Play store isn't part of Android.

It is extremely well integrated into it, by design.

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Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by dahart on Sunday December 09, 2018 @10:28AM (#18641244)
> Those apps are making a conscious decision to exclude phones/roms not certified by Google. That's their choice.

Isn’t the entire point of Google’s certification process to encourage app vendors to make that choice?

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Re:Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again? by ikeboy on Sunday December 09, 2018 @10:32AM (#18641271)
No, only for apps that value certified behavior over accessibility. Typically this is payments (high liability for fraud, higher fraud rates from non-certified users), DRM, and multiplayer gaming (prevent cheating).
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