Perhaps it’s possible to resurrect Blackberry 10 ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_10 ) for example, which seemed to be an impressive piece of engineering that got trampled by Blackberrys failing business. I played with a demo once that could run Android apps and was amazing at multi-tasking thanks to its microkernel architecture. Plus would be governed by Canadian export laws I guess. Perhaps I’m just daydreaming though.
Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing
1: BlackBerry hub is a lot nicer to view messages
2: Smart use of Bezel gestures makes it much easier to actually interact with the phone:
-If you want to access the hub while using an app, you take your thumb from the bottom of the screen and swipe up and to the right. The interface is very forgiving of where you swipe, you can do it without even looking, yet you wont accidentally do it either. If you don't want to fully enter the hub and just take a peak without leaving your app, just do a partial swipe.
-If you want to view all your running apps, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to the middle of the screen, and voila , you get a tile arrangement of your running apps (easier to view than a Rolodex), as well as phone and camera access. And you are also less likely to lose track of what windows you have open. I find lots of peoples android phones have like 30 windows open - this is a fault of its interface.
-If you want to access your apps, swipe up from bottom bezel (shows running apps), and then swipe left, now you can view all your other apps.
-Every app is expected to have its settings menu accessible by swiping down from the top bezel.
There are no silly little cumbersome function buttons at the bottom like Android has (the back/home/apps buttons). Smart use of bezel gestures make this unnecessary.
Everything can be accessed easily in a simple, comfortable gesture with your thumb. As a result, it is a lot faster to use day in day out. And it is not as cluttered as Android.
I am sad the whole world chose Android. It's a crappy interface.
I would love to see an alternative to the iOS / Android duopoly. One way to go would be a better F-Droid ecosystem, and pure AOSP.
But perhaps, even better, a true Linux userland. Maemo lives on with Jolla. Although I hate they still have many closed components.
It's somewhat of an alternative to iOS & Android and feels like running Linux 20 years ago. You are making it harder on yourself.
Running Android apps with microg installed on it provides a decent fallback.
The UI is still very much a work in progress, though. But it's fully open source. Based on GNOME.
I personally don't like gestures. You have to remember and get used to them. Then suddenly in a major update they will change everything to new "cooler" gesture, re-learn and get used to it again. Year after year that happens.
Compare that to buttons. You can always see them, so no need to remember anything. Older people also able to use them.
Of course new shiny mobile os have mixed both together and now we are guinea pigs of modern UI.
Also, have you actually used the BlackBerry gestures? Upon getting a BlackBerry, the very first thing it does is a 1 minute tutorial explaining how to use the gestures. There are only a few. They really aren't complicated. They just take a brief explanation and the reward is you get a more functional interface.
I was a BB Classic user for about 2 years before jumping ship to iOS for practical reasons.
Aside from what you mentioned, I would also bring up that, at least on the Classic, the little touch nub/joystick/trackpad thing was actually incredibly handy. It could act as a mouse, which meant that you could use "Desktop" websites very easily, since you didn't have to try to fat finger tiny little buttons. And since it was essentially a real mouse, hovering worked to, which is nice for sites that required that.
For those that have never seen one, it was a small button, about the size of an iPhone home button, but the surface doubled as a capactive trackpad, I assume with similar tech to those used in laptops, but far more sensitive. I still used the touch-screen a fair amount, but having a mouse was wonderful when you needed it.
The hardware on the Classic was just fantastic... long battery life, good build quality, and a SIM+microSD slot.
There is no need to keep track of them or close them, since the app lifecycle is managed automatically by the system – having a window (called activity on Android) open doesn't mean that the app is running.
Non-foreground activities are automatically suspended by the system and resumed when you return to them. Processes with suspended activites are automacially killed when resources run low.
I got the impression that the United States forced their hand.
Buying both Sailfish and Qt would be peanuts for Huawei.
On the other hand, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, Xiaomi are all not sanctioned by US, all of them offer comparable products with a very similar price and aggressively try to expand their international presence.
So I expect mainly a Oppo/Vivo/OnePlus vs. Xiaomi vs. TCL/Alcatel fight for every slot Huawei is at risk to lose...
They dropped Huawei but had a OnePlus instead.
More Chinese brands pop up every time you try to cut one off ;)
Netflix, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Gmail, Outlook, Chromecast, Dropbox, OneDrive, YouTube, Twitter, Google search ( or duck duck go), Amazon, Amazon video, 2fa authenticator, iftt, Wikipedia, Skype, messenger, Snapchat, Instagram, Waze, Google maps, Ted, Wolfram Alpha, ... I'm pretty sure there is one of them that you use recurringly.
You're going to use that OS?
The only Chinese app I use is eWelink and I really want to flash that device to be more flexible and dump it.
The others I don't use, so it would be OK for me.
So Baidu will be the default search engine on any browser that will be used ( since they can pay).
I would. Nothing in that list is indispensable to me.
That, to me, seems like the real barrier for any new smartphone platform. It happened with Windows Phone, a platform backed by a huge company and even using a very popular language and platform.
I think WebOS and Firefox OS were before their time a little given the rise of progressive web apps, but I still don't think they're a complete answer until they can use native UI elements.
android's large market share is attributable to many things beyond the software itself, which, in any case, owes a heavy debt to Linux. replacing android as an ecosystem will require enticing a large 3rd party developer base to write apps. the worldwide android developer community is full of developers eager to you know, like, make actual money on their apps. if Huawei can create a new app marketplace where that happens for these developers, they should be able to attract abundant talent. they should imitate Apple, not Google.
It used to be [1], but was a victim of HP's incompetence.
Samsung tried this with Tizen, IIRC:
All the craziness about preventing American internet companies from dominating the Domestic Chinese market makes total sense now, doesn't it? If the Chinese economy had been built around Facebook, Google etc. the US would have a lot of leverage, since they're all US-based companies and _must_ comply with whatever US Government asks them to do.
Can you tell me with a straight face that the CIA, NSA etc. do _not_ have active espionage activities in China? Do you think valuable intellectual property and state secrets exist only in the US? That as a result of these activities, the Chinese Government has not also lost lives?
Do not buy so easily into propaganda. Nations will promote themselves as the only "Good" nation to their own people throughout the world. Because the US is a democracy, the US Government has to be very careful and frame the narrative in a way that's not an outright power grab.
Google may lose a lot more business than it seems at first glance.
The US has power over Google. Google has power over android. TFA is about the latter.
BB10, on the other hand, is dead and buried. It would be easier to port something like UBPort's Ubuntu Touch to QNX as an alternative to Android.
But sure, it's also in infotainment systems and at the heart of self-driving cars.
I don't understand what you mean about "US assets, patents, licenses" -- what are you thinking about here?
Even in 2019 email sucks on a modern smartphone compared to blackberry in 2004.
I'm still hoping Apple wakes up and releases messenger for Windows and Android before that ship sails. They claim to be a services company but they still can't seem to let go of tying it to devices.
They've shipped apple music on Andriod since day 1, have had it on Sonos for several years, and in the last 6 months have announced & started to ship TV on tons of actual TVs and non-apple straming boxes.
They've 'let go' of tying services to devices, but iMessage isn't a paid service so the advantage to shipping it on other platforms is lower.
They acquired a product (beast music) that already had an Android version and didn't deprecate it, congrats?
>have had it on Sonos for several years
Sonos had to pay a license and write the code... I'm not sure I'd hold that up as an example of them being open.
> started to ship TV on tons of actual TVs and non-apple straming boxes.
Literally hasn't been released and isn't scheduled to be until "Fall of 2019".
>They've 'let go' of tying services to devices, but iMessage isn't a paid service so the advantage to shipping it on other platforms is lower.
Right, so charge for Messenger on other platforms. Nobody asked them to give it away.
> Literally hasn't been released and isn't scheduled to be until "Fall of 2019".
“A whole new world of entertainment just opened up, because the Apple TV app is now available on select 2018 and 2019 Samsung TVs...”
It's a must-have for the small companies like Xiaomi that only or mostly make smartphones. But they can't afford to develop an android alternative.
Huawei and Samsung make lots of things other than smartphones and can just leave the market if need be. It's less expensive for both of them to shutter their smartphone business than it is to develop a viable android alternative that developers would want to code for and that consumers would want to use.
Either way think it’s going to lead to more mobile OS competition again, which is a good thing
Unlikely.
Launcher, Phone app, Messages, Contacts, Calendar. All proprietary.
Notification API, Location API, SMS APIs and step counter APIs, and even the new app format. All proprietary.
It's a huge undertaking building an app for Android today without using Google's services, and sometimes even impossible.
If you want to verify a user by sending a code through SMS (think Whatsapp sign-up) you either have to use the proprietary API, or you'll be banned from the play store. Using the open source API instead gets you banned because it allows you to read all SMS — and Google never cared to build a new open source API because they already have their proprietary API anyway.
And nowadays you don't have APKs anymore but often app bundles, a special format which only the Play Store can parse.
And if you create a new app today, per default you don't even get the signing key to publish APKs yourself, but only Google gets to keep it.
Replacing those bits is still less work than writing your own entire OS. There are even open source projects to replace those bits.
I remember days when Android was still open, nowadays I’m fighting against the ever-increasing restrictions with my open source apps with every single OS update.
They're saying that there's easy and simple drop in replacements, app and service wise that can hook into better services/ones you host.
I’d be interested in what existing, working solution for a FCM replacement there is? Replacing the apps is simple, replacing the services is the hard part.
If there is a working open FCM alternative, please link it, I’d immediately add support for it in my apps.
Note too that they could have gone the Microsoft IE route and declared various apps as part of the OS. Instead they made their apps separate from Android, and let them succeed by bundling them together. Amazon Fire is at least one example where the Play Store et al. are not installed.
/thread
To answer the big question in this thread. Yes, Huawei can simply fork Android. It will be a pain in the ass, expensive, and not as usable, but they certainly can.
Google's "iron grip" in this instance is only ostensible, not literal and complete. HN is not immune to clickbait.
No, their action actually lead to this in the first place — previously, each manufacturer slightly modified the AOSP apps, now each manufacturer actually builds their entirely custom apps for this purpose, as most can’t or don’t want to license Google’s apps for that purpose (they license the base Google Play apps, but e.g. not messages or the phone app or the launcher).
F-Droid developers manage to do it. Sure, they might not publish their apps on the Google-Play Store (some do, actually) but so what? Any Android user can freely download these entirely open apps and install them on their own, by pre-checking a box in the phone settings. That's still more than you can say about iOS!
Right now I’ve spent months on getting a full clean-room reversed version of Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging system’s client library working, and we’re still nowhere close to that.
The final goal being that we can have one, fully GPL app, which can utilize FCM if it’s installed on the phone, either through the proprietary Google Play Services, or through microG, but which can also work without it otherwise (while also avoiding any tracking or telemetry)
And trust me if I say Google’s making this for us devs harder with every update.
Thank you for that.
Thank you for that! I'm very sceptical of Googles "soft lock-in" and will switch to MicroG Lineage sooner or later. So every inch helps.
We need anti monopoly measures to prevent this kind of thing.
All major 'Android' manufacturers in China somewhat customized launchers with unique UXs. Notification services were always chaotic and every platform provider woke the phone up to checkout pending notifications and drained the battery. And this list of abyss easily expanded to App Markets and other features.
So blocking Huawei from Android might create some troubles but it would definitely not be around these proprietary features where other proprietary counterparts existed, at least in China, Huawei's home market.
Is this only in cases where the app reads the SMS as soon as it's received, and authorizes the user without any further user input?
Because I've done similar authentication stuff for some website logins (like a real estate listings one) where they require me to punch in the code I received via SMS. This was an interaction that occurred independently of Play Services I would imagine.
No. They play an entirely different league of evil. Google is orders of magnitude more evil. Hint: it is very easy to live without oracle.
It's ok.
When you are developing Android apps, you can leverage Google Play Services for all sorts of functionality, such as push notifications and maps, and I would say more apps do use these than don't.
Huawei can still put Android on their phones, but not with Google Play Services. This means that many Android apps just won't work. They also can't supply the Google Play Store, which means that they need an alternate way to distribute apps.
So sure it's possible, but it's not as easy as you perhaps think?
I'm not stating that the problem isn't hard, just that the Fire Phone had other issues.
Their problem isn't implementing these things. Their problem is convincing non-Chinese developers to port their apps to Huawei's ecosystem.
They also are using safer xen compartments, as Amazon did until recently or Qubes is doing. kvm is fast, but certainly not secure.
Personally I trust Huawei more than Google, and esp. LG, Sony or Samsung. The current war on Huawei looks like Huawei is denying the US their backdoors into the baseband layer on 5G. Loosing 5G would be big for US intelligence, and good for privacy. China getting access into 5G backdoors is not as worrying as continued US abuse.
But of course Google would never allow BB users to access the play store ...
When they released it, it was pretty much 100% Open Source, then they moved more and more elements to their proprietary GApps suite, included the Play Services required to run even many 3rd party apps.
At this point Android is barely more Open Source than iOS and its Mach kernel, but the difference is that Google got its market share by selling to manufacturers the fact that they're independant because it's Open Source.
> When they released it, it was pretty much 100% Open Source, then they moved more and more elements to their proprietary GApps suite, included the Play Services required to run even many 3rd party apps.
I thought the reason they did this was because third party phone makers were controlling when/whether users could update the OS on their device. So users were often several Android releases behind, even on a phone that was only a year old. By moving a lot of the core functionality into apps, users could update these apps and have access to newer features even on older OS versions.
Though, I guess that doesn't explain why the apps themselves aren't open source.
Sure you could build a phone on top of Windows Mobile, Sonys Xperia X1 is my favorite entry from this time period, but you had no consolidated Software Vision for a mobile OS. Customers were craving phones that were as accessible as iPhones were, with a good example being the datepickers in mobile safari. You couldn't fix this with a Custom Windows Mobile Homescreen. Neither Nokia, nor anyone else in Mobile Phones at the time had thought about the software part as much as about the hardware. Even Andy Rubin got smacked in the face by the iPhone Keynote, but his advantage was the lack of organizational and technological debt that anyone else watching this keynote in a position to act plagued.
Apple was highly regarded inside Google when it comes to design decisions and is so until this very day (Why again does my Pixel 2 lack an 3.5mm socket?) so for Rubin simply adopting the design and ui vision while following different engineering principles was a path that had less hurdles for him than for everyone else in the position to do something about it in 2007.
That's why Android is where it is, not because Google decided to go the OpenSource way with it. Customers decided this was the only viable alternative, they brought money to the platform and developers followed.
Sure it was a lot fun stuff happening on the platform aswell that gave it the positive look, but this didn't affect the relevant apps to stay iOS only until they couldn't afford to anymore, simple market share decided that.
Device Manufacturers were desperate for anything, if they had to pay license fees for closed source software or not wouldn't have mattered if there had been a viable answer to iOS in 2007.
If you want to add in the Play Store into the mix, things change slightly.
Google's biggest trick was developers. They leveraged the decaying state of Java, and it being the default CS language in a lot of places. They simple showed a more attractive opportunity to tenths of thousands of Java devs stuck in ungainful employment in "enterprise software" sector.
Nobody else in the world managed to get so much of developer mindshare overnight ever.
Developers, developers, developers, developers... Balmer got the idea, but did not know how to get it.
Jobs realised it too late, and spent too much effort toying with Internet only apps in time when most of USA was on class 2 GPRS.
Andy Rubin, well I'd say, got the right solution almost by accident, and only realised its value later in Android's life.
Against platforms actively fighting you? Good luck with that!
That would be interesting to see!
After that things went sour:
- GTK+/glib dev community began to wither simply because of older members retiring, and no new blood
- DRM flamewar with record labels
- Android diverted a great amount of community resources
- Monopolisation of smartphone SoC market.
- Elop...However, the parents cant handle the debt and commit suicide, entrusting older brother to his rich uncle. Sure enough, the older bro didnt live long either. After a long coma, the plug was pulled on the older brother's life. Even his rich uncle cant save him.
What a waste of resource
Hell, even include Microsoft in there too.
Creating another OS seems like an inevitability.
I am getting ready to leave the commercial smartphone world entirely, in large part to escape Android. I want to escape Android primarily (but not only) because of the very thing you said here.
Google is making it harder and harder to use Android devices in a secure way, and for me, the cost/benefit of using it became too high a while back.
As it stands, Android's whole notification system (3rd party apps included) relies almost completely on communicating with Google servers. Seems like a bad design if privacy is a concern.
True, although having one endpoint does have some advantages for battery life and api consistency.
> “Sailfish OS, as a non-American, open-source based, secure mobile OS platform, is naturally an interesting option for different players — currently the interest is stronger among corporate and governmental customers and partners, as our product offering is clearly focused on this segment,” says Jolla co-founder and CEO Sami Pienimäki .
> “Overall, there definitely has been increased interest towards Sailfish OS as a mobile OS platform in different parts of the world, partly triggered by the on-going political activity in many locations. We have also had clearly more discussions with e.g. Chinese device manufacturers, and Jolla has also recently started new corporate and governmental customer projects in Europe.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/trumps-huawei-ban-also-cau...
- China has a huge domestic market and it may be sufficient in itself for a profitable venture
- About half of Android phones are manufactured by Chinese brands.
- China has deep pockets and are willing to play the long game.
- They have no choice. Trump's used the nuclear option, which may well work in the short term but in the long term this has shown China and others that they have to get rid of their reliance on US tech and companies as a matter of national security.
I think Trump's move has set a ball rolling and that in 10 years we'll see the results of that... And that won't be a pretty picture for the US.
But if they relinquish some control for the sake of getting a competitive OS where they can't be cut off, what you're saying is true. I do see them capable making an OS, technically, I'm more worried about their worldwide soft skills/soft power. Which I'm guessing they'd also want to improve, so you never know.
Because this is HN and HN has a horrible moderation system that makes no sense and pales in comparison to the BBS of olde.
Indeed. Trump's heavy-handed approach in recent weeks seems likely to have far-reaching implications, and presumably the results won't be favourable for Western businesses hoping to expand more into fast-growing Asian markets in the years ahead. He's shown that any business with strong connections to the US can't be relied upon to be an economically rational trading partner, because the US is now demonstrably willing to conflate national security issues with trade policy.
That policy is also putting US allies in awkward positions. Here in the UK, we are faced with questionable demands from a long-time ally (the US) and thinly veiled threats from a big investor (China) if we comply with those demands. Presumably other allies such as Australia feel similar opposing pressures. The only rational long-term strategy I can see for nations in this position is to be clear that they will always make their own strategic decisions on security matters and which global suppliers to use for national infrastructure projects (and then to actually do so, throwing a proverbial elbow at the US if necessary). At least that way you maintain some credibility with future governments around the world as a reasonable partner.
In the meantime, it seems that the current hostile stance toward China from the Trump administration in the US is hurting the global economy, and ironically it also seems like US consumers are the ones ultimately paying most of the cost of those trade barriers.
Consumers will pay more but I'm not as sure about the irony. Couldn't it be that the intent is to reduce US consumption of Chinese imported goods? Couldn't the policy's intent simply be to shift the economy ever so slightly away from consumption and toward production?
It certainly could be, but I think how credible that is depends on the goods affected. If they are essentials and there is competition from elsewhere, the barriers make China less competitive, and US customers will presumably go for the best deal to minimise their losses. If they are non-essentials, the barriers also make them less attractive, and again China loses out. But if they are essentials and China is the only game in town, import tariffs look a lot like a tax on the US market.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35288650-the-next-factor...
Expect that this will cause a decline in EU GDP as the remnants of colonialism get displaced/replaced.
Facebook and others will make apps for them...
If 50% of Android phones are by Chinese brands then once an alternative exists they will have a big incentive in dropping Android. The end result can only be a massive market share loss for Google.
The same goes for other tech companies like Qualcomm, ARM (not US but in same boat). Anything that can be weaponised.
This is geopolitics and a global strategic issue. Google is just caught in it.
Or is it about the trade deficit? In which case Korean and Japanese manufacturers are not safe from prosecution.
Japan has to sign the Plaza Accord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord#Effects when it positioned to challenge US economy. It is attributed as the main reason to their Lost Decades. You bet that Japanese forgot about this, and Korean and Chinese do not know this.
What US gov initially wanted probably is something like Plaza Accord with Chinese, but they have the size to resist, so Trump showed the nuclear option. Like some commenters pointed out here, it may work in short term, but it will hurt US companies in long term.
Samsung tried to hedge for this by building Tizen(Bada) and realized how much needed to be invested to get an Android competitor going, so they kept the development going, but focused for their Smartwatches, as this would have to be a "if the worst happens" plan, not something that could be a profitable venture.
LG has the Palm/HP borne WebOS for their TVs, i suspect with a similar idea at the back of their minds.
Everyone else? They're too small to realistically try to save their smartphone businesses when the green robot becomes their enemy.
Google bought this platform with every dollar invested over more than a decade, they didn't do this only so that Apple had a competitor, but so that THEY had control over mobile eyeballs.