Google has spent the last decade cutting apart the open part of Android and making it more and more proprietary.

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.

> Google has spent the last decade cutting apart the open part of Android and making it more and more proprietary.

Replacing those bits is still less work than writing your own entire OS. There are even open source projects to replace those bits.

Yes, microG exists and is amazing — but even it is only replacing an absolutely tiny part of the APIs, and even those it can’t replace fully yet and a lot of work is still to be done.

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.

No, no, no - GP isn't saying replace the bits that support the proprietary Google services.

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.

There are? Now that’s interesting, because I’ve spent the past 5 years developing open source Android apps and such projects. (And e.g. my app Quasseldroid is also on F-Droid)

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.

If you're reading this, and would like to see a solid selection of these: www.F-Droid.org

Phone companies tried to replace the open versions first. Google was faced with either: a different version of Android on each phone (with the apps replaced,) or making their own versions.

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.

>Fire is at least one example

/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.

They kind of actually already did, like all the chinese companies. Because CCP banned google from chinese market years ago. Banning all CCP related corporations should have been implemented as a part of opening to china. or at least as an answer to CCP's censorship protectionism, etc.

> different version of Android on each phone (with the apps replaced)

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).

> It's a huge undertaking building an app for Android today without using Google's services, and sometimes even impossible.

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!

I’m a publishing apps on F-Droid myself, so I’m speaking from experience there.

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.

> 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

Thank you for that.

> 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

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.

So that is a great bait and catch strategy. Start open source and after market dominance move over to closed source.

We need anti monopoly measures to prevent this kind of thing.

Huawei did the same thing. Started out with their phones being unlockable (not that it did much good, the hardware was hell to work with), then took that away. Even on existing hardware. That's when people in the consumer tech community figured out "okay, these clowns definitely can't be trusted". We didn't need Trump to tell us that!

All 'Android' phones sold in China did not rely a tiny bit of those Google stuff, as Google's existence in China has been negligible since it was blocked.

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.

> If you want to verify a user by sending a code through SMS[..]you either have to use the proprietary API, or you'll be banned from the play store.

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.

So, that “huge undertaking” is exactly what LineageOS is, isn’t it? So couldn’t Huawei fork that?

so google is pretty much oracle?

> so google is pretty much oracle?

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.

My only remaining dependency on Google is YouTube, and I could do without that in a pinch, although I’d definitely miss it.

What's your gMaps replacement, if any, out of curiosity?

Not the parent poster but I use Here WeGo on Sailfish running on the Android subsystem.

It's ok.

The OS is open source, Google Play Services isn't.

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.

Google Play can be rewritten from scratch to look like the real one and point to open source repositories, but the real hassle are device drivers: they're tight closed to the point there's not a single person in the world who managed to install a 100% open OS on a phone or tablet; even Purism themselves had to use some closed blobs here and there. Closed firmware/blobs/drivers are the #1 problem; that's the battle to send more troops to, not play stores or apps. The day we eradicate them from devices is the day we can consider those devices really open and trustworthy, the day no entity in the world, not even the original manufacturers, can suddenly decide to make a device obsolete forcing the user to buy a new one.

What about the baseband?

I understand carriers don't want the average Joe to mess with the radio, I'd be totally ok with that, so I would agree on closed source firmware on baseband if it was limited only to that use: a fully separated system that deals with connections and nothing else. All data could be en/decrypted on main device CPU, so that the radio closed firmware would essentially have full access to noise. Of course IP addresses could not be masked, but they would be available anyway to authorities with full access to cell towers and traffic.

Huawei could make their own Play Services, API-compatible with Google, then all apps would work the same. Maybe that's what they actually do now.

As the article says, Amazon spent _years_ trying this approach and ultimately failed with their phone project.

So sure it's possible, but it's not as easy as you perhaps think?

Oh man, the Fire Phone has so many problems as a product. As someone who turned a large Android Google Play app into a Fire Phone compatible one, I think it took me literally a day to swap out the Google Maps implementation with the Amazon Maps one and that was very nearly it. I'm convinced that the hijacking the swipe to go home was the real killer of that thing. I honestly don't know how people actually used that thing because scrolling on any list in any app basically left you with 50:50 odds of heading back to the home page.

I'm not stating that the problem isn't hard, just that the Fire Phone had other issues.

Amazon tried to make their own copy of Play Store, not Play Services.

Huawei already does this in China, where Google services are blocked.

Their problem isn't implementing these things. Their problem is convincing non-Chinese developers to port their apps to Huawei's ecosystem.

Well, yes, but maybe the failure was more due to not many users being willing to accept that much vendor lock-in, rather than issues with Amazon's Android version?

Amazon's phone failed because it was a new product in a very crowded market that didn't offer anything new of significance.

Aw c'mon, it's just software.

They not only forked it, they also improved it. They are e.g. the only one who built their own secure Annex K C11 extensions, besides Android Bionic. Android first did it with an old HP stlport, and then Bionic did it with C++ (Google style). Huawei did it in 1998 already in C.

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.

I think the main issue is the play store is off limits i.e. no existing android apps

The play store is unavailable within China anyway, so alternatives certainly exist.

The play store is not the sole way to distribute apps. You can download the .apk files, or get them by mail, or use another play store that has the same apps. The play store is just a repository of some apps.

I believe the Play store is treated 'special' though - F-Droid can't install apps in the same way unless you're rooted and install the priv-app.

On a phone licensing the Play Store sure. But on a Huawei phone free of those restrictions they can make it use any store they want without any special restrictions. Of course, it becomes a question what that means for security, but still.

I did not root my phone yet, and I install apps with f-droid just fine. The only thing I had to do, if I recall correctly, was enabling third party apps instalation

Try it again and watch the process closely. You'll get an additional prompt when you use F-Droid that doesn't appear with the Play store.

Indeed there is an extra confirmation step, and it freezes some processes (specifically, those that alter the screen, like red shifters)

That seems like a violation of anit-trustlaws. I'm surprised the FSF hasn't pursued this route against google.

I don't think that the lack of Google Play would be a huge problem. I use Android devices in the US and don't use Google Play.

Why do you think Google is working on Fuschia? The second a major competitor forks android in any meaningful way, I guarantee they switch to Fushia and stop all further contributions to Android.