Re:Fuchsia overview
by smnrchrds on Saturday May 30, 2020 @05:29PM
(#23364926)
Once upon a time, Android had a mail client that was part of the open source components. There was also GMail app that was closed source. Then a couple of versions later, the open source email app was discontinued and its functionality was incorporated into GMail. And the same thing has happened to many more apps and functionalities.
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The F-Droid store provides compelling alternatives to essentially all of the old AOSP apps. (LineageOS also maintains varieties of them.) The one component where there's been a real issue for FLOSS apps is support for centralized push notifications, and that's reliant on 3rd-party services so "open" is not a very meaningful characterization anyway.
Part of that has more to do with the fact that AOSP is not used nearly as much and updating the default AOSP apps is not a good use of time for Google. The AOSP browser was never [edit: not recently] competitive with Chrome and the AOSP mail app was never [edit: not recently] competitive with Gmail.
> The AOSP browser was never competitive with Chrome
That's really not true, and not how it worked. Chrome was very late to the mobile game (first released 2012, a year after Android 4.0 / ICS was released) and its first few attempts on Android sucked. It was incredibly slow & laggy when it first finally came to Android.
It's obviously not a good use of resources to make two webkit-based browsers both targeting the same market, but it was a complete swap out from one to the other over a relatively short time-frame. It's not like the mail vs. gmail situation where it was actually two "competing" apps for quite a long while.