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Re:Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones by css771 on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @02:50PM (#4998811)
> there are no guarantees that AOSP even works without Google's magic proprietary mojo

What do you mean by this? If you mean in the market, it can work. Amazon's devices are proof. If a manufacturer is shipping just AOSP, it needs to have a working complement to Google's suite of apps or it needs to have a different value proposition altogether.

> CyanogenMod had to develop the missing pieces when Google sent their C&D over the proprietary bits

What "missing bits"? They were shipping Google's suite of proprietary apps on top of their AOSP-based ROM and they stopped after the C&D.

Re:Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones by fluidcruft on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @03:29PM (#4999065)
Once Google's proprietary stuff was deleted, it was not possible to provision a phone (until the FOSS alternates for things like Provision.apk were developed). I can't remember if you got bootloops or what. There were other problems, too. I think AOSP has been friendly toward patches for that sort of thing... ensuring AOSP without gapps works just wasn't one of Google's requirements (at least early on--it may be now for all I know). Not that you can really fault them for having different priorities.