roflharrison

Fair enough.

I'm a huge fan of Google Now so hopefully I can continue to use it if I decide to switch to a custom launcher.

>4.4 has now a new closed source launcher

Not correct. Launcher3 is open source.

Arstechnia hasn't done enough research.

You can (and I have) fetch the new Launcher from AOSP, compile it and run it very easily as a separate application. The Google Experience Launcher is a closed source Google app based on this which integrates Google Now.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Laun...

Yep, that is definitely leg up for iCloud I hadn't considered.

Developers can write their own sync adapters on Android, but they would need to run their own servers (or find storage) and complications start to add up from there.

Google has nothing to do with this topic, but for what it is worth Android syncs all (if not almost all) Google related data from Android devices.

If you have a Picasa account Android comes with a sync adapter which seamlessly syncs photos to all your Android devices and PC's with Picasa.

What advantage does iCloud have over this for photos?

Android also syncs Google docs, browser/Chrome data, contacts, calendar... The only thing I can think of that Google doesn't sync (yet) is files.

>Still, I don't have experience with iOS devices, but my Nexus S tends to be so laggy at times that apps crash frequently.

This sounds more like poorly written apps than an issue from the article.

For example if you are scrolling a list view and it slows down to the point of crashing, the application probably isn't caching views or has a memory leak (application authors fault).

If your device gets sluggish and you get miscellaneous force closes I would look for applications with background services that are doing more work than they should be.

>Funny how that works

How what works?

I see just as many "Android phones do this naughtiness" headlines as I see "iPhones allow these shenanigans" headlines. The fact that is isn't mentioned in the header lends more credence to the author (and article).

Looks like he is amazed at the performance improvements, not the just fact that it works.

1. There are bang's for lots of sites, http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html (e.g. !amazon bags isn't really for developers). You can now refute this with your "easy for [insert competition] to copy" argument.

2. Fine

3. I'm sure that many people find this useful, but it is very subjective. What results should be higher than an exact match to a search term?

>Duck Duck Go doesn’t do anything significantly different

Further to this, Duck Duck Go is targeting people who don't want to be bubbled and tracked, which is completely different to the other search engines.

Having said that, I tried Duck Duck Go for a few weeks and found it wasn't giving me the results I wanted (there's a !bang for Google but that seems a little silly).

From what i can see there is no pressure being put on Google from gpl-violations.org (presumably because the haven't made any violations).

Plenty of heat being put on manufacturers with Android devices but that is hardly Google's fault or related to the ICS release.

I'm not sure why any developer would need access to source code with such a well documented SDK.

Lots of hackers would like the source so they can poach the some code, make a few enhancements then make a quick buck though...

The code we are talking about is under an Apache 2.0 licence, they didn't have to release anything.

"open-source citizen" is in the eye of the beholder, if you are a die hard FOSS advocate then yes, they have failed. If you are happy with code being released when it is deemed ready (of course readiness in this case might have been influenced by marketing factors) then they have been quite successful.

Interesting point, especially considering Google specifically said the source would not be available until the Galaxy Nexus was out.

>year's backlog

This is inaccurate, they have been releasing patches and updates for other versions of the platform over the last year.

They did skip Honeycomb, which fits your Amazon theory, mind you, from the reviews I have read the Fire would not benefit greatly from ICS as they Frankensteined the Android experience.

Some people criticized AOSP because they believe the delayed release is unfair (a reasonable criticism). Other people (sheep) criticized them because they actually believed Google was never going to release more source or because needed an arguing point against the OS.

I will hazard a guess that anyone who cares about the freedoms we are discussing is capable of rooting and installing a custom ROM or researching a purchase to ensure they get a device that is free to do what they want.

Of course, these same users would also be able to jailbreak an iPhone, but does that lock you out of the Apple loop (i.e. App store, Siri, iCloud)? I honestly don't know so that is not a rhetorical question.

Bringing this in a full circle and back to topic, I'm sure Steve Jobs pushy attitude is one of the reasons (perhaps the only reason) iPhone's aren't tainted with carrier garbage and upgrade(less) shenanigans. Just because it worked for him doesn't mean it will work for you.

Off topic but too tempting: It is safe to generalize that Android (why the quotes?) is open.

There is continual activity on the Android source tree with updates for most versions of the platform well after December last year. The well publicised exclusion is Honeycomb and we can only speculate why Google kept that one to themselves (incomplete/Kindle Fire depending on your Android hate level).

Even if you insist that Android is not open in the most complete sense, you have to agree it is MORE open than iOS which makes it more appealing to some people.

The comparison is invalid because iPhone/Blackberry devices are premium high cost devices with high quality control. A direct comparison will only work against other premium high cost devices with high quality control.

By comparing every Android phone on the market (from cheap to premium) to only premium devices you are always going to get a skewed result.

It does mean you can't meaningfully compare the two.

Are you saying that if people started installing Android onto iPhones (if it were possible) all of a sudden the hardware failure rates for iPhones would sky rocket?

What was the problem?