"look but don't touch" kind of Android openness

Paul Sokolovsky pmiscml at gmail.com
Thu Oct 2 01:45:56 UTC 2014


Hello,

On Wed, 01 Oct 2014 20:43:35 +0200
Paul Kocialkowski <contact at paulk.fr> wrote:

> Le mardi 30 septembre 2014 à 10:49 +0300, dimonik, dimonik a écrit :
> > nice article:
> > http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
> 
> I am indeed worried to see the free software applications in AOSP
> being discarded by Google as they develop their proprietary enhanced
> and tied-to-their-services versions of these core system applications.

Good riddance! Isn't it refreshing to know that big company stopped to
rape the poor app's codebase? Just imagine - you can implement a useful
feature, and it is there to stick, you won't need to re-write it for
a new version, with only change this new version brings is yet another
comics-like UI re-do to dumb out users. 

> 
> CyanogenMod was able to make up for it to some extent, with Apollo
> replacing the old Music application, that didn't get any updates
> after, maybe Android 2.3, along with their file manager (that never
> had any counterpart in AOSP). There are however still pieces where we
> are starting to lack quality from AOSP (due to no more updates), such
> as the Browser and the Gallery (we are still using the Android 1.5
> Gallery due to the lack of free software graphics acceleration in
> Replicant).
> 
> It is becoming more and more urgent to write quality free applications

There's no need to write free applications. Everything is already
written - http://f-droid.org now has 1200+ apps in repository. Quality
varies though, so *contributing* to and *improving* existing apps is
pretty important. Actually, not even that the biggest problem -
existing free apps just need to be *used*. Then it will just itch to
improve them, and also you will hear from other people which apps are
better than other (because heck, there're 1200 of them! - it probably
will take half-year to try each of them well enough).

But what we have instead is that "need to write free apps!!11", as if
it's still 2007.

> that integrate well with the system (that is, matching the standard
> looks and feel of the rest of the system)! Some of these are already

This is trap, Google's trap. There's no "looks and feel of the system".
Android is just set of open-source components on top of Linux kernel.
Everything else is Google's marketing b/s (which they change every
month or so). Trying to compete with it on this b/s ground is futile, as
the Arstechnica article which started this thread argues. So, no need to
compete on "looks and feels", better to compete on "free software".   

> listed in our tasks list:
> http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Tasks
> 
> Any help on that is welcome, it's only about writing a significant
> amount of Java Android code: it's all doable.

[]

-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                          mailto:pmiscml at gmail.com


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