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In light of the EU's $ 5 billion antitrust decision against Google this week, we began to notice some classic Ars story circulating around social media. Google's methods for controlling open source Android code and discouraging Android forks are exactly the kind of behavior with which the EU has a problem, and many of the techniques described in this 2013 article are still used today. hui.
The Idea of a Sequel Google's Android strategy, based on proprietary applications and proprietary services, has not really changed in the last five years. Updates have been made to Google's proprietary applications so that they are different from the screenshots in this article, but the basic strategy described here remains very relevant. So, in light of the latest development of the EU, we are doing this story again for the weekend. It took place for the first time on October 20, 2013 and seems to remain unchanged, but we launched a few updates in 2018 where they felt particularly relevant
Six years ago, in November 2007 , the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). has been announced. The original iPhone came out a few months earlier, capturing people's imagination and ushering in the era of the modern smartphone. While Google was an application partner for the original iPhone, it could see what an uncontrolled iPhone competition future would look like. Vic Gundotra, recalling the initial presentation of Andy Rubin for Android, said:
He argued that if Google did not act, we had to face a drastic future, a future where only one man , one company, one device
Google was terrified that Apple would eventually rule the mobile space. So, to help fight the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile support, Android was launched as an open source project.
At that time, Google had nothing, so no adoption – no market share – was welcome. Google has decided to offer Android for free and use it as a Trojan for Google services. The thought is that if Google Search was a day locked on the iPhone, people would stop using Google Search on the desktop. Android was the "moat" around the "castle" Google search – it would exist to protect Google's online properties in the mobile world.
As we have seen with the battles of Windows Phone and Blackberry 10, the selection of apps is all about the mobile market. installing the base means that it has a ton of applications. If a company uses Android, the operating system will already be compatible with millions of applications. a business just needs to build its own app store and download everything. In theory, you would have an operating system other than Google with a ton of applications, virtually overnight. If a company other than Google can find a way to make Android better than now, it would be able to build a serious competitor and possibly threaten Google's dominance over smartphones. This is the biggest danger for Google's current position: a successful alternative Android distribution.
And some companies are making a difference by separating Google from Android. The most successful and popular alternative version of Android is Kindle Fire from Amazon. Amazon takes AOSP, ignores all of Google's usual add-ons, and provides its own app store, content stores, browser, cloud storage and email. The whole country of China is skipping the Google part of Android, too. Most Google services are prohibited, so the only option is another version. In either case, Google's Android code is used, and there is nothing for it.
It's easy to give something when you're in last position with zero market share, exactly where Android started. When you are in first place, it is a bit harder to be as open and welcoming. Android has gone from being the thing that protects Google from being something worth protecting on its own. The mobile is the future of the Internet and the control of the largest mobile platform in the world has many advantages. At this point, it's too difficult to put open source engineering back into the bottle, which raises the question: how do you control an open source project?
Google is still given some protection against alternatives versions of Android. What many people call "Android" is divided into two categories : the open parts of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), which are the base of Android, and the closed source parts , which are all Google- branded apps. Although Google will never go to the end and completely shut down Android, the company seems to be doing everything in its power to give itself an edge over the existing open source project. And the main method of business here is to bring more and more applications under the "Google" umbrella to closed source.
Closed Source Creep
There have always been Google applications with closed source. Originally, the group consisted mostly of customers for Google's online services, such as Gmail, Maps, Talk and YouTube. When Android had no market share, Google was comfortable keeping only these apps and building up the rest of Android as an open source project. Since Android has become a mobile power, Google has decided that it needs more control over the public source code.
For some of these applications, there could still be an AOSP equivalent, but when the Google proprietary version was launched, the AOSP version is usually out of date. Less open source code means more work for Google's competitors. Although you can not kill an open source application, you can turn it into abandonware by moving future development to a closed source application. When Google changes app or publishes a new version of Android on the Play Store, it is often a sign that the source has been closed and that the AOSP version is dead.
Search
Let's start with the Search application, which is a great example of what happens when Google duplicates the AOSP feature.
In August 2010, Google launched Voice Actions. With it, the company introduced "Google Search" in the (then) Android Market. These are the days of Froyo. The picture above shows the latest version of AOSP Search and Google Search running on Android 4.3. As you can see, AOSP Search is still stuck in the time of Froyo (Android 2.2). Once Google launched its closed source application, it immediately dropped the open source version. The Google version provides voice search, audio search, text-to-speech, answering service and contains Google Now, the company's predictive helper function. The AOSP version can do web and local searches and … that's all.
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