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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 18 2013 @ 09:23 PM EDT |
Ah, but, your honor, you'd have to pay *many times* the
normal license fee to get a non-Google search engine.
----------------
How many ? A gazillion (GZ).
GZ * $0 = $0.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: PJ on Thursday, July 18 2013 @ 09:31 PM EDT |
Try to find some urls and send them to the
EU Commission, by all means.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, July 18 2013 @ 10:57 PM EDT |
To access the Play Store a device must have the Google Services
Framework
installed. This I know because I have factory roms for my Huawei
phone,
one is for the worldwide model that has the GSF plus the full bundle
of
Maps, Gmail, Search Bar, etc.
I also have a Chinese rom for the
same hardware that is sold inside China.
It has the same version of Android
OS with no bundled Google apps,
but has a bundle of equivalent Chinese apps.
To get any Google apps
to install and run on this rom requires sideloading
the GSF from the
gray market.
Huawei has an Android Partner
Agreement with Google. I don't, so I
can't tell you the details. I know that
I observed months of anguish
on the Android hacker forums while a three way
back and forth
happened between Huawei, Vodafone and Google for the
upgrade
from GB to ICS. None of that was needed for the Chinese
version.
Of course there's no requirement to use Google's Play Store.
It's just
what most customers expect nowadays. I can imagine
Aussies
throwing their hands in the air in despair at the
沃商店
on my phone. Fairsearch could put in the effort to
do their own,
otherwise they are forced to go cap in hand to Google. I think
the
complaint might be they've discovered TANSTAAFL.
Chinese (non-Google) page
2012-07-02
General (Google) non-carrier
specific 2012-12-17
The Australian Vodafone update took until
2013-05-12
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 19 2013 @ 05:53 AM EDT |
That manufacturers choose to license and bundle it with
their android distributions is of no more consequence than
PC manufacturers choosing to bundle new machines with trial
versions of Norton Antivirus.
Of course the usefulness to the consumer is far greater in
the case of bundling the play store.
Google play services are fundamentally NOT android, though
Google is being clever recently by bundling a lot of new
features (location APIs etc) into the Play services when
they would have normally been part of Android
(This is one reason that the platform as a whole has been
moving forward in tech recently despite no new platform
version release - and is also good for consumers because it
means they can get their updates from an app/library
download rather than waiting for the system update from the
manufacturer which may never arrive)
It's a clever game, but it's legit. It's basically about
providing a great base platform for free (as in beer &
liberty), and providing additional functionality that people
want based on subsequent negotiation (maybe with less
liberty or more financial cost, or possibly other strings
attached depending on how they play it.)
Again, with less freedom to make things incompatible (which
manufacturers *love* to do, to "differentiate" [lock-in
consumers] ), the ecosystem benefits, and arguably consumers
benefit.
If manufacturers want to differentiate in ways that break
compatibility, they lose some of the other benefits (for
example like Amazon with Kindle. They clearly decided that
the benefits could be offset by their own tech)
Literally everyone wins, except those who try to compete
based on a separate and inferior platform technology. Even
Apple (with their competing successful platform have "won"
from this by being inspired to create many of their recent
features and updates based on things they have seen
elsewhere (though as we all know, Apple always creates from
whole cloth and is never inspired :)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: TemporalBeing on Friday, July 19 2013 @ 04:42 PM EDT |
Agreed. The makers of the Nubi tablets (Nubi Jr, Nubi 2, and Nubi XD) are in the
mix somewhere. We have a Nubi Jr ($99 USD) for our 2 year old - he loves it, and
it keeps him off my ASUS Transformer Infinity and my wife's iPad Mini - it's an
Android 4.0.4 right out, only no Google Apps, no Play Store, as they have not
yet certified the stuff with Google. (I'm tempted to sideload them any way
because we can.)
Now, I did at one point load the Amazon store; but then something when haywire
and it acted all funny so I reset it. I've added it again but only to install
the NetFlix app.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 22 2013 @ 08:05 AM EDT |
"There's absolutely no reason why one of the FairSearch
members can't write their own app and try to get it bundled
by a manufacturer."
Google has WISELY created a catch 22 for the supply chain.
Cell phones companies have long relied on selling new
hardware instead of fixing the OS bugs. More phones, more
contracts, more money. Google is on the other end: they
want to make sure the USER gets security and bug fixes that
the industry (including weasel soft / Insmell ) has long
relied on to push their profit margins.
So the industry scum have a tough choice to make: they give
the customer what he wants and lose their upgrade scam or
they lose the business entirely![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, July 22 2013 @ 12:10 PM EDT |
That's exactly the point the complaint is making, not that certain Google apps
must always be included (a strawman you've knocked apart very easily) but
Android phone makers who want to include must-have Google apps such
as Maps, YouTube or Play are required to pre-load an entire suite of Google
mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone, the
complaint says.
Let's not get sidetracked chasing
non-Play-equipped phones when the complaint is over the bundling and its
supposed freezing-out of competitors. --DonW[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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