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0 pointsgreenhouse_gas8y ago0 comments

1. Companies distributing Google Play Services has to sign an agreement not to ship (or even build) a non-Google Android-derived phone.

So, while Samsung may ship Tizen and Windows Phone, they may not build phones for Amazon (which caused Amazon a lot of problems back in the day - where will you find a company making portable electronics that will make them a white-label product and not making android phones).

2. MicroG depends on Google's servers, so Google can pull the carpet out of them at any time. And where will you get those millions of apps if Google doesn't let you access the App store? Look at the difficulty Amazon has at getting apps into its store, and it's a larger company willing to pay devs to switch apps to Amazon store. And all the hacks that people use will be closed by Google once they get popular.

Now sure, you can use MicroG as a porting library (so if I have a closed source app relying on firebase I can trivially switch to relying on MicroG and Mozilla's back end - kind of like wine), but you'll still have to recreate all of Google's apps anyways (there's no way Google will publish their apps on an Android fork) and also those apps written by those who don't care to port (unlike wine - where I can use the OEM CD or EXE from the OEM website, there's no official way to get apks out of Play Store)

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pjmlp8y ago

And yet they don't use that power to threat OEMs to lose contracts if they don't behave nicely regarding updates.

devit8y ago

Smartphones are commoditized and there are non-Google Android smartphones on the market, so they should be able to get some made. Also, they can just buy any unlocked phone at retail, replace the OS, rebrand and resell (obviously this limits the market due to high price, but also requires no upfront investment).

As for Play Services, they could just have a team whose job is to make MicroG work exactly like Play Services so that all apps work including the Google apps.

The only Google app that you need to replicate is the Play Store client (or really, the downloader, since you can just use the Play Store website for the UI) and then the user can install all the Google apps from the Play Store.

As for getting developers to put apps in their store, it's certainly much easier than getting them to write another app.

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