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0 pointsDannyBee7y ago0 comments

(The rest we are going to disagree on. I know the specifics of these agreements and advised on some of them, so i can't talk about them for rea)

"There's a very good chance that without it being open source it would have went precisely nowhere. "

Why? You say a lot of things, but none seem to related to why this is true. As far as i can tell, it is definitively not true.

The app developers were happy to go where there was money, and the users certainly didn't care.

Again, i'm a huge supporter of open source projects, i donate to the FSF, etc. I would love for it to be the case to say that Android was a success/failure because of open source. It's just i've seen exactly zero data that supports this notion, and a lot that doesn't.

The real history rewrite here is the rewrite that Android didn't enable choice or competition. Before Android all of the systems you're talking about had user interfaces that were tightly controlled by the carriers right down to the Verizon internet browser. Your best case scenario would be apple winning. Your worst case scenario is you still have Verizon deciding what your phone user interface should be like.

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blub7y ago

Developers and users generally won't care whether it's open source, I agree. Manufacturers like Samsung or Sony would though, especially after their experiences with Symbian. Not because they care about freedom, but because they want to have some form of control over their own destiny.

The US market was always an anomaly and under tight carrier control. There the iPhone and Android enabled choice. This is however mostly irrelevant for the EU and especially for this verdict. It's undeniable that there are now fewer choices and competitors available, and that most of the ones that are gone have been killed by Android: Windows Phone, Blackberry, Symbian, Meego, FirefoxOS, etc.

njoro7y ago

I must say that the whole situation is very disappointing. While western companies have been folding, China has a very active smartphone ecosystem with multiple manufacturers of phones and many different providers of services, including app stores. Wasn't it supposed to be the other way around?

IBM7y ago

Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good. If Google didn't share ad revenue with carriers and OEMs or tried to extract a license fee ala Windows, Google would not be sitting on 80% global market share today.

zmmmmm7y ago

> Android got market share because it was free, not because it was good.

If free was all that mattered then one of the other smattering of "free" open source mobile OSes would have taken off. You can perhaps say that free is a necessary condition but it clearly isn't sufficient. Something else matters and to a first approximation that can be thought of as "goodness".

gkya7y ago

The world has changed. Today what determines the success of a mobile platform is availability if applications. If Ubuntu's thing could run WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram apps (especially the first b/c it has to be an app), it would have a completely different fate. If I was Mark Shuttleworth, I'd go to Facebook and offer porting WhatsApp for free. IDK the US, but for most of the world, it's an essential means of communication.

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