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Google’s iron grip on Android: Controlling open source by any means necessary | Ars Technica

Basically Android started as Open Source, but over time they've been moving so many of the core features over to Google Play apps and their own services, while discontinuing work on the core Android functionality.

Basically following Microsoft's "Embrace-Extend-Extinguish" philosophy. With Android being open source, anyone can make their own version. That's why BB10 has the Android runtime built into the OS. Unfortunately, if anyone wants to use Google's apps at all, they need to sign a contract with Google saying that they won't ever build hardware for anything but a Google sanctioned Android OS.

So Google builds GCM, which makes messaging easier to run in the background. That's cool. This has been around for a while. Android's Push support hasn't really been worked on, otherwise, since then. Google is also doing everyone a favour by limiting what apps can run in the background, basically making not using GCM very very difficult. But BlackBerry prides itself on security, and doesn't want it's messaging going through Google's servers.

So we're stuck with what we've got. Because Google no longer cares about open source, or a fair playing field. They want to control everything.

It's a really good article, and I suggest giving it a read.

[AndreyLepher]

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[Baconwich]

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