No, none of those were AOSP devices either. They all included Android Market and Gmail, as the most obvious examples.
The platform remains entirely open. That's how Chinese people are able to use Android even though Google does not do business there. You confuse the platform with the apps and services that run on it.
> When something is open and able for anyone to do with as they please
AOSP is open. Android from Google is not -- manufacturers have to agree to only ship Google's OS, not any competing forks. (Yes, they can customize things like the launcher, but those aren't true forks.)
I have seen Aliyun handsets. Like other China-market AOSP-derived systems, Aliyun is Android without Google's ecosystem. It will run any Android app up to the API level used in Aluyun you put on it. The claim that it's not CTS compliant is, at best, splitting hairs. No specific incompatibility has ever been claimed, and no set of apps have been shown to fail.
Google is free to allow or deny anyone access to their proprietary app suite for Google-logo Android handsets whether they are consistent or arbitrary about it. I'm merely pointing out that that some OEMs, like Huawei and Haier, get away with building both Google-logo Android handsets AND Aliyun handsets, while others do not.
Like many Linux-based products in China, there are other things that are wrong with Aliyun in addition to dubious app market practices. It doesn't observe open source licenses, for one thing. But Aliyun being "bad" isn't the point.
I am just pointing out that Google is usually, but not always, consistent about enforcing a policy that Android OEMs can't participate in AOSP-based products that compete with the Google ecosystem. In some cases the OEM relationship appears to be more important than a consistent policy, or perhaps licensing regulations differ in the PRC.
AOSP is open source. GMS is not. Samsung required GMS to make a commercially viable Android handset that consumers recognize as Android.
Therefore the Android that Samsung (and the other Android makers outside china) licenses is obviously not open-source. This is why Pichai and Google have leverage.
AOSP is OSS. Google's proprietary apps, for their propreitary services (GMail, Google Calendar, Google Play), are not. Why d you so wrongly act like Google has to provide those applications? Especially if someone has forked Android to compete with traditional Android offerings?
AOSP is open source, period. Just because Google apps aren't doesn't make the entire thing closed.
The binary blobs and baseband firmware might as well be on any "open" phone. The issue here is not whether Android phones are open or not, it's whether phones in general can truly be "open" or not.
I help people make things using the Android OS - things that are not phones and that do not include the Google ecosystem. I have also been involved with using code from AOSP to create Android compatibility for non-Android OSs and in convincing OEMs of non-Android system to use it. In my experience I have traced the boundaries of what Google allows people in general to do, and their OEM partners to do with Android.
This is roughly how it goes: If you want to use AOSP for anything, including competing with Google, go for it. Google won't sue you, and won't even FUD you the way Sun did and Oracle continues to do if you want to use an open source Java implementation.
If you make Android devices that use Google's logo and proprietary code and ecosystem, you can stuff Android full of crapware that your carrier partners want, and that your product managers delude themselves into thinking gives you "differentiation," even though Google really does not want that to happen. What you can't do is compete with Google, or take a cafeteria approach to using Google's apps and ecosystem. You are in or out. No in-between.
AOSP is Apache licensed and Google adheres to the letter and spirit of that license. Both B&N and Amazon compete with Google using AOSP code and there has never been a hint of FUD aimed at them for doing so.
Many China-market phones with China-based ecosystems are based on Android. Here is where the lines blur a bit: China-based Lenovo gets away with making AOSP-based products for the China market with non-Google ecosystems and they make Google-logo Android phones. Somewhat famously, Taiwan-based ASUS was slapped down by Google for trying to do, as far as I can tell, exactly the same thing. There are also Google OEMs who make OPhone handsets. So Google hasn't been 100% consistent regarding OEMs with one foot in the mainland China market and one foot in the Google ecosystem.
It also appears that OEMs licensing other OSs, notablely Windows Phone, get no retaliation from Google.
I also dealt with Sun, trying to get a license to use Java in a VoIP-oriented OS. They were utterly opaque bastards about the licensing process, cost, etc. and about their position regarding Java patents and open source implementations. to the point where we concluded they could go to hell and we would use an open source Java implementation. Using AOSP is by contrast FUD-free.
This is only true in the most technical way possible. Yes, AOSP is open source -- but none of the standard applications on any stock version of Android use AOSP anymore. The calendar and other applications are all proprietary. The AOSP versions feel like they stopped being developed in 2010 -- which coincidentally is when Google started developing proprietary replacements.
I use LineageOS (and have for a while), which is mostly AOSP, and the applications from AOSP today feel older than the ones I used on Google's Android ~5 years ago. As a simple example, Google's Calendar application can create very complicated recurring events while the AOSP one is much dumber.
> Hardware and firmware is a much different story, but that applies to the device you're promoting just as much...
The Librem 5 hardware was specifically chosen so that it contains no firmware blobs and all the firmware is free software and upstream in Linux. There is a caveat for the baseband, but that's because it's not legal in most countries to sell or use baseband hardware that is free software (unless the user is licensed and even then it's non-trivial).
Android that’s seen as Android in the mass market is also closed. The AOSP layer may be open source, but all the Google layers that make Android usable (for most people), such as Play Services, the Play Store, and Google apps, are all closed. Not any different from Apple in that respect.
AOSP is not Android. What Google distributes to OEMs and its direct customers is not AOSP. It is AOSP and the different Play Services including the Play Store and the Google applications with contracts mandating that they have to be provided to customers.
If you think people talk about AOSP when they talk about Android, you are always going to miss the point of these conversations.
>This is only true in the most technical way possible. Yes, AOSP is open source -- but none of the standard applications on any stock version of Android use AOSP anymore. The calendar and other applications are all proprietary. The AOSP versions feel like they stopped being developed in 2010 -- which coincidentally is when Google started developing proprietary replacements.
AOSP sample applications like Calendar are exactly that: samples. I'm not sure why those are at all relevant. There's a very healthy and active open source app ecosystem, along with many other apps that work on AOSP. Those AOSP apps are included as samples, and they're being removed from the project as at this point there's no real need to have these samples.
It's also not true what you claim about the stock applications shipped on a phone like a Pixel. Apps like Dialer, Contacts, DeskClock, etc. are still actively developed and maintained in AOSP with the Google variants being extended versions of those apps. It's true that some apps like the keyboard forked away from the AOSP version, but it doesn't make AOSP any less viable of a basis for an OS. It's not a bad thing for AOSP to not ship a bunch of user-facing apps when there are a bunch of good alternatives outside of it. Apps do better without a release cycle tied to the slower pace of the OS releases.
> The Librem 5 hardware was specifically chosen so that it contains no firmware blobs and all the firmware is free software and upstream in Linux. There is a caveat for the baseband, but that's because it's not legal in most countries to sell or use baseband hardware that is free software (unless the user is licensed and even then it's non-trivial).
This is completely untrue and absolutely a false claim. The SoC is entirely proprietary with proprietary hardware, firmware and microcode along with the other components like Wi-Fi, the baseband, etc. being the same. The cellular baseband is not an exception. It applies to all of the hardware components in general. Librem 5 is not open hardware and does not have open firmware or microcode. It's simply untrue, and you're falsely representing it. I can see why you would be under that misunderstanding based on their incredibly misleading marketing but they never actually claim what you are claiming.
Not providing firmware updates for these things is a security disaster. The firmware that's upstream in Linux is rarely open source. It's a subset of the necessary firmware for most devices and is still proprietary. Projects like linux-libre / PureOS do not ship these upstream Linux firmware updates. They strip all of this out of the kernel. They also don't provide all the additional firmware updates beyond what is upstream.
The hardware and firmware is just as proprietary. The boot chain has open source components near the end before the OS (coreboot), just as many mainstream devices do (https://source.codeaurora.org/quic/la/abl/tianocore/edk2).
There's a huge difference between choosing hardware that has built-in firmware and can work without the OS supplying it each boot and hardware with open firmware... what they are doing is shipping a device that can work without the OS providing firmware updates, since they don't do that to keep it 'pure' of proprietary code. The firmware is still present and running, except it's out-of-date and vulnerable to many patched security vulnerabilities. You're completely misrepresenting the reality and falsely portraying it as having open hardware and firmware when it absolutely does not.
What you claim about not being allowed to have open cellular baseband firmware is also nonsense. It's also not particularly different from how Wi-Fi works. Wi-Fi firmware is a comparable secondary OS, and the same applies to a lot of other components. These hardware and firmware components on the Librem 5 are not any more open. What you're doing is spreading misinformation and false claims to promote it as something that it's not.
Google is not immune to this either, all companies should be treated the same way IMO. Monopoly status should not be a factor when it comes to default apps and such.
Android isn't truly open though. Sure, the AOSP is. However, before Gingerbread there were still a lot of advantages reserved for those who entered a commercial relationship - for instance, access to the Google Apps (mail, calendar, chrome).
Post-Gingerbread, Google has put the vast majority of their development into the Google Play APIs, which are not open and are only available to partners. This means that use of things like chromecast (for instance) are restricted to apps distributed through the Play store, and handsets running partner builds of Android.
No it isn't, AOSP is open source (it's right in the name) and there are projects like CalyxOS, GrapheneOS, and LineageOS which make it extremely easy for anyone on HN to get away from having Apple or Google on their mobile devices.
The platform remains entirely open. That's how Chinese people are able to use Android even though Google does not do business there. You confuse the platform with the apps and services that run on it.
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