
With Cyanogen dead, Google's control over Android is tighter than ever - vezycash
http://www.greenbot.com/article/3153485/android/with-cyanogen-dead-googles-control-over-android-is-tighter-than-ever.html
======
dispose13432
The article is wrong on so many counts:

1\. Closed source apps are not the threat (Nowhere does it say that the
dialer, home screen, messaging app, or camera are a part of the OS. All are
replaceable, and all replacements integrate just as well as the original, it's
not an iPhone).

2\. Google controlled Android through legal means - If you want to make your
Android phone in a factory, or if you want to use any google app, you need to
obey their rules. So if yo want Play store, you have to play along.

3\. Cyanogen saw Google as a threat, but Google didn't see Cyanogen as a
threat. Cyanogen didn't die because of Google's behavior. They died because of
terrible execution.

Remember the spat over split-windows. Google didn't ban the appstore (despite
being able to), they demanded that the environment not be _too_ modified.

Cyanogenmod backed down and Google let it go.

The only thing is that they were forbidden to _package_ it, but opengapps is
still around.

4\. Google isn't closing-source because of Cyanogenmod or other custom Roms.
It's bigger threat is Samsung or Amazon.

~~~
kuschku
> Closed source apps are not the threat

Yes, they are. See
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html)

> All are replaceable

You can _not_ replace the Dialer at all. Replacements can not integrate at
all. The others have similar problems.

> Google controlled Android through legal means

According to the EU, they didn’t – they abused their market power to extort
companies to force them to bundle their products.

> Google didn't see Cyanogen as a threat.

Yet Google cracked down even more on OEMs that shipped non-Google Android in
markets where Google Android exists in the meantime. They definitely saw a
threat.

> Google didn't ban the appstore (despite being able to), they demanded that
> the environment not be _too_ modified.

See the EU argument again: Google does _not_ have the right to restrict their
services in that way, due to having too much market power. They can not
discriminate against the environments their products will be used in.

~~~
dispose13432
> Closed source apps are not the threat > Yes, they are. See >
> [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html)

Well, they should. But I wouldn't call a closed-source messaging app (which
you can replace with qksms) proof that AOSP is over.

>According to the EU, they didn’t – they abused their market power to extort
companies to force them to bundle their products.

I meant legal to contrast "force" (closing the source), not that it's not
illegal. They could really open-source everything and still mandate people to
use Hangouts.

>Yet Google cracked down even more on OEMs that shipped non-Google Android in
markets where Google Android exists in the meantime. They definitely saw a
threat.

Did they fight CM?

What did they do to make CM's life difficult?

>See the EU argument again: Google does not have the right to restrict their
services in that way, due to having too much market power. They can not
discriminate against the environments their products will be used in.

But they can refuse to license the Google Play store to entities outside of
OEMs, as long as the terms aren't discriminatory.

------
optforfon
Google controls Android due to the PlayStore

Just an anecdote. I'm currently living in China and me and the other expats
were always kinda amused that local Chinese are willing to spend the
equivalent of 2 months of their salary on an iPhone. Apple's grip on the
market is absolute here

At first, like some high brow NYT journalist, I thought it must be a cultural
thing. People looking for a status thing, a vanity thing in a image conscious
society. Or a the very least they're willing to fork over tons of cash to get
a good quality device bc they don't trust their own phone makers. But the
local phones are actually hardware-wise okay. And they have decent warranty
support (not Apple level.. but still)

But after watching a friend struggle with an Android phone, I realized that
the problem is the apps. There is no GooglePlay store, just crappy 3rd party
stores like the Xiaomi Store. These stores have basically no standards when it
comes to app quality and Chinese apps are horrible bloated virus-like
monstrosities that slowly cripple your phone till it barely works and the
battery dies after half a day. All the permissions managers and security
features in the world don't stop the system from being a complete disaster
here.

If anyone wants to free Android - they need to make a good play-store
alternative that only allows high quality apps. They you can make your Android
fork and whatever else you want

~~~
frik
My Android phone was practically dead in China.* My iPhone worked completely
fine. And like everyone use an iPhone 7 and an AppleWatch 2 in tier 1 cities.
And the rest of China seem to use non-Google Android phones with a different
AppStore.

* not even connecting to WiFi worked, as it tries to connect to a Google domain to check, which is blocked. (iPhone connects to apple.com to check, though that domain works fine)

------
untog
Cyanogenmod (and every other custom ROM) is, and always was, an extreme
minority of Android users. I don't really see how this changes anything.

~~~
shade23
> I don't really see how this changes anything. This affects much more than
> the small minority that you think: PS : its hard to differentiate between
> ROMs here since the Android XDA community tend to be quite competitive and
> sharing a lot of code \- Dynamic Tiles was first introduced by CyanogenMod.
> \- CM introduced ambient lighting based day/night modes \- CM's Theme Engine
> is still one of the best out there. While they derived their themeing engine
> from Sony. Google added app based status tinting into android after this \-
> CM/PA had even introduced a camera tile which still remains a wonderous
> thing \- The long press on home button for google now, seems like a concept
> heavily derived from PA's Pie Menu. \- Runtime permissions came in
> Marshmallow, But CM's privacy guard came much earlier.

There are several other minor features also which made the cut from AOKP roms
to AOSP.

And once you spend enough time on websites like [Google-My Activity][1] .You
would realise why many would want to avoid the google ecosystem owing to their
privacy concerns. Most of the alternative android app markets like F-Droid
survived majorly because of custom ROMS. While their numbers were not huge,
they were the few who preferred keeping control of their devices and the
information that they shared. Almost 80% of the custom ROMs are forked off CM.
With CM being dead,this would affect others too.

You can also thank CM for ensuring that devices have a much longer lifespan
than what the OEMs deem.

[1]:[https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity](https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity)

~~~
itsame
Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top of
App Ops that Google had already been developing.

Also, IMHO, it's a bit of a stretch to say that the Google Now shortcut was
inspired by PA's Pie controls. One is just a shortcut to an enhanced search
feature, and the other is... not unlike iOS's Assistive Touch feature on
steroids. The only commonality is that they occur near/around the home button.

 _EDIT_ : And in fact, my Galaxy Note II had a "long-press menu button to
trigger search" since the dedicated search button was removed -- nothing
particularly unique about that paradigm.

While Cyanogen Inc. may well have been Google's biggest "threat" when it came
to control of Android, it wasn't even that big a threat to begin with. They
were always beholden to Google's source dumps, as was any other ROM
distribution. I'd argue little has changed in terms of how much control Google
has over Android's destiny, and Cyanogen Inc.'s (impending) death doesn't
really move the compass in any meaningful way.

~~~
shade23
> Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top of
> App Ops that Google had already been developing.

ApOps was removed by google[1] .

I agree with the little has changed bit. But I think we should give them
credit for innovating quite a bit on the platform.And with Google's version of
the OS, there were little outside options.which will reduce more drastically
atleast till all Custom ROMs start forking of LineageOS.

[1]: Minor quibble, but CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard was a glorified UI on top
of App Ops that Google had already been developing.

~~~
itsame
It wasn't _removed_ ; it was simply hidden because it was a work-in-progress
piece of infrastructure wasn't ready for end-user consumption[1]. The same
underlying code was still used by Privacy Guard[2], so it still wasn't
CyanogenMod's innovation. App Ops would eventually make a user-facing comeback
in 6.0 Marshmallow, with a very similar UI, just with the additional runtime
popups for on-demand permissions.

I agree that CyanogenMod did bring innovations to the table -- I'm in no way
trying to diminish that. Just clarifying attribution where due.

Speaking more generally, there is no doubt that custom ROMs answered
needs/demands that Google just couldn't satisfy in the same timelines. Custom
ROMs deserve tons of credit for prototyping and "market testing"
concepts/features for Google. The good news is that -- by and large -- most of
the low-hanging fruits have already been incorporated back into mainline
Android. Nowadays, I've personally found fewer and fewer reasons to use custom
ROMs (outside of the ever-important need to extend device lifetime anyway --
probably the biggest thing remaining that Google likely won't ever attempt to
satisfy).

[1] [http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/11/googler-app-ops-
was-...](http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/12/11/googler-app-ops-was-never-
meant-for-end-users-used-for-internal-testing-and-debugging-only/)

[2] [https://www.xda-developers.com/protecting-your-privacy-
app-o...](https://www.xda-developers.com/protecting-your-privacy-app-ops-
privacy-guard-and-xprivacy/)

------
sli
Bit of an alarmist article title when plenty of fairly popular alternatives
exist, like AOKP, AOSB, Slim, and PA. Was CM doing something extra to/with
their ROMs and code that these are not?

~~~
dispose13432
AOKP - dead.

PA - dead

AOSB - Exceeded bandwidth and archive doesn't seem to have archived it
properly. According to Google cache, they're working on L, so seems dead.

Slim - was dead for a few years. Seems to have revived.

The question is what will LineageOS look like?

~~~
varuniyer
AOKP is definitely not dead. Take a look at the recent gerrit activity:
[https://gerrit.aokp.co](https://gerrit.aokp.co)

~~~
varuniyer
Sorry, do url without https, so gerrit.aokp.co

------
meesterdude
That's a great narrative, but the project lives on ala the nature of open
source. [http://lineageos.org/](http://lineageos.org/)

~~~
dispose13432
We'll see in a few months how viable is it.

------
lalos
Makes me think on how much is Google using open source just as a gimmick or a
marketing term and win over engineers when in reality they know that is next
to impossible to achieve something with the code they publish and the
dependencies on their services. Even if a contender uses their code, they have
all the resources to squash them by marketing their product way better.

------
ryao
This is a really bad title. Cyanogen is founder of the Cyanogenmod project and
he is not dead.

~~~
dorfsmay
[https://mobile.twitter.com/CyanogenMod/status/81308624950634...](https://mobile.twitter.com/CyanogenMod/status/813086249506349056)

~~~
ufo
I think you missed the point. CyanogenMod was named after its founder, Steve
Kondik, who's online alias is cyanogen. Steve is still alive and breathing
[https://twitter.com/cyanogen](https://twitter.com/cyanogen)

------
hota_mazi
It's not any tighter than it was before Cyanogen's death.

------
fattire
[http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-is-us/](http://lineageos.org/Yes-this-is-us/)

Hopefully it gets done right this time.

------
hackuser
> bringing customization and features far beyond those available in the stock
> OS.

I looked into custom ROMs (i.e., Android forks) and that wasn't my experience.
They took AOSP (Android Open Source Project), made some mostly cosmetic
changes, and distributed it. CopperheadOS might be an exception.

------
joshiej
I'd die to see the day we could install custom ROMs on an Apple device

~~~
ggregoire
Most Apple users (including me) don't want to install custom ROMs. Actually,
I'm quite sure most Android users don't want either (and most of them don't
even know what's a ROM).

~~~
CaptSpify
But wanting to and being able to are two different things. I don't want to
change my cars tires, but I absolutely want to be able to.

~~~
fifi56
Some would say, "welcome to democracy".

------
HillaryBriss
stealing Android doesn't seem like a particularly great idea in the first
place. maybe look for something much better than Android.

but, i guess it was really about Android's market share.

------
netsec_burn
What about Oxygen?

~~~
wtfishackernews
We need it to breathe.

(but seriously, what about it?)

~~~
vidyesh
People usually get confused about OPO's business model. They think OPO is a
'XDA community device' which makes cheap flagships for the people so they
would do anything to fulfill their wishes. So some think OxygenOS is a custom
ROM supporting tons of devices.

