

With Android management shakeup, Google reveals the broad sweep of its ambition - slerner17
http://qz.com/62586/with-android-management-shakeup-google-reveals-the-broad-sweep-of-its-ambition/

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mwcampbell
What might a fusion of Chrome OS and Android look like, from a technical
perspective? This talk of a grand business strategy glosses over the technical
differences between the two systems, which go deeper than the primary input
method and full-screen versus overlapped windows.

I can think of two more salient differences:

1\. Both systems are based on the Linux kernel, but Android is based on a
custom libc (Bionic) and various Android-specific things (like SurfaceFlinger
and AudioFlinger) held together by an Android-specific IPC system called
Binder. By contrast, Chrome OS is much closer to a typical GNU/Linux stack; in
particular, AFAIK, it's based on X11 and GTK.

2\. Android supports persistent on-device storage, whereas Chrome OS only
supports ephemeral storage.

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CCs
My prediction from 2011:
<https://twitter.com/csabacsoma/status/68371971913687040>

With NaCl, HTML5 audio and so on you can just obsolete Android after a
while...

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afsina
And Dart. The technology to replace JS+Java+Dalvik

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thetrumanshow
So, my question is... to be forward compatible do I keep developing Android
apps in Java, or Chrome apps in C++, or ...

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wluu
If it were me, I'd develop in something like Xamarin/mono
(<http://xamarin.com>) and if a convergence does happen, you'd imagine Xamarin
would likely figure out a way to allow your apps to run on the new platform.

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mmanfrin
Has this not been known for years now? Google has been making motions to
converge.

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OGinparadise
_But a fused Android and Chrome OS opens up a number of new potential revenue
sources for Google. Foremost among them is simply charging for future Google
services. While Gmail might always be free, Google is happy to charge users to
store their data. As people move more and more of their lives to the cloud,
Google could potentially lock them into life-long subscriptions to its data
storage and other services._

More or less, Android = Samsung. No matter what Google thinks, Samsung has
their own agenda (as they should) and dozens of billions ready to be put to
play. They can fork it in a year or two and take it from there.

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l3db3tt3r
I think you miss the point of the google play store. Certainly, Samsung could
fork and offer their own storefront, but they would lose some of the core
Google applications. Take for instance Google maps, we have already seen what
happens when a company like apple dumps maps for an alternative..

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glasshead969
But Google did eventually release their own maps app in the App Store. If
Samsung forks android and create their own store front, will Google ignore all
the users Samsung has which is comparable to or even more than what Apple has.

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l3db3tt3r
I don't think Samsung has the same 'fanboy' base as Apple does. And as
AndrewDucker pointed out above, HTC was the dominant android name some time
ago, who's to say another hardware giant like Sony or LG isn't the next
android giant.

Furthermore Samsung isn't in the software business, its in the hardware
business. Unless they find some giant profitable reason to fork and diversify
into becoming a software business also, I see no reason why they would not
simply keep riding the innovation coming out of google.

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glasshead969
I don't think what ever fanboy base apple has is really significant. Sure they
are more than what any other company has. But at 400 million users, it is not
just fanboys buying apple products.

2 years back, it was a smaller and different market. Samsung has established
brand now and has more power on android. They are moving around 100 million
phones a year now. It's not the same market. Samsung doesn't need to do much
to fork android. They recently announced a new wallet API for Samsung devices.
If developer start doing apps for Samsung specific API and devices that's all
they need. If those become popular enough that's a huge barrier for other
OEM's to copy.

Few years back google forced Motorola from using a competing maps service. I
don't think they can force Samsung from using or creating non google services.

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l3db3tt3r
I was not aware of the Samsung wallet API. That's an interesting move.
However, I wonder if that isn't more of a hardware-software security piece
(for financial transactions) then an outright play into the wallet
marketplace?

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Samuel_Michon
It's just an Apple Passbook clone, as you'd expect from Samsung.

[http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/27/4035064/samsung-wallet-
app...](http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/27/4035064/samsung-wallet-app-apple-
passbook-features)

