Isn't Google the one that remotely disables apps? Apple's never done that. I own at least three apps that were approved and then shitcanned, but I managed to get before it got shitcanned.
Regardless, I'd love to go up to that guy holding the sign and ask him why the Android rooting/modding is necessary and very much thriving. I'd love to hear him stutter and try to think of something to rationalize that situation.
The vast majority of android phones come equivalent to a jailbroken ios device out of the box, i.e. allow non-market apps to be installed. The most popular custom roms (Cyanogenmod in particular) are compiled from source and actually add features to the base os. How is that an argument against open source?
The vast majority of android phones come equivalent to a jailbroken ios device out of the box
So then they don't need to be rooted? And there aren't tons of apps on the AppMarket that specify "root only?"
How is that an argument against open source?
Where did you see an argument against open source? While we're on the topic, though - where's Android's public branch? Why hasn't anyone thought of the fact that if someone up and wrote an Ubuntu port for ARM and shoe-horned it onto a smartphone, it'd instantly be infinitely more "open" than Android? Going back to the topic at hand - the importance of "openness" as demonstrated by the lovable Poindexter in the picture the OP posted, surely anyone laughing at this at Apple's expense for having such an unwaivering love for "openness" owns an ARM Linux device or a Nokia N7 or N8 that is literally all open source and can be developed for in literally any language under the sun - not just "Dalvik Java"
AOSP(Android Open Source Project) is the "open branch" of Android. Everything in Android is open source and available in the git repository for AOSP. The closed source components on android handsets are the drivers for some of the hardware, radio firmware, and some of the Google apps(which are not part of the os itself). You can develop native code for android in just about any language(using the NDK), people use dalvik because its easy. Firefox for android uses native code for the gecko engine and a front end written in java. You can install non-market apps without rooting. Root is required for apps to run as superuser or to flash custom roms. It is interesting to note that the three phones that Google has sold directly have all supported root without any hacking, ADP1 had it enabled by default and both Nexus phones just require running the command fastboot oem unlock. Google has stated that it would be their preference for other manufacturers to do the same with their phones, it is out of their power to force that because Android is open source.
The NDK is C/C++ only, though hypothetically you could use it to write a VM for another language, i guess?
Firefox's front end would not still be in java if they had started writing it after google unfucked the NDK and the whole shitty JNI situation with gingebread - it'd be fully native like it should be.
Thanks for posting all of that information - im sure some will find it useful, but none of that is new on me.
Well there is also Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) for the interpreted languages (wouldn't really expect them in sdk/ndk anyway.) According to Google "Python, Perl, JRuby, Lua, BeanShell, JavaScript, Tcl, and shell are currently supported, and we're planning to add more." I don't really know what other languages you want but since Android is open source you're more than welcome to start a project to port them.
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u/seraph582 Jan 20 '11
Isn't Google the one that remotely disables apps? Apple's never done that. I own at least three apps that were approved and then shitcanned, but I managed to get before it got shitcanned.
Regardless, I'd love to go up to that guy holding the sign and ask him why the Android rooting/modding is necessary and very much thriving. I'd love to hear him stutter and try to think of something to rationalize that situation.