Should Ubuntu Phone Rebase To Android?

[coder111]

Short answer- No, do not rebase to Android.

Long answer- Hell noooo, no way you should rebase to Android.

If you need reasons- read this:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/

Android is not free in terms of control- Google calls the shots. Android is not free even in price- I think all Android manufacturers end up paying Microsoft for patents and Google for the right to use it. And Android is not free in terms of software freedoms- more and more apps are closed source or depend on closed source Google apps/APIs. And there are plenty of blobs.

Any phone that cares about software freedoms or privacy should stay away from Android.

If you need compatibility with Android apps- you can use libhybris, like Jolla/Sailfish guys did. Invest in it, improve it, and make more apps run better. This will not solve the problem of Android apps depending on closed Googe services though... Technology wise, the whole independent phone OS is solved pretty much perfectly by Jolla/Sailfish. There are several problems with Jolla- lack of polish, some code is closed in Jolla, and that hardware is somewhat dated. It's getting better with each release, and I love my Jolla phone though.

Now, how to make an independent (non-Android, MS or Apple) phone successful? I do not know. You have to offer something that's severely lacking in current phones, but I do not see what it is. Convergence? Privacy (few people care)?

If I had resources to blow, maybe I'd make phones that can work in peer-to-peer mode? Use them for mesh networking? Run some kind of distributed filesystem, and make synchronization fully private and independent from 3rd parties like Google? Or sell both phone and a home server and desktop software that can work in sync- again without depending on 3rd parties. But few people care enough about privacy to go through the trouble of setting this up.

Or offer UI or devices that are significantly easier to use / better than current crop of phones? Hard to manage with limited resources...

[droidhacker]

What developers always say about Android, is that it's terrible to develop for. Incompatible among devices and even Android versions. I only had a quick look, but yes the java stuff seems a huge mess. So Ubuntu don't copy but do way BETTER!

Might not hurt for you to dive into Android development *before* passing judgment.

[droidhacker]

Hell no! We need a pure GNU/Linux phone.

Android is repulsive because of the fact that you're using Java to develop for ONE OS! There's also the problem of the whole Android OS stack being messy and bloated (not that Ubuntu is much better... >_>), which makes it tough to develop for (and slow).

Take into account the recent re-opening of the Java API issue by Oracle, and the future of Android is already on the fringe. : /

Java isn't about multiple *OS*, Java is about multiple *ISA*.

That means: Android Java applications run on ARMv6, ARMv7, ARMv8, MIPS, x86, x86_64.
Please note that though the majority of Android devices currently will be ARMv7, there are MANY examples of all of the other ISAs in use. In fact, Google themselves sell an x86_64 Android device; the Nexus Player.

As far as Oracle goes, Android is critical mass now, Google can afford to put some R&D into switching out the front end language to something a bit less Oracle-y now, and won't lose the whole system because of it. Its too bad that they didn't have the foresight to get Sun to sign them up on a royalty free deal before the Oracle mess happened.

Oracle is really eff'ing the dog though. It is very shortsighted of them to attack Google on using Java, since Android is really the only application *of* Java. They had the opportunity to leverage Java in a useful and non-hostile manner in order to benefit themselves, but instead, they seem really intent on making the whole world hate them.

I guess when you're not smart enough to be successful, you become a patent troll.

[droidhacker]

Because every app I run on my computer will out of the box and truth be known, I don't actually use that many apps. I'll take the convergence so I can have a full PC on the go for productivity. I don't need tons of horsepower for the stuff I do.

The problem is that you don't actually get that. I mean, yes, you can technically *run* all of the various open source Linux-only software on such a device, but have you tried to actually run Libreoffice on a cell phone?

** I have. Its not pretty. The UI is literally so small that you have to continually zoom in/out and jump all over the place to even access menus.

Also, FYI.... you can actually run all Linux software on an Android device ***RIGHT NOW***, but without actually limiting yourself to Linux software, i.e., you can still run Android software. This is how you do it:

1) Install "Linux Deploy": https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...uxdeploy&hl=en
(source code: https://github.com/meefik/linuxdeploy)

2) Install VNC viewer of your choice: I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...freebVNC&hl=en
(source code: https://github.com/iiordanov/remote-desktop-clients)

3) Install distro of your choice via Linux Deploy, and start an instance.

4) Connect to it with VNC.

5) When the phone rings, answer it. When the call is finished, you can go back to your Linux software.

** This doesn't do anything stupid like running a new stack from kernel up in a VM. This starts all the regular-linux processes on top of the already running kernel in a chroot.

[droidhacker]

This would be a bad idea, especially given efforts by Google to close all their top-level Android apps and require OEM's to either take all or none of the apps and sign contracts not to produce "incompatable" meaning non-approved versions of Android. Any OEM using Android as the basis of an Ubuntu Phone would risk being cut off by Google, while a current Ubuntu phone probably would not count as it has no relationship to Android except SurfaceFlinger, which Ubuntu hopes to replace with mir anyway. Any phone developed by Ubuntu should use open, not closed top level apps. Google is abandoning their original open apps one after another and replacing them with closed Google Play crap. An open Ubuntu Phone is something unique: a few sliders in "privacy" moved, and all malicious tracking requires using backdoors in the baseband radio or firmware exploits. In both Google and iPhone a lot of the tracking is done by top-level, closed apps. It stands to reason that a non-Android Ubuntu phone would be harder to track and send a lot less data to commerical servers with the right privacy settings. There is one thing that Ubuntu should copy from both Apple and Google though: default local device encryption to lock out both thieves and law enforcement efforts to snuff out political dissent. I love hearing the FBI whine about being unable to recover files locally, apparently their online tracking is not good enough to win in court.

Hmm, well.... problem with your argument here, is that Google does NOT actually force you into their "google applications" set. Yes, if you want to use play store in the "official" manner, you are required to carry a few compatibility pieces that yes, are a bit.... excessive, but the nuts and bolts of the system are still sitting there in AOSP.

Frankly, the only two pieces of "google applications" that are actually useful, are play store and hangouts. Yes, hangouts can be easily replaced (in terms of functionality) using something based on XMPP or SIP, but then you are in that unfortunate situation where you can't connect with your non-technically-minded contacts who use whatever it comes with.

Play store can be easily replaced using the nogapps project's "BlankStore". https://github.com/mar-v-in/BlankStore
Hangouts... well, it isn't built for Android yet, but can be replaced for the most part by hangups: https://github.com/tdryer/hangups -- if they figure out how to do voice/video, I may consider building an Android client for it.

The important thing to keep in mind, is that this isn't apple -- this is Android, which means that you aren't stuck installing software that they've "approved", you can install any software from any source. In my experience, all the Android software that is actually worth having, can be obtained from the vendor directly. Play store's listings are fully accessible regardless of whether or not you have an actual android play store client, then you go to the manufacturer's website and obtain the software. Complicated? Perhaps. Thing is, I really suspect that if enough phone manufacturer's had the balls to cut off Google, that Google would give in and provide a standalone installable play store. It really does feel like a violation that Google would provide Google applications in a standalone configuration for **APPLE** devices, but not for Android. I.e., you can install Hangouts on an apple phone without having to run GmsCore.

[droidhacker]

I use Ubuntu phone for the last few months and I immensely enjoy the fact Google is not integrated everywhere in my phone

Easy enough to kill the google...

and that applications dont ask for phone book, camera and microphone access without any reason like on Android.

Legit.
BUT... also something that Google is finally doing something about.

Frankly, the way I always looked at the set of "requested permissions" was to be able to ask the question **why would you be asking for that?**. And if there is no satisfactory answer besides "to steal your personal information", then you are provided with a window into the motivations of the software's author. This then leads to the ability to decide whether you actually trust the software author, which can actually be a lot more useful than simply the ability to deny the software's request to access certain information.

I.e., if the software *feels sketchy*, then whether you can deny certain permissions or not, you probably don't want that program to begin with.

So what they are now doing with the next major release version, is keeping the "request permission" framework in place, but providing a mechanism where you are able to choose to decline specific permissions regardless. Frankly though, I will still wholly decline software from authors I don't trust anyway.

[d2kx]

Like I said in another topic, regarding AMD:

It works fine with AMD Catalyst, but a future driver with OpenGL driver build 13394 and newer (probably on the 15.20 branch when it goes official) improves the performance by around ~45% compared to the Catalyst 15.5 (fglrx 15.101).