Quote:
Originally Posted by jyl
As I understand it, Google's lack of control over updates, fragmentation and forking is because of the way it set up Android, as open source code. I think Google needs to take back control. Just because Android started as open source, does that mean that every future version of Android (Android 6, 7, etc) must forever be open source?
Right now, I think most people don't know or care about Android's security weaknesses. But one day, people's bank logins, PayPal logins, identity, pictures, contacts, etc will get stolen in a big way that gets widely publicized. And in a flash, Android will lose buckets of market share.
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The amount of capital investment, infrastructure specific, and device specific tweaks (forks) to the base system made by licensee's makes it difficult to reset to a standard. It's not impossible, just can't happen overnight.
Google know they need to and have been actively trying to take control of Android but it's not simple.
Amazon is a prime example. Think of everything they've built that relies on their fork of Android.
I believe it is one of the driving factors behind googles aggressive push of it's own OS / hardware initiatives.
They need to have the majority market share in order to dictate and enforce a standard.
The only other option is to adopt a standard fork from one of the other hardware players and that's no bueno.