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Most Android manufacturers — including Huawei — are what’s known as Google hardware partners. This relationship lets them build their phones around a collection of Google products, from apps like Google Maps and Assistant, to under-the-hood tools like location services or push notifications. While Google gives off the impression that Android is open and available to everyone, these services represent a quiet control that the company doesn’t often enforce over its hardware partners — though, as it has now proven, it certainly can.
With the recent order, the U.S. government forced Google’s hand. The U.S. Department of Commerce put Huawei on the “Entity List,” which blocks it from buying technology from U.S. companies without government approval. Huawei and Google now have three months to send updates to existing users. For new phones, Huawei may be able to use the open-source version of Android, but it can’t be a Google partner.
The distinction between using Android and being a Google partner seems messy from the outside, but “Android” technically refers to the core operating system that covers basic things like making phone calls or using the camera. The freely available version of Android is called the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and a company doesn’t have to be a partner to use it.
Most manufacturers like Huawei, however, do choose to become a Google partner. That means Huawei agrees to only make devices that use a collection of Google apps known as Google Mobile Services which includes things like Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Play Store. Under this arrangement, Huawei can’t, for example, make a phone that ships with Microsoft’s Bing and Edge instead of Google Search and Chrome.
Partners also have to meet certain security and compatibility conditions. In exchange, they get access to all of Google’s apps and infrastructure, making their phones much more appealing to customers worldwide than they would otherwise be. This arrangement is usually free, though manufacturers who sell in the EU pay a fee and are exempt from the all-or-nothing condition for complicated legal reasons.
According to Bryan Pon, PhD, mobile platform researcher and co-founder of the data analytics firm Caribou Data, this gives Google a lot of control over its platform. “Consumers are attached to the Google products and services that sit on top of the operating system,” explains Pon. “Google has very strong proprietary control over those, and in that sense wields tremendous power, irrespective of the operating system.”
Additionally, Huawei, and Google’s other partners, have to include a collection of developer tools called Google Play Services. These background tools let app developers easily do things like create push notifications, embed maps in their apps, or get a GPS location. Most Android apps distributed through the Google Play Store rely on some of these tools to provide features that are too expensive or difficult for every developer to build themselves.
As Pon explains, some of these tools are crucial features that would normally be part of an operating system. “They’re actually taking functionality out of the core platform,” Pon says. “They’re leaving Android open source, more and more, just a shell. And that core functionality is now part of just proprietary Google services.” Google does this to make it easier to update important features without waiting for a big Android update, but the result consolidates Google’s power over its platform.
[...] Even if we could assume the best about Google’s intentions to keep Android as open as possible — and Google did not respond to a request by OneZero for comment — the Huawei order demonstrates that Google’s control can be abused by other entities. If the U.S. were in a trade war with South Korea instead of China, Samsung phones — still the most popular in the world over — could face a similar fate. Google can reaffirm its commitment to being “open” and “free” all it wants, but ultimately it’s still a gatekeeper.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday May 27 2019, @07:43AM (4 children)
With blackjack! And hookers!
I'm kind of surprised the Chinese government hasn't already picked up Android and made their own version of it. Social credit score, great firewall ... but no official state-sanctioned phone OS fork?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ataradov on Monday May 27 2019, @07:57AM
The problem is not the Chinese market. They are fine there with AOSP and their own services.
The problem is that in the western world everyone needs Google Play. Even if you were to trust those Chinese services, half of them will not work or will be useless.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Monday May 27 2019, @07:58AM
They have already announced that they have 'something being prepared' for this eventuality, but as yet we do not know any details - particularly how advanced it currently is.
If they produced their own version of Android, how many countries would ban it for security reasons, exactly as is happening to Huawei's products now? For internal use it might be OK, but it would face stiff opposition globally.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday May 27 2019, @09:22AM
https://wccftech.com/huaweis-hongmeng-kirin-os-is-9-years-old-optimized-for-linux/ [wccftech.com]
It's coming.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:20PM
> made their own version of it
I am suprised that the "powers that be" have not taken Android and broken Google's control over it. I guess they are held in place by a few short term contracts and the ubiquity of google play store. I guess it is a very weak federation, and maybe the US govt using google as a pawn will break their hold over the federation...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Monday May 27 2019, @07:54AM (4 children)
What people usually miss comparing Huawei to Samsung and China to South Korea is that in China all those "essential" Google apps and services are blocked by the great firewall.
So how do the Chinese manage to do anything with their Android phones? Answer: they already have their own infrastructure on top of Android to replace Google's - App stores, Apps, Services the lot.
Huawei have tried and tested alternatives to all the Google stuff ready to go, because they have to for the home market - of course it's all in Chinese so there's probably a _lot_ of translation work to do, but that's about it. Oh, and then all your data and info is going to China instead of to Google, but I'm sure they'll
keep it secure and privatemonetize and abuse it just as well.If Google has to pull the plug on Samsung on the other hand, then Samsung has nothing - unless/until they do a deal with the only other source of a complete Android smartphone infrastructure, i.e. China...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @08:46AM (2 children)
Not exactly true that Samsung has nothing. They do have their own app store etc. Probably not the full suite of apps, but not nothing either.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday May 27 2019, @09:21AM (1 child)
Samsung could also intensify work on Tizen [wikipedia.org] if shit hit the fan (Huawei is prepping its own "HongMeng" OS [wccftech.com] that appears to be Linux-based).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 27 2019, @04:41PM
If they've got any sense, they're already doing so. The current US govt. isn't exactly a reliable partner.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @02:35PM
Answer: Not Many.
Result: much less Huawei devices outside China, and incidentally less currency income for Huawei and China in general.
Seems like mission accomplished, from both security and trade war standpoints.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday May 27 2019, @09:16AM
Huawei chief would be ‘the first to protest’ China retaliation to Trump ban [theverge.com]
CEO doing damage control, leaving the door open. The U.S. Commerce Department did grant Huawei a 90 day temporary license [engadget.com] to deliver updates to users (good time to throw some of that Chinese spyware at them, eh?).
Huawei can’t officially use microSD cards in its phones going forward [theverge.com]
Remember this story? Huawei Introduces a Memory Card That Fits into a Nano SIM Slot [soylentnews.org]
Suddenly that doesn't sound like such a bad idea, at least from Huawei's standpoint. They expected these issues years in advance and have planned for this moment.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @12:58PM
Android, both as a name and iconic symbol itself is a gender bias, no doubt. A mascot of
circumcisedpenis as a symbol of operation system, created and operated by CIA investment frontend ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel [wikipedia.org] ) is maybe acceptable in Atlantic civilization for subjugated nations, but other ancient cultures on this planet (China, India) recognize it as very inappropriate.(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @04:12PM
I think more people should have a look at microG (basically a one-man operation)
https://microg.org/ [microg.org]
https://lineage.microg.org/ [microg.org]
https://github.com/microg [github.com]
https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_GmsCore/wiki [github.com]
https://github.com/microg/android_packages_apps_GmsCore/wiki/Implementation-Status [github.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 27 2019, @10:14PM (3 children)
Funny that only Huawei is targeted by the US govt.
How about all of the spying that Google and Facebook do? But no sanctions on Google or Facebook ...
Likely the same or worse than what Huawei might/does do?
Could this really be that Huawei is too far ahead in the 5G competition and the other multinationals
are using this move to slow them down since they apparently cannot compete with better products
(ie about money issues, not so much about spying)?
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday May 28 2019, @12:31AM (1 child)
It *could* be, but it's not. Google scrapes all your data (pretty much) and uses it to direct relevant ads to you. Sucks, but they protect it very well as it's the life-blood of their business. FaceBook scrapes all you data and uses it to push ads (and misinformation it seems) to you, and they also sell it, meaning who the hell knows where it's going. It's pretty easy for the government to request it though.
Huawei gathers the data and hands it to the Chinese government, which in general terms is better than FaceBook, or even Google as they have little direct effect on Westerner's lives .... unless of course they're in government, technology, healthcare, law enforcement, etc. The Chinese government can leverage that data pretty well, and backdoor access even more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:16AM
Google and Facebook gathers the data and hands it to the US government.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) [wikipedia.org]
"Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"
We do get fooled again!
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday May 28 2019, @01:02PM
> Funny that only Huawei is targeted by the US govt.
I thought you were going to mention other Chinese players (I'm specifically thinking about OnePlus, but there are almost certainly others).