It's not a compliment, it's an attempt to use my name to peddle misinformation which we see as quite harmful towards GrapheneOS and getting the issues we have with hardware addressed. Inventing problems we don't have and distracting from those we do doesn't help us. It hurts us.
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I was just giving you credit for all the hard work you did on android-prepare-vendor and lots of research and time to work out secure boot and all the other things Google failed to provide in their tools and docs to get AOSP actually working for each hw/release combo.
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You're talking about support for Pixels, not issues with AOSP. If we didn't support Pixels, none of that would be relevant, and we don't intend to support Pixels in the long-term. We're using them until we have better options available, and ideally we'd have input into making it.
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is it fair to say that it's more difficult than it need be to get GrapheneOS to run on Google's Pixel product line? Or that there have been vendor-specific barriers that favor Google's own builds of Android? These are the questions from an anti-competitive practices standpoint.
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The anti-competitive practices are around requiring that Google services need to be built into the OS with privileges unavailable to third party apps. They encourage apps to depend on APIs provided by Play services. The problem is it's not just a set of libraries for apps to use.
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right, that I'm aware of and hence why I called it the "smoking gun" somewhere in this thread. The ease and practicality of developing and installing an alternative OS for Google's product line is another issue, possibly considered anti-competitive if specific barriers exist. 1/
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My opinion on that is well-known, but I'm wondering what you think about it and whether you would characterize these challenges as monopolistic and/or a hindrance to developers and users. 2/2
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I don't think they should be forced to support installing other OSes on their own phones at all. Pixels have a tiny market share. Perhaps they shouldn't be allowed to provide Pixel exclusive advantages from their other services, such as free photo storage, but beyond that...
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... it all has to do with Play services and the licensing arrangements for it. Don't really see much that's anti-competitive about Pixels themselves aside from minor cases where they offer advantages to using a Pixel based on their services like past free photo storage deals.
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The reason I ask is that other monopoly cases have relied on looking at specific products as hardware+software combos. This was true re: Microsoft ruling and x86, and one of the reasons Gates was asked about alternative OS's and if there were barriers to installing them on x86 1/
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The combo is every device that has licensed Play services. Pixels themselves can only be anti-competitive in regards to other hardware vendors, and they really don't do much of that. Play services on the other hand is highly anti-competitive to alternative service providers.
It is possible to implement an app providing an alternative push service usable by other apps. However, it will need to show a foreground service notification (cannot match FCM UX) and it has to ask for a poorly explained battery optimization exception. Also, Play Store forbids
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uploading this app or using it for this in other apps. They forbid competing with their push notification service. They give their push notification service special privileges on devices licensing Play services. Same applies to many other Google services. It's anti-competitive.