There is an assumption that AOSP is how OEMs receive Android updates from Google. However I am not sure that is the case. GrapheneOS is perhaps a minority player due to lack of hardware which they can use to get into a partnership agreement and advanced access.
I don't think that phrase means what you think it does. That only makes sense when there exists an open standard which a company builds an implementation for. Android was built from scratch and there was no standard.
The scale of engineering to compete with Android is an order of magnitude or two larger than that necessary to compete with those other products you mentioned. Not to mention the challenges of getting the developer market to follow you to your fork. It seems like any phone vendor even capable of giving it a go is okay with the current arrangement. Chinese firms can definitely do it and I guess Huawei has, but that's not entirely relevant to Western markets.
There was a split world for a long time even before the more recent changes because of the need to hide secret new features or products from the general public. It was always a tricky arrangement. They just decided one day that there wasn't a lot of folks contributing that lacked access to the private repos, so they might as well just switch all development to occur in that place. Honestly, it's somewhat rationale. If there was a significant number of folks contributing to Android without such access I'm sure that wouldn't have happened. We didn't lose as much as folks think we did given the code drops from the private repos still happened even previously.
I'm curious why you care about whether or not they spent time and effort to write those components themselves. Isn't that their choice as the authors? How does it materially affect you or the product experience? From my vantage point, I love the idea of having even more options as it will create competition, making all sides better for it. Having a singular dominant player in any space (whether it's a browser, kernel, or library) is something we should try to avoid whenever possible.
They can obviously do whatever they want, but realistically, having five different engines that are all 70% complete is not helpful. That's not providing more options. Instead, having one that's 99% complete would be providing more options.
They don't need to do that to sell their hardware so why would they do that? On the other hand, they have strong incentives to not give you that level of access and information. The only way this will change is by having some disruption by way of a competitor who sells hardware with that feature as being a major reason why it takes off.
Or we could regulate. One hammer I'm tempted to use is to simply forbid sales and importation of hardware made by companies that also distribute software. That way the only way to sell you hardware is to make sure its interfaces are both simple and thoroughly documented.
We could possibly make an exception for open source software, or only forbid the distribution of the relevant drivers, or limit the applicability of that law to specific hardware: hard drives, mice, printers, web cams... or GPUs.
Security at its core comes down to trusting the supply chain that provides the software that runs on your hardware. There are many alternative secure supply chain models, but ultimately users often are incapable of making great choices on what is trustworthy. It does generally make sense that the OS vendor needs to play a key part in helping ensure trusted parties are involved in the supply chain.
Comparing phones to PCs isn't a great comparison because PCs don't have a great track record and the amount of personal data and ease of installing lots of apps is quite different. Of course the current arrangement is far from perfect, but acknowledging the problems it's trying to solve is an important step towards trying to find a solution that is better.
Having been on the flip side of this divide in the past, there really are a lot of potential safety and reliability problems when using random third party versions of components. While I'm sure there are strong financial incentives to constrain supply, there are also some other strong reasons as well.
Also it's very expensive to actually make an ecosystem compared to a close one. The best way to incentivize manufacturers to do it is by creating a competing product that is open and having that differentiating feature drive sales away. That's generally the approach that works best.
That's kinda been the experience I've found in the open source diabetes space; several manufacturers have floated making things harder to hack, and we've found that actually showing them how many people use the reverse engineered API and would definitely go to their competitor is a really useful way of disincentivising that sort of anti-consumer behaviour.
When it comes to ebike batteries I think the alarmism is actually valid considering how often we see explosive fireballs on trains and in apartment buildings coming from cheap no brand ebike batteries.
High capacity batteries are incredibly dangerous devices kept safe only by very careful engineering and manufacturing.
> there really are a lot of potential safety and reliability problems when using random third party versions of components.
What are you talking about?
If a seller sells you random junk that causes safety issue, they are liable of the damage like the OEM would if their product was bad.
Then, if the seller is in a jurisdiction where you can't hope to sue, then it's either your problem for picking this random seller on their website, or we should make it Amazon's problem to feature this kind of sellers in the first place. Surely the biggest retailer on the planet could afford vetting businesses selling on its platform to protect consumers' safety.
In any case, the fact that Bosch's ecosystem is closed offers no additional protection whatsoever, as shady sellers already sell counterfeit components (that may or may not work at all).
> If a seller sells you random junk that causes safety issue, they are liable of the damage like the OEM would if their product was bad.
No, the GP comment is right. I’ve worked on products where a lot of users did mods and used third party accessories.
Customers don’t care who, how, or why their product broke. They want to make noise and try to get a warranty fix for it. Customers would try to mod their devices, break it in the process, and then spend weeks trying to drag us on social media until we relented and shipped them a new one for free.
They’re not going to be pursuing damages against the Aliexpress vendor who sold them a flawed battery pack, nor the Amazon seller called WOBALUBAFY that has already disappeared, nor the YouTuber who hastily showed them how to solder some things together.
They always try to hide the evidence and claim the product failed by itself because the big American company has the deep pockets and the ability to send them free stuff to avoid bad PR.
Right, I see what you mean, but that's merely “saving the company the hassle of bogus support requests” and still has nothing to do with the claimed “improves reliability and consumer safety”. This actually confirms my intuition that the safety argument is BS (as always with this argument).
And even from a “bogus support request” PoV I fail to see how opening up your product degrades things, as the risk of a user having an issue with third party components should be lower, not higher, if the said components don't have to hack around proprietary restrictions.
The closed system doesn’t (only) prevent counterfeit systems, it also prevents someone from maliciously releasing a mod that could make the motor accelerate instead of break at some random time.
It’d be negligent for anyone to release a product like this without locking down the FW.
Many years ago, we did exactly that: our product had FW update support and our biggest concern was a rogue hacker creating a package that would brick the product.
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