Huawei ban and alternative OS for mobile

[Thomas]

But man, was that CLI painful for many purposes.

DCL actually is awesome in my unbaised opinion. I mean this is a very subject perspective. You can do amazing stuff with DCL. I think VMS needs a good supported unix portability layer to port most unix applications.
See: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Real-Pro ... 1555581919

--Thomas

[Thomas]

More on topic:
It is possible to write a good optimized os for huawei specific devices. But missing app ecosystem is something they will have to deal with,

https://www.neowin.net/news/mandrake-li ... ndroid-os/
and
Lineage OS

remain plausible alternatives.

--Thomas

[bzt]

But man, was that CLI painful for many purposes.

DCL actually is awesome in my unbaised opinion. I mean this is a very subject perspective. You can do amazing stuff with DCL.

I must agree. DCL is more powerful than any other UNIX shell script equivalent, and this is not just a personal perspective, read it's feature list.
Also VMS is not tied to CLI, it had GUI long before XFree86 and twm was ported to Linux. DECWindows is similar to today's Xorg-xserver, Motif is like gtk or qt, and CDE is the equivalent of KDE or GNOME.

On topic, it turned out that Huawei is allowed to use Android after all, but they are ready with Plan B just in case (originally called HongMeng OS, recently renamed to HarmonyOS).

Cheers,
bzt

[Thomas]

Yes. yes, I agree with the senitment.

Also VMS is not tied to CLI

In theory this might be true. In practice, I would not want to use VMS without DCL. I do not want to go further into details at the moment.
--Thomas.

[eekee]

There are already alternatives to Google Play Store, at least for apps that work on Android devices. F-Droid is the best Open Source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-Droid ) example I've been able to find so far. I was very disappointed with the lack of Open Source development of apps written in anything other than Java for Android. I use C and SDL for app development. I've found very few Open Source projects encouraging sharing of C code for Android devices. I even wrote to the FSF about the topic of mobile development since they have some posts at their site regarding Free Software for mobile and how important it is, but they never even bothered to reply to my message. There are also several closed source alternatives to Google Play Store. The Kindle site seems the most visible to me. They even have a tool to check if your app works on various devices and once you run the check, they ask if you'd like to add your app to their store. I've seen lists of several other sites trying to offer their alternative to the Google Play Store too.

I had a Kindle Fire tablet for a couple of years. The app store was poor, especially in content. It didn't have anything like as much content as Google Play, and the store app itself was bad, with a serious text editing bug and no way to edit your reviews. I think the text editing bug got fixed eventually, some time in the last year. I never checked but always suspected Amazon of charging for listings in the Kindle store, because there was absolutely nothing on there which was actually free; neither ad-supported nor paid. At any rate, it's especially poor for development tools. Even QPython had a price!

There seemed to be far more content on Aptoide, although I didn't use it much. I didn't like Aptoide's app either, spam and fixed rotation are not friendly features, but it had the most stuff. There was another store app I can't remember the name of, which also seemed to have more content than the Kindle store, but less than Aptoide. I didn't use either store much because I was bored with installing apps by the time I saw them, and somewhat nervous about security.

Then of course there's F-droid, which I've had on all my phones and tablets for years, but barely use because it's depressing. There's so much low-quality junk, and I haven't had very good results searching for apps. I'm glad it doesn't make such a big meal out of updating apps any more, but there's so much junk I think of it as karaoke for programmers. Open sourcers have always been overproducers. Back in 2001, there was already vast numbers of little, low to medium quality free programs using the supposedly painful Xlib and Xaw. Imagine what the easy development of mobile OSs does for this phenomenon!

Here's an idea: Patch F-droid to filter out apps written only in Java. Maybe exclude .NET too.

[bzt]

I've put my findings about Huawei's OS in this topic. What I've gathered so far, they've tried to create a new kernel, but they realized what we all know, that writing an OS entirely from scratch is a huge task. They surely can't do it in the given time frame, so for the time being they switched to creating a new Linux distro instead.

Two days ago it turned out that Huawei is lobbying strongly in the EU to create it's own appstore and google-killer applications: Eric Xu interview (German)

Cheers,
bzt

[lmemsm]

I never checked but always suspected Amazon of charging for listings in the Kindle store, because there was absolutely nothing on there which was actually free; neither ad-supported nor paid. At any rate, it's especially poor for development tools. Even QPython had a price!

Didn't notice anything asking a developer to pay to add an app, but I didn't go through the entire process and submit the app I was running through their online checker.

Then of course there's F-droid, which I've had on all my phones and tablets for years, but barely use because it's depressing. There's so much low-quality junk, and I haven't had very good results searching for apps.

I think you can find that problem anywhere, depending on what you're looking for in programs/apps. I've been having trouble finding any applications I really like in the Google Playstore. I'm used to searching through a lot of programs/apps just to find the few I actually might like. Also, keep in mind, your idea of low quality might be someone else's idea of cool and vice versa.

Here's an idea: Patch F-droid to filter out apps written only in Java. Maybe exclude .NET too.

I wish it was that easy, but I think if you filtered out Java and Kotlin you'd be left with relatively no applications for Android except for web apps and programs using HTML/CSS/JavaScript (developed using PhoneGap, ReactNative, etc.) I do know of some developers using .NET and mono for mobile development, but I really haven't seen much in the way of Open Source app development with them. I don't know if F-Droid can easily accept most C/C++ based Android applications. They have requirements for apps they accept and describe how it must work with their build system. Using native development, NDK and a typical GNU autotools or makefile style build may not work with their buildserver.

Main example I've seen for C/C++ ported applications to Android is: http://libsdl-android.sourceforge.net/ There are a few others, but really not much in this area. There are also some terminal emulator projects that let you run ported command line applications but you're limited to cli or ncurses style applications. I've been searching for books, references, projects that don't use Java/Kotlin/Android Studio style development. There are very few resources in that area and I wish there was a good list with URLs (wouldn't even need an app store since the number is so limited) for those types of things. If you do run across other resources of this nature, would be very interested to hear about them. Would be nice to see some well-tested Open Source applications ported to Android rather than watching developers reinvent the wheel and rewrite everything from scratch using new languages and toolchains. I don't mind reinventing the wheel if you come up with something better, but it seems like a lot of code repeats earlier mistakes made in other languages and with previous projects rather than learning from them.

[lmemsm]

In case anyone else is interested, here are a few links to articles I found interesting. The first is on removing some of the Google specific apps from Android. (Huawei could conceivably do something similar and just use the Linux/Open Source parts of Android while removing the more proprietary Google apps and code. There would probably still be some hardware issues to overcome depending on the device.) The other mentions and gives some reviews of alternative app stores.

https://android.izzysoft.de/articles/na ... t-google-5

https://android.izzysoft.de/articles/na ... afe_to_use