Keep Android Open Saga - (1/6)

Opensource And Appstores

Google already has started locking-down android, and, is a few months from completely locking it down. Visit keepandroidopen.org for more information on how it affects you, and, what you can do about it. I will try to make this series easy enough to help you understand why we (as a species) are in this situation now. This post is part 1.

Opensource was flourishing in the 2005s. Android was born. It was a phone operating system. Being opensource and everything, it meant one could theoretically acquire source code and compile it on their hardware. In reality this is a very complex task; not meant for ordinary folks. 

It was also the age of software proliferation. If there was an app that existed on the Macintosh and it was popular, it slowly made it way onto windows, and, yes eventually android. But that happens a little later in time. 

Before that came appstores. It is a kind of service available on the internet where one could obtain software they want onto their operating system - i.e the android smart phones. The android's appstore was called Google Play or sometimes Playstore. 

But opensource and software proliferation are not the same idea. One must pause and wonder about that last paragraph. Android is opensource. It is linux based. On its own, theoretically speaking, it really doesn't need an appstore. You didn't have to explicitly depend on an organization or corporation to be able to get software onto your phones or other desktop software. Android is kind of a derivative of linux (?). Many flavors of linux that existed around that time - ubuntu, fedora, archlinux, etc - they too had the same concept (as that of appstores) but it was commonly called "repositories". The primary "function" of the repositories was to make your computer "less vulnerable" or "more secure". And from this point of view, appstores became more "strict" or "harsh".

Ordinary people take many aspects of Android (or iOS) for granted. For e.g. many people are unaware how the phone is able to notify you of a new chat message (on whatsapp/telegram/instagram/whatever)? (To keep things short, it isn't like an SMS notification). There is a great deal of cloud infrastructure and related redundancies in place. When you buy a phone, nobody tells you that some part of your identity is going to live on that infrastructure. 

Appstores are a small part in that entire infrastructure. In the next part we will try to understand more about the various roles appstores came to have over the years. 

Thankyou for reading.