Hi everybody!
It's my first post here, I'm quite a noob at all these Android things, but I got my HTC Hero last year and have been using it quite a lot since then.
I'm also fond of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), and I always try to find an open source equivalent to what I'm using. That's how I switched to Ubuntu Linux 6 years ago and never came back to Windows
I've been looking on the Web, reading Android news websites, and I realized they never talk about open source software being developed for Android phones. At most, they will talk about free (as in beer) softwares, but most of the time these are ad-supported or quickly become ad-supported if they're popular.
For instance, I looked for a music player (cause the one offered by HTC is quite slow and poorly reads OGG music -- yes I'm also in open formats!), and I could only find ad-supported free-ish softwares (MixZing player for instance)... but no open source choice!
On Linux, there are dozens of music players, and of course they're all open source, so you just choose the one you like the best, and even if it doesn't suit you perfectly, you can modify it or develop a plugin for it!
I was wondering if all that was because of the Android Market. Could it be possible to push an open source application on the Android Market? Would it be accepted?
Anyways, to summarize: Is there an open source community on Android?
Thanks in advance!
I'd say yes, you can find many oss in android market, but generally the source is in devs personal page. For instance my apps are open-source, the rom hackers generally give out their source, and more. However i don't know if there are oss apps for all categories...
Hi!
Thanks for your answer! (and congrats for the supertux port )
I'm pretty concerned about the multimedia part... So far:
MixZing Player ==> Ad supported, closed sources
Tune Wiki ==> Ad supported, closed sources
Astro Player ==> Commercial software, closed sources
Cubed ==> Closed sources
etc.
The only one I see was Rock On, which used to be closed sources until the project was discontinued (now the sources are available on github I guess).
As for the other softwares, a lot of them are created by people who think they're going to be rich by selling 0.99 USD softwares... therefore all these softwares are (obviously) closed-sources!
not to be a smart ass but, as long as it works, does it really matter if the source is available?
Yes FOSS is great but if there's a closed source app that does the job I'll use it, there's nothing wrong with closed source vs open when it comes to functionality
Of course, it's mainly a philosophical/ethical topic.
But to give you an example, MixZing recently decided to add an ad-supported system. In the initial release after this system was applied, ads were displayed every 10 seconds, it became almost unusable!
Of course, because a lot of people complained, the MixZin developers changed that. Yet, it's still heavily invaded with ads everywhere...
Another thing is that if you like a software but think it lacks a functionality, with open source you can add it. Of course, it requires technical skills, but the most important thing is that it is possible. With closed source, the only thing you can do is to send a feedback to the developers, then cross your fingers and hope that your request will be implemented in the next version.
A last thing: if the software is discontinued (e.g. the main developers lack of time to keep maintaining the software), the source is available for anybody to maintain it. With closed sources, well... use your software until the next Android update tells you it's too old to run on your system!
By the way, I should twist my fingers 7 times before typing anything: the main developer of RockOn created a project called ^3 (Cubed) which is open source as well, and which has evolved a lot since the last time I checked it! It might become my music player of choice!
I personally use Music Mod. I'm not sure if it's open or not, it's based on the stock music player.
As for open source vs not, I use the best tool for the job. I've used Linux for 11 years and Unix for years before that but I'm no source code tree hugging hippy..
There are many open source software.. I'd have to guess most on code.google.com are open..
arcMedia is based off ffmpeg and so should be OSS
(appbrain playing up today so link here)
http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/multimedia/arcmedia_jpez.html
Related
Android was announce as Open Source 6 hours ago.
Anybody now can download and work over Android.
http://source.android.com/
Let's work together to bring the Android to our loved Elf(in)!
Good luck!
Sry for the english.
Android is now available as open source
Oct 21, 2008 7:52 AM posted by Dave Bort [updated Oct 21, 2008 9:59 AM by Dave Bort]
Today is a big day for Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and the open-source community. All of the work that we've poured into the mobile platform is now officially available, for free, as the Android Open Source Project.
You'll be hearing a lot about Android devices. We've all put a lot of effort into the first Android device, and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. But one device is just the beginning.
Android is not a single piece of hardware; it's a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.
Even if you're not planning to ship a mobile device any time soon, Android has a lot to offer. Interested in working on a speech-recognition library? Looking to do some research on virtual machines? Need an out-of-the-box embedded Linux solution? All of these pieces are available, right now, as part of the Android Open Source Project, along with graphics libraries, media codecs, and some of the best development tools I've ever worked with.
Have a great idea for a new feature? Add it! As an open source project, the best part is that anyone can contribute to Android and influence its direction. And if the platform becomes as ubiquitous as I hope it will, you may end up influencing the future of mobile devices as a whole.
This is an exciting time for Android, and we're just getting started. It takes a lot of work to keep up with the changes in the mobile industry. But we want to do more than just keep up; we want to lead the way, to try things out, to add the new features that everyone else is scrambling to keep up with. But we can't do it without your help.
What will you do with Android?
Damn....i read a bit and then realised this is not gonna work for the Elf
Elfin users yes but not elf......... maybe someone can hack it for elf users or provide a workaround
Please maintain subject line as per posting policy in the announcement. I have edited the same right now in spirit of this discussion. Please bear in mind for further times
Hello XDA'lers,
I'm proud to present you my latest app, called OpenOffice Document Reader.
Boring part about its history following... Feel free to skip it if you are lazy like me
I've already released it a few months ago out of frustration that there's NO native OpenOffice (LibreOffice) viewer for Android out there. However, first versions contained a lot of bugs, were slow and simply... bad.
Then, I started working together with my colleague Andi and rapidly improved the app a lot (from 3 to 4 stars average rating in Android Market) and seeked some interest from an Australian wine company, the official OpenOffice.org project and others.
However, let's go on with the interesting stuff...
OpenOffice Document Reader, Android's first native OpenDocument viewer, features most of the things you'll demand from a viewer, including zoom, copying, text search and other little gadgets almost none of you will ever use.
Originally it was meant to integrate seamlessly into the Android system (no icon in the launcher, no built-in file chooser), but since I mostly respect my user's opinion I've added both of the features I never planned to add (namely an icon in the launcher and a built-in file chooser - contributed by David).
Otherwise you're still able to open your documents using other apps, like GMail, Dropbox, Box.net, the official stock Android browser and others... (please keep reporting me what apps you're using to open your documents!)
That's it. I can't wait to read how you like it.
If you didn't already download it while reading this: Download at Android Market!
Maybe one thing I should add: Yes, we're working on editting. Hopefully Andi, TomTom and I can get it working soon for you.
Have a nice and open-sourcy day
Tom
PS: Yes, this is - and will be for ever - free open-source software released under GPL or something like that. Feel free to fetch the code at GitHub and don't forget to take a look at the underlying library called JOpenDocument by Andi.
PPS: Sorry for the awful amount of hyperlinks, but they tell you more than thousands of words.
Okay, this will be more of a rant.
So on non-android linux there are about 10000000000 useful, top-notch, cutting-edge, great, perfect and all round ass-kicking programs around. You can download all sorts of crazy super cool stuff for free because the free software and open source software community is producing awesome things. In many cases the open source and/or free alternatives are much better than the proprietary ones. I can't really think of a need when I couldn't find a really great open source library or full program to do the job.
But with android it's different. On Google Play there is all sorts of crap, feature-less and expensive stuff, the free version of a program is typically unmitigated ape****, the reviews/ratings/etc are useless. There are some exceptions like the terminal emulator, or sl4a, but for gods sake where is the geek community here? With fedora/ubuntu/debian/arch/etc we didn't need a centralized crap store and fancy useless ratings/reviews/etc and everything was still wonderful and you could actually get things done. In android, not so. There isn't a single fully functional open source and free GUI for browsing webdav or files over scp, but that's just the latest frustration of mine. Whenever I think of a program I'd love to just search for, download, install and use in 5 minutes which is the norm in a usual linux environment I know in advance that 8 out of 10 cases it won't be that easy on android.
And so where did all the non-free stuff get us? Now everyone is offering crap for money, all ****ty stores incorporate this supposedly to create incentives for developers to innovate because you know, without money there is no innovation at all on the face of this Earth but let's face it, when things were open source and/or free things worked (i.e. ordinary linux) but now they don't. Seems like the model is just not working.
Why can't I have the same linux experience on my bloody phone as the one I have on my laptop and desktop?
Who screwed this up and when?
Can we still fix it?
Android was meant for consumers as an option to the iPhone. Not for people to get all techy with it.
And most Android users ARE simply consumers who want a smartphone with "app and games," internet browser, texting, email, facebook, and calling
Ask that same consumer about computers, and I can almost guarantee they think its a Mac and PC (in which they mean Windows) battle. Mention Linux, and they'll look at you puzzled.
Sent from my DROID2 using xda premium
Android isn't totally open source. Still better than apple though.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy Exhibit 4G running Cyanogen Mod 9.
We are not limited to the Play "crap store" since we can sideload .apk files from alternative stores, or from wherever you get them. Also, I wouldn't call the Play store's reviews "useless;" I actually think they're generally helpful, and certainly better than the reviews in the Ubuntu "store."
Also, remember that Google built it's empire on selling advertising, and selling access to analytical data. The general *nix community doesn't have that. That's the difference between "open source" & "free."
-- Sent from my TouchPad using Communities
Yes, we don't need to use google play, but how many software packages are out there for android outside of google play? Not many. Certainly orders of magnitude less than ordinary free software available for desktop linux.
I see the fact that google invented android in order to make money, sell ads, etc. That's clear, so I agree with a commenter that android is not really techy from the get go. But why isn't there an ordinary linux based phone? I hear meego is dying, but why is that? Or why isn't there an alternative to meego which follows the ordinary linux philosophy, being community driven, perhaps with a corporate sponsor like redhat or canonical?
The same path that worked for the desktop is currently does not seem to be there for the phone although I'd think it's just another computing platform, not much different after all.
I honestly think we will never see a true open source phone. There are carriers that have to carry that phone and they want users to be able to have the latest and greatest when it comes to their phones and they want it to be easy for them to use. Android & IPhone both offer that experience a full functional Open Source phone would not offer that experience, you would have to build the source from scratch and flash it to your phone which wouldn't be fun for most users. Plus android has the full source code available here http://source.android.com/source/index.html which is how you get Cyanogenmod builds most of the time, they use google source to build that ROM.
tortib said:
I honestly think we will never see a true open source phone.
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Click to collapse
The Openmoko-Project has grown very far,
the FreeRunner is pretty cool:
> www.openmoko.org
not only the software development is open, you can already even print your case at home if you own a 3D-printer:
> projects.goldelico.com/p/gta04-main/page/CaseDesign/
github.com/psaravan/JamsMusicPlayer
Jams is a free, powerful and elegant music player for Android. Jams used to be a trial/paid app on the Play Store. Due to my lack of adequate free time and other issues, I've decided that I can no longer provide the level of support and active development that paid users expect from a developer. Rather than letting Jams completely die off and abandoning my users, I've open sourced the app and hosted it on GitHub (see link above) to encourage other developers to potentially improve it, use it in their own personal projects, and re-release it to users.
I will still occasionally update this app based on my free time, but it will probably be beta quality code. If you are a developer who's interested in using Jams' current codebase, I encourage you to fork this repository and/or directly contribute to it. If you decide to launch your own fork of Jams on the Play Store, feel free to drop me a line so I can feature it on my GitHub page.
Just want to thank everyone who's supported Jams Music Player over the past year. It's been an awesome experience for me and I really enjoyed receiving feedback from everyone in this subreddit and elsewhere. The app has received a major UI overhaul over the past few weeks and I will be publishing the free version of the app on the Play Store in the next few weeks once I get any existing kinks ironed out. Hopefully I'll be able to find more time again in the near future to work on this app full-time.
Imgur links to the new UI:
i.imgur.com/2hdMFzP.jpg
i.imgur.com/tdLiCVY.jpg
Tl;dr: I no longer have enough free time to develop Jams in a way that justifies asking people to pay for it. The app is now open source and a free version will be released on Google Play in the next 3-4 weeks.
is ACEMUSIC is based on your code?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android/apps-games/complete-material-design-acemusic-t2904994
unable to find any mention but even whole UI is same as of your code
Yeap, that player is definitely based off my codebase. The developer did mention my name in the "Special Thanks" section of their post.
JamsMusicPlayer said:
Yeap, that player is definitely based off my codebase. The developer did mention my name in the "Special Thanks" section of their post.
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Click to collapse
after thread block, he decided to add credit, now thread is reopened.
without any change in ui he is claiming to be Material design also...
Hi all, first time poster here. Microsoft just announced that Windows 11 will be able to run Android apps natively which will have potentially huge impact on Android Emulators running on Windows. Given the potential additional interest in running Android apps on Windows (and Macs), I thought I'd start a thread here.
I have seen threads on different Android Emulators here sporadically but they are not very active so I thought I'd start a megathread consolidating info/discussions related to emulators and to bring in discussions from gamers, Android/PC enthusiasts and (hopefully) Android developers so that we can do more advanced troubleshooting/discussions.
Very often when an app doesn't work on Android Emulators, we are pretty much at the mercy of Android Emulator developers whether they can (or will) fix it or not, perhaps with our combined knowledge we will be able to get closer to the root cause which may eventually lead to a fix or workarounds.
Anyways, just kicking this off, what I envision for this thread is for people to discuss anything to do with Android Emulators, be it issues running certain apps, configuration recommendations, emulator recommendations and even rolling your own.
I've been running Android Emulators for the past few years on both Mac and PC and it's my dream to be able to start an Open Source Android Emulator project, so perhaps this is the place where I can get interested parties.
In the next little while I will also try to edit this post to include more information/resources on emulators and to get things organized. Please let me know your thoughts on this and I look forward to hearing from you.
For those of you on Discord, feel free to join for live discussions on related topics, thanks!
An Open source Emulator and Virtualizer already since almost 2 decades exists:
QEMU
www.qemu.org
jwoegerbauer said:
An Open source Emulator and Virtualizer already since almost 2 decades exists:
QEMU
www.qemu.org
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi there, thanks for your response!
When I talk about Open Source Android Emulators, I mean the full stack, not just the virtualization piece. For instance I wouldn't consider something like BlueStacks "open source", even though it uses Open Source components like VirtualBox. We'd want to be able to build something from the ground up that uses all Open Source components. A lot of these Android Emulators use some Open Source components but some parts (like graphics acceleration) are closed source. Because of that, the only people who can fix bugs when game updates and stop working are the developers. If it was an Open Source project, we'd have more hands to be able to help out and users can fix their own issues if they are capable. And yes, qemu was used by early Android Emulators as well as the official Google Android Emulator, however it seems most current Android Emulators have since shifted to using VirtualBox.
For more information feel free to out this thread I started on Android-x86 Google Groups:
Open Source Android Emulator based on Android-x86
groups.google.com