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2015 technology industry graveyard

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2015 technology industry graveyard

Cisco, Microsoft, Google and others bury outdated technologies to move ahead with new ones.

Ba-bye
The Technology Industry Graveyard is pretty darn full in 2015, and we’re not even including the near-dead such as RadioShack and Microsoft’s IE browser. Pay your respects here…

GrooveShark
The self-described “World’s Music Library” is no more after shutting down in April in the wake of serious legal pressure by music companies whose songs GrooveShark allowed to be shared but had never licensed. Apple and Google had each kicked GrooveShark out of their app stores years ago due to complaints from music labels. Much more sadly than the 9-year-old company’s demise, however, was the death of co-founder Josh Greenberg in July at the age of just 28.

Typo iPhone keyboard
Not even the glamor of being co-founded by American Idol host Ryan Seacrest could help Typo Innovations save its iPhone keyboard, which BlackBerry said infringed on its patents. So instead, Typo bailed on the iPhone model and settled for selling ones for devices with screens 7.9-inches or larger (like iPads).

Amazon Fire Phone
With a product name like Fire, you’re just asking for colorful headlines if it bombs. And indeed, Amazon has stopped making its Fire Phone about a year after introducing it and media outlets were quick to highlight the company “extinguishing” it or remarking on the phone being “burnt out.” Amazon has had some success on the hardware front, namely with its Kindle line, but the Fire just didn’t distinguish itself and was going for free with a carrier contract by the end.

Interop New York
Interop Las Vegas carries on as one of the network industry’s top trade shows next May, but little sibling Interop New York is no more this year. The Fall show, traditionally held at the Javits Center since 2005, was always smaller and was discontinued for 2015 despite lively marketing material last year touting “More Than 30 Interop New York Exhibitors and Sponsors to Make Announcements in Anticipation of the Event.”

GTalk
Google ditched so many things in 2015 that we devoted an entire slideshow to Google’s Graveyard. So to choose just one representative item here, we remember Google Talk, which had a good run, starting up in 2005. But it’s never good when Google pulls out the term “deprecated” as it did in February in reference to this chat service’s Windows App. Google said it was pulling the plug on GTalk in part to focus on Google Hangouts in a world where people have plenty of other ways to chat online. However, Google Talk does live on via third-party apps.

Cisco Invicta storage products
Cisco has a good touch when it comes to acquisitions, but its $415 mlllion WHIPTAIL buyout from 2013 didn’t work out. The company in July revealed it had pulled the plug on its Invicta flash storage appliances acquired via that deal. It’s not unthinkable though that Cisco could go after another storage company, especially in light of the Dell-EMC union.

RapidShare
The once-popular file hosting system, begun in 2002, couldn’t withstand the onslaught of competition from all sides, including Google and Dropbox. Back in 2009, the Switzerland-based operation ran one of the Internet’s 20 most visited websites, according to Wikipedia. It shut down on March 31, and users’ leftover files went away with it.

Windows RT devices
This locked-down Microsoft OS for tablets and convertible laptops fared about as well as Windows 8, after being introduced as a prototype in 2011 at the big CES event in Las Vegas. Microsoft’s software for the 32-bit ARM architecture was intended to enable devices to exploit that architecture’s power efficiency, but overall, the offering proved to be a funky fit with existing Windows software. Production of RT devices stopped earlier in 2015 as Microsoft focuses on Win10 and more professional-focused Surface devices.

OpenStack vendor Nebula
As Network World’s Brandon Butler wrote in April, Nebula became one of the first casualties of the open source OpenStack cloud computing movement when it shuttered its doors. The company, whose founder was CIO for IT at NASA before starting Nebula in 2011, suggested in its farewell letter that it was a bit ahead of its time, unable to convert its $38 million in funding and hardware/software appliances into a sustainable business.

FriendFeed
Facebook bought this social news and information feed aggregator in 2009, two years after the smaller business started, and then killed it off in April. People have moved on to other means of gathering and discovering info online, so FriendFeed died from lack of use. It did inspire the very singular website, Is FriendFeed Dead Yet, however, so its legacy lives on.

Apple Aperture
Apple put the final nails in its Aperture photo editing app in 2015, ending the professional-quality post-production app’s 10-year run at Version 3.6. In its place, Apple introduced its Photos app for users of both its OS X Mac and iOS devices.

Secret
One of the co-founders of anonymous sharing app shared this in April: The company was shutting down and returning whatever part of its $35 million in funding was left. The company’s reality was just not going to meet up with his vision for it, said co-founder David Byttow. The company faced criticism that it, like other anonymous apps such as Yik Yak, allowed for cyberbullying.

Amazon Wallet
Amazon started the year by announcing its Wallet app, the company’s 6-month-old attempt to get into mobile payments, was a bust. The app, which had been in beta, allowed users to store their gift/loyalty/rewards cards, but not debit or credit cards as they can with Apple and Google mobile payment services.

Circa News app
Expired apps could easily fill an entire tech graveyard, so we won’t document all of their deaths here. But among them not making it through 2015 was Circa, which reportedly garnered some $4 million in venture funding since starting in 2012 but didn’t get enough takers for its app-y brand of journalism.

 

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Google

Google Graveyard: What Google has killed off in 2015

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Six feet deep
Google is truly a company that has more technology and products than it can handle sometimes, and in 2015 the company with the recent name change shed a host of tools and products to enable it to focus on more pressing needs. Here’s a look back at what Google this year has offed or announced plans to off (To go back even further, check out 2014’s Google Graveyard.)

Google Code
Google in March said it would be axing its Google Code platform in January 2016, acknowledging increased adoption of alternatives like GitHub and Bitbucket. “As developers migrated away from Google Code, a growing share of the remaining projects were spam or abuse. Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management,” wrote Google open-source director Chris DiBona. Google Code launched in 2006.

Chrome extensions
At the risk of making itself look controlling, Google has been taking steps for years to protect Google Chrome users of extensions that inject ads and malware. In May it really put the kibosh on such software coming from any Windows channel, specifying that all extensions now need to original in the Chrome Web Store. Extensions for Chrome for OS X got the same treatment in July. “Extending this protection is one more step to ensure that users of Chrome can enjoy all the web has to offer without the need to worry as they browse,” a Google product manager wrote in announcing the changes.

Pwnium hacking contest
Google’s big one-day hacking contest at the CanSecWest event, under which it doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2012, has been shuttered in favor of year-long opportunities for hackers to snag bounties for uncovering flaws in its Chrome technology. Among other things, Google was concerned that hackers were hoarding bugs until the contest came around.

Bookmarks Manager
Technicaly, Google didn’t kill the Bookmarks Manager in June, but it did relent to widespread hatred of the free Chrome extension and revert to including the old bookmark tool with its browser. Those few who did cotton to the new UI are still able to access the Bookmarks Manager if they know where to look. Meanwhile, Google’s Sarah Dee blogged: “Our team will continue to explore other ways to improve the bookmarks experience. ”

PageSpeed
Google alerted users of its PageSpeed Service for making websites zippier that it would be killing off the tools as of Aug. 3. Google had pitched its 4.5-year-old hosted PageSpeed optimizing proxy as a way to improve website performance without having to know any code.

Google TV
Google kicked off 2015 by announcing it would ditch the Google TV brand that few probably knew existed and focus its living-room entertainment efforts instead on Android TV and Google Cast. The company said Google TV libraries would no longer be available, but Google TV devices would continue to work.

Google logo
Google nixed its colorful longtime serif typeface logo, around since 1999, in favor of a new sans serif colorful logo with a typeface dubbed Product Sans. With the emergence of the Alphabet parent company came a new look for its Google business.

GTalk
Google Talk had a good run, starting up in 2005, but it’s never good when Google pulls out the term “deprecated” as it did in February in reference to this chat service’s Windows App. Google said it was pulling the plug on GTalk in part to focus on Google Hangouts in a world where people have plenty of other ways to chat online. However, Google Talk does live on via third-party apps.

Maps Coordinate for mobile workforces
Google in January emailed users of its mobile enterprise workforce management offering, which debuted in 2012, that the service would be shutting down come January 2016. Google has been folding various mapping-related products into one another in recent years, and is putting focus on its mapping APIs in its Maps for Work project going forward.

Google Moderator
This tool, launched in 2008, was used to “create a meaningful conversation from many different people’s questions, ideas, and suggestions.” The White House, among others, used it to organize feedback for online and offline events during the 2012 elections. But Google gave up on the tools in July due to its overall lack of use.

Helpouts
There’s no more helping Google Helpouts, which was discontinued in April. This online collaboration service was short-lived, launching in November 2013. While alive, it allowed users to share their expertise – for free or a fee — through live video and provide real-time help from their computers or mobile devices. It exploited Google Hangouts technology, but was largely redundant with so many help videos found on Google’s very own YouTube.

Eclipse developer tools
Google informed developers over the summer that it was time for them to switch over to Android Studio, now firmed up at Version 1.0, as the company would be “ending development and official support for the Android Developer Tools (ADT) in Eclipse at the end of the year. This specifically includes the Eclipse ADT plugin and Android Ant build system.”

Flu Trends
Google in August said it was discontinuing its Flu and Dengue Trends, which were estimates of flu and Dengue fever based on search patterns. Flu Trends launched in 2008 as an early example of “nowcasting” and Google is now leaving the data publishing on diseases to health organizations that it will work with. Historical data remains available from Google.

Google+ ?
Google’s social networking technology has never had much life in the first place and isn’t “really most sincerely dead” like the Wicked Witch, but Google keeps messing around with it, such as extracting the Google Photos app from it, as announced at Google I/O this year, while adding a feature called Collections. Google also has stopped requiring people to have Google+ accounts to tap into other services, such as YouTube channel creation.

 

 

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Google

Google looks for content makers to test its Jump VR video camera

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Google may have a strong interest in applicants who have creative backgrounds, like film making and directing

If you’re an aspiring virtual reality content producer, Google wants to give you a chance to test the Jump camera system it developed for recording video to be used in VR environments.

People interested in trying their hand at capturing 360-degree video with Jump can fill out a form Google posted on Monday that asks basic biographical questions as well as details on how they would use the system.

Google didn’t say how many “select creators” it would chose, but those who are picked will be able to start using the 16-camera rig this summer.

Google seems especially interested in people with creative backgrounds. The jobs that people can select in the form’s occupation section include filmmaker, director, artist and production staff — but there is an “other” section that allows write-ins if none of the above apply.

There’s also a section where applicants can explain why they want to test Jump — and “awesome answers might put you at the top of the list,” Google said.

Google worked with GoPro to build Jump, which has 16 of the company’s Hero4 cameras attached to a circular frame. Jump’s price and availability weren’t provided when the rig was shown at Google’s I/O developer’s conference in May. However, given that a Hero4 camera retails for approximately US$500, initial Jump buyers will likely have deep pockets.

The first videos created with Jump will appear on YouTube this summer, Google said at I/O. People will be able to experience them via the Google Cardboard viewer.

 

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Cloud

The downside to mass data storage in the cloud

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The ability to access Dropcam video footage in the cloud is indicative of a broader trend in cloud computing that is eating away at privacy.

The cloud can be an enormously cost-effective way to increase storage and computing musculature, and also, sadly, a way to further add misery to those seeking privacy—or who just want to be left alone. It’s rare to see organizations stand up and shout, “we’ll not give your data to anyone!” or “the life of all stored data, except opt-in assets you want us to store, is always 90 days!” or “yes, we can determine in absolute certainty that your data has been erased to protect you and your identity.”

The cloud, in some warrens, has become a storage ground for the various factories of “big data,” whose ideals are generally to sell things to consumers and businesses. Correlating facts is huge. Ask Target, whose insight into discovering pregnancies helped them capture a nicely profitable market in the pregnancy and new mother world. Smart, you say. There is a downside to this.

Striking while the iron is hot is a great idea. This means harvesting information on searches to be correlated into ads at the next site you visit. Facebook and Amazon are famous for this, and it’s a huge amount of Google’s total business model. Google’s purchase of Nest last year, which gleefully rats out your utility use patterns, also meant the acquisition of Dropcam.

As ace reporter Sharon Fisher reported at TechTarget, Dropcam’s users allow cameras to send their data into Dropcam’s cloud, where it is archived seemingly indefinitely, to the delights of users, police warrants, and security monitoring individuals, who see the surveillance results at will, from any reasonable IP address. It’s inferred that some users monitor Airbnb suites (shouldn’t they disclose this?) and apparently users forget there’s a camera on and do, well, silly things that they may not want captured on digital film.

Google’s storing this sort of info, Amazon will be listening with Echo, and who knows what Siri knows but isn’t saying. This amounts to a comparative heap of very personal information, as though these were robots whose knowledge base was contained inside the physical unit we see on-premises, but it’s not—it’s in the cloud and not only hack-able, but perhaps being used to analyze us, sell us something, or maybe worse, refuse to sell us something or to used against us in a court of law.

Is this data tagged so someone knows to kill it? Is there a metadata tag saying this file or this datablock expires on April 19, 2017? Often it’s tied to an account. Does this data get reused somehow? Video, audio conversations scrubbed for keywords? Much is up to the user agreement, and what happens if you’re, say, a medical provider that’s amassing large quantities of personal medical data? Can that be used? Yes, an attorney would say, “stop right here, and let’s disambiguate these questions.” Clear as mud.

The average civilian has no “bill of rights” that’s common to these online personal information services, whose data is accumulated in cloudy locations. Murky might be a better way to think about it. You want to trust data storage providers – one wants to believe that data sources are somehow bulletproof – but with huge, emblematic recent breaches of retailers, insurance providers, and university alumni databases, that’s not so easy. In reality, some have already been hacked and we just haven’t discovered it yet because no one’s offering the information on dark markets….at least right now.

Is there a way for the app industries to have a common agreement about what can be shared, what is a reasonable life expectancy for personal data, how and to what extent personal data can be actually anonymized, and how data destruction can be audited to even a private detective’s satisfaction? I wish there were answers.

 

 

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Tech

Google relaxes strict bug disclosure rules after Microsoft grievances

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After dust-up between the companies over bug revelations, Google offers 14-day grace period before going public

Google today relaxed its strict 90-day vulnerability disclosure that put it at odds with rival Microsoft last month, saying it would give vendors a 14-day grace period if they promised to fix a flaw within the two-week stretch.

“If a 90-day deadline will expire but a vendor lets us know before the deadline that a patch is scheduled for release on a specific day within 14 days following the deadline, the public disclosure will be delayed until the availability of the patch,” Google’s Project Zero team said today in a blog post.

“Public disclosure of an unpatched issue now only occurs if a deadline will be significantly missed (2 weeks+),” the team added.

Google will also not reveal a vulnerability on weekends and U.S. public holidays, even if the timetable expires on those days.

Although Microsoft welcomed Google’s modifications, it continued to disagree with Project Zero’s patch-or-we-publish attitude. “While it is positive to see aspects of disclosure practices adjust, we disagree with arbitrary deadlines because each security issue is unique and end-to-end update development and testing time varies,” said Chris Betz, senior director of the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in a statement today. “When finders release proof-of-concept exploit code, or other information publically before a solution is in place, the risk of attacks against customers goes up.”

“These were the right things to do,” said Andrew Storms, vice president of security services at New Context, a San Francisco-based security consultancy, in a Friday interview. “Weekends and holidays are obvious. It’s true that the bad guys never sleep but you have to account for those days. And I like the grace period idea. It shows that Google is communicating with vendors.”

Project Zero is composed of several Google security engineers — including many of its most notable researchers — who investigate not only the company’s own software, but that of other vendors as well. Previously, its policy was to start a 90-day clock when it reported a flaw to an outside vendor, then publicly posted details and sample attack code at the expiration if the vulnerability had not been patched.

Over several weeks starting on Dec. 29 2014, Project Zero revealed numerous bugs in Windows before Microsoft patched them.

That quickly drew the ire of Microsoft. After Project Zero disclosed a Windows vulnerability on Jan. 11 — two days before Microsoft was set to patch it — the latter lashed out.

“We asked Google to work with us to protect customers by withholding details until Tuesday, January 13, when we will be releasing a fix,” said Betz said at the time. “[Google’s] decision feels less like principles and more like a ‘gotcha,’ with customers the ones who may suffer as a result.”
 

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Had the new grace period been in place, some but not all of the Windows vulnerabilities disclosed by Project Zero this year would have been kept under wraps until Microsoft had patched them, including the one Betz was angry about last month.

Some, however, would have still been revealed prior to patching.
One of those vulnerabilities had been reported to Microsoft on Oct. 17, with an expiration date of Jan. 15, when Google automatically unveiled details and proof-of-concept attack code. At the time, Project Zero’s bug tracker asserted that while Microsoft had initially intended to patch the vulnerability on Jan. 13, it pulled the fix “due to compatibility issues” and rescheduled it for the Feb. 10 collection. It was, in fact, patched earlier this week.

A two-week grace would not have helped Microsoft in that case.

But the grace period should answer critics who took Project Zero to task for its hard-liner policy.

“Microsoft is never going to get a fix into the first Patch Tuesday after a report, nor in the second depending on the timing,” said Chet Wisniewski, a security researcher with Sophos, in a January interview. Because of Microsoft’s similar-rigid Patch Tuesday schedule — the second Tuesday of each month — Google’s disclosure deadline could “push right against the deadline almost every time,” Wisniewski argued.

The automated disclosure system also removed the human element, critics said. “Google’s pretty big on things being automated, versus people-driven processes,” pointed out John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute, also in a January interview on Project Zero’s approach.

Wisniewski thought there was another reason for the automated disclosure, and the resulting inflexibility.

“If Google made it automatic, then it can’t be accused of being vindictive,” said Wisniewski, referring to previous clashes between Google security engineers and Microsoft, when that charge had been leveled against the former after they revealed bugs without giving Microsoft more than a few days to patch.

Storms saw the grace period as evidence that Google realized the all-automatic disclosure process wasn’t appropriate.

“It’s a ‘gimme,’ as in the vendor saying, ‘Gimme a break, I’m so close to a patch,'” said Storms of the additional time. “You have to consider the goal, which is not to shame people, but to get things fixed. [The grace period] adds a human element to it, which is necessary.”

As of Friday, there were two vulnerabilities on the Project Zero bug tracker that had exceeded the 90-day deadline. Both were for flaws in Adobe’s Reader; Adobe had patched the bugs in December in the Windows version of Reader, but has not yet addressed the same vulnerabilities in the OS X version of the PDF program.

Google

Google Now adds data from Lyft, Airbnb and other apps

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The content could give a lift to Google in mobile search

Google Now just got a lot smarter, adding data from dozens of outside apps to help people get more things done as they go about their day.

Google Now is a search tool and digital assistant built into Android devices and the Chrome browser, and included as part of the Google search app for iOS. Until now it’s served up information about the weather, restaurant reservations, shipping notifications and nearby events based on people’s past Google searches and reading their Gmail messages. The content is presented as “cards” that users can swipe through and dismiss as they please. The idea is to present helpful information, sometimes before people know they need it.

Now, a much wider variety of cards will be incorporated into the Android version of the app, including for the first time information from third-party apps like Pandora, Airbnb, Lyft, and real estate database Zillow — provided a user has those apps installed. Adding more of those cards will make it faster to get information from the other apps, and perhaps make them more useful.

Take this example for Airbnb: A person uses Google search to plan a trip but can’t decide right away where to book. Later, after opening the Google Now app, a card from Airbnb appears for the location and dates researched, helping the person choose a place to stay. Or if a person who uses Lyft lands at an airport, Google Now can offer to order them a ride.

The integrations could lead to more use of Google Now, provided the suggestions are useful and not annoying. And they could address a mounting challenge for Google — that people are getting more and more information from apps rather than searching the web.

Google’s share of U.S. mobile search ad spending could fall to 64 percent this year, research company eMarketer said in a report last June, down from 83 percent in 2012, while Yelp’s share was expected to grow.

The more than two dozen new cards will roll out over the next few weeks, Google said, with more on the way. Plans for bringing the new cards to iOS were not announced.

 

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Firefox

Mozilla unveils search tool tweaks in next week’s Firefox 34

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New tools will accompany change from Google to Yahoo as default search engine for U.S. customers

Along with its impending switch to Yahoo as the default search engine for Firefox, Mozilla will also change how users conduct searches in the browser, the company said Tuesday.

Searches done in the next version of Firefox will display not only a list of suggested searches that narrow the results, but will show buttons for search engines other than the default, said Philipp Sackl, a lead designer of Firefox, in a blog post yesterday.

“These buttons allow you to find your search term directly on a specific site quickly and easily,” Sackl wrote.

For example, a search for “US Grant” started in Firefox’s default search engine can be switched to Wikipedia for results there by clicking a button.

Mozilla has implemented the changes in the beta of Firefox 34, which is scheduled for promotion to the finished, polished build next week. In the beta, Firefox 34 shows search-switch buttons for all available providers, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, Twitter and Wikipedia. Users can also add additional search engines.

Other browsers, such as Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari, lack similar tools, although Safari does offer a short list of suggested searches when a string is typed into its address bar.

Mozilla will introduce the search tweaks next week when it ships the production version of Firefox 34, currently slated for a Dec. 1 release. At the same time, Mozilla will also introduce Yahoo as the default search engine in the U.S.

“Under a new five-year strategic partnership … Yahoo Search will become the default search experience for Firefox in the U.S.,” Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said last week.

Beard’s description implied that Mozilla will automatically change the default search engine within Firefox from the earlier Google to Yahoo for all U.S. customers. But in the beta of Firefox 34 the previous default — Google — remained in place.

Mozilla may face resistance from existing users if it changes the search engine to Yahoo without their permission when Firefox updates itself next week. Firefox users will be able to change the default to another provider, including back to Google, however.

Mozilla did not immediately reply to questions about how it will handle the change from Google to Yahoo within Firefox.

Firefox, unlike its browser rivals, will continue to use separate search and address bars rather than unify them into one field where users can type not only URLs but also search strings. Safari, Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) all offer a unified address-search bar.

“That has been looked at several times, but there are difficult privacy problems to overcome if you also want to provide search suggestions,” said Gervase Markham of Mozilla in an answer Wednesday to a user’s comment appended to Sackl’s post. “If someone is typing a URL, they don’t necessarily want their default search engine to know where they are going. And yet, if you want to provide search suggestions well, you have to send every keystroke in a unified box to the search provider.”

 

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Tech

What Google killing IE9 support means for software development

Google’s announcement that it won’t support Internet Explorer 9 is a sign of a broader move toward rapid iteration in software development.

Let’s start with this: I am completely OK with this. Sure, it may be a bit of a drag for people running Windows Vista (as newer versions of Internet Explorer – 10 and 11 – require Windows 7 or 8) but, let’s be honest – nobody expects any company to spend the money and man-hours supporting every web browser for all eternity. And Vista users still have the option of installing another web browser, such as Firefox or Chrome.

So, if this isn’t all that big of a deal, why am I bringing it up?

Web browsers are, in essence, platforms for running software.
Internet Explorer 9 was released in 2011. It’s only two years old.

That means that we have reached the point where complete application platforms are being deprecated, and left unsupported, after having existed for only two years. And, while that does bode well for the rapid improvement of platforms, it comes with a pretty steep price.

The most obvious of which is that end users are put in the position of needing to upgrade their systems far more often. This costs a not-insignificant amount of time (especially in larger organizations) and money. It is, to put it simply, inconvenient.

This rapid iteration of new versions of these systems also takes a heavy toll on software development. More versions of more platforms means more complexity in development and testing. This leads to longer, and more costly, development cycles (and significantly higher support costs). The result? The software that runs on these systems is improved at a slower rate than would otherwise be possible, and in all likelihood they will be of lower quality.

These are some pretty major drawbacks to the current “Operating Systems and Web Browsers are updated every time the wind changes direction” situation. But is it really all that bad? The alternative, for Windows users, isn’t terribly attractive. Nobody wanted to be stuck with IE 6 for a second longer than was absolutely necessary.

I don’t have a solution to any of this, mind you. Not a good one, at any rate – maybe we should make a gentleman’s agreement to not release new Operating Systems or Browsers more often than every three years. (See? Not a good solution.)

I’m just not a big fan of how it’s currently working.

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Google

Google Android roundup: Why did JBQ leave AOSP?

Android news/rumors: The end of an era, plus giant robots annoyed as LG removes “optimus” title from latest release, Android’s continued domination and why people think it’s doomed, and a Moto X engineer hates back on critics

The Android realm is not a physical place, else we would have seen flags flying at half-mast and heard announcements made over school loudspeakers – Jean-Baptiste Quéru, godfather of the Android Open Source Project and one of the most influential figures in the ongoing development of the platform, abruptly stepped down from his position as AOSP maintainer this week.

Though JBQ, as he’s generally known, didn’t give explicit reasons for the move, the clever people over at Android Police quickly connected the dots from some of his recent Twitter activity, which bemoaned legal interference in the AOSP release process. Specifically, Quéru’s frustrations about being barred from releasing critical binaries for the new-model Nexus 7 tablet appear to have boiled over.

What’s strongly implied by the Android Police analysis is that Qualcomm, which makes the chipset for the new Nexus 7, has been making it impossible to get fully open-source versions of the software to work properly, withholding code essential for hardware support.

In a subsequent Google+ post, Quéru more or less confirmed this.

“Well, I see that people have figured out why I’m quitting AOSP,” he wrote. “There’s no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can’t boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support, especially when I’m getting the blame for something that I don’t have authority to fix myself and that I had anticipated and escalated more than 6 months ahead.”

The reaction from the community has been generalized dismay, with sorrowful posts highlighting JBQ’s importance to AOSP and Android in general, as well as widespread rancor directed at Qualcomm.

AOSP’s curiously bifurcated nature – the underlying OS is open-source, but Google can’t distribute the fully open version for a given device unless the OEM gives permission to distribute its proprietary binaries – always makes this sort of issue a bit hazy and complex, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Quéru had every right to be upset. Given that anyone can simply grab the closed-source binaries from the device itself, refusing to give AOSP permission to distribute is puzzling, to say the least.

While the usual caveats about unconfirmed information apply – Quéru himself seems to have some legal obligations that prevent him from speaking explicitly on the subject – it certainly seems as though JBQ’s exit should have been avoidable, and it’s a shame that it wasn’t. Android Authority says it’s “unlikely” that he’ll actually leave Google, but AOSP has nonetheless lost a father figure.

* Speaking of Qualcomm, their latest Snapdragon 800 is powering the just-announced LG G2, according to the many tech blogs that got an early hands-on with the device. In contrast to the recently released Moto X, the G2 is a much more traditional Android flagship – an outsized, feature-packed whopper of a phone, with as many megapixels, GB and GHz as can possibly be crammed into its considerable frame.

From a design perspective, the G2’s big innovations are having lost LG’s well-worn “Optimus” moniker and putting some of the controls – including the power and volume keys – on the back of the phone instead of somewhere on the side. I have no idea if this is a silly gimmick or a revolutionary answer to the problem of oversized smartphones – and I won’t until I actually get my hands on one – but it’s at least a creative attempt.

* The latest smartphone market share report from IDC says that Android’s global smartphone market share has risen to nearly 80% – up from just below 70% a year before. Sound like great news for Android, right?

Not so fast, says comScore. In the U.S., at least, Android subscriber numbers were flat during 2013’s second quarter, while Apple’s rose slightly. The Guardian also cites a Yankee Group study as saying that Android’s market dynamics indicate that Apple will retake the lead next year.

While they’ve obviously done their homework more assiduously than I have – which is to say, they’ve done some homework – I still have a hard time seeing Android losing too much ground back to That Other Smartphone absent a massively successful launch of the next-gen iPhone. Given that the last couple of iterations haven’t quite matched the stratospheric heights reached by their predecessors, that’s far from a guarantee.

Still, the U.S. market is more heavily Apple-centric than that of the world in general – more like 52% to 40%, according to the aforementioned numbers from comScore, so Apple’s still within striking distance.

* After the Moto X took some lumps on Twitter about its slightly-less-than-cutting-edge specs, Motorola designer Iqbal Arshad slammed critics in an interview with ZDNet.

He said that comparing raw specs misses the point, asserting that the Moto X is architected so differently that such measurements are meaningless.

“So it’s hard to understand because you’re comparing architectures that are fundamentally different. It’s kind of like people who are looking at a Tesla electric car and expecting it to have a V-8 engine. When you talk about an electric motor, it’s hard for people who are used to comparing specs on traditional cars to understand how it truly compares, because it’s completely different,” he said.

He would say that, of course, given that his company is the one charging the same price for less powerful hardware, but he has a point – the Moto X’s voice command and power-saving technologies are a bit more compelling than the avalanche of goofy camera modes. Still, if you’re just in it for pure performance, the ability to say “OK Google, advise me on purchasing decisions” or whatever probable doesn’t cut it for you.

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Google, Tech

Google unveils second-generation Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.3

The device will be available starting next week via Google’s Play Store

Google is rolling out a second-generation Nexus 7 tablet designed for improved performance and portability, featuring the company’s just-announced mobile operating system, Android Jelly Bean 4.3.

The device offers numerous enhancements over the original Nexus 7 tablet that Google released last year. It is also the first device to ship with Android Jelly Bean 4.3, the latest version of Google’s mobile OS, the company announced Wednesday.

The product was introduced by several Google executives during a meeting hosted by Sundar Pichai, head of Android, Chrome and apps at Google.

Improved portability, speed and graphics comprise the major enhancements to the Nexus 7 tablet. The device will be available in three models: a 16GB Wi-Fi version for US$229, a 32GB Wi-Fi model for $269, and a 32GB 4G LTE version for $349. The Wi-Fi models will be available starting Tuesday at the Google Play store, while the 4G model will be available in the coming weeks through T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon, the company said.

Besides the U.S., the new Nexus 7 will be available in Canada, the U.K., Spain, Korea and Australia, with more countries to follow very soon, Google said.

In terms of portability, the new Nexus 7 is almost 2 millimeters thinner than the original and about 50 grams lighter. The device features a 7-inch display, the same size as its predecessor, but packs in more pixels, Google said, going from 1280 x 800 to true 1080 HD at 1920 x 1200 pixels in the new model. It also can show a 30 percent wider range of colors and has dual stereo speakers for virtual surround sound.

The first partner to take advantage of the new 1080 HD video feature is Netflix, which supports video streaming in the high-quality format.

The tablet also sports dual cameras, with a 1.2-megapixel camera in the front and a 5-megapixel lens in the rear.

Internally, the Nexus 7 features a 1.5Ghz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, giving it a four-times-more-powerful graphics processing unit than the original Nexus 7, Google said. The CPU is also 1.8 times faster, Google said, and the system memory has been doubled to support 2GB of RAM.

Specs also include dual-band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 for powering peripheral low-energy devices.

The Android 4.3 software on the Nexus 7 also includes a new restricted profiles feature to give users more controls over who else can access certain content and apps on the device.

Since its launch last year, Google’s Nexus 7 has accounted for more than 10 percent of all Android-based tablets sold, Google’s Pichai said.

“Nexus 7 has been a big hit, and we’re going to try to follow up with another one,” said Hugo Barra, product manager at Google.

In recent years Google’s product portfolio has expanded significantly beyond its bread-and-butter search technology. In recent months there has even been talk of Google opening brick-and-mortar retail stores to boost its efforts in selling hardware like tablets and also laptop computers with its Chromebooks.

 

 

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