Hackwatch

Hackwatch

Nope, not here. I mean around the web and especially the newspapers.

A thread for the staggering technical illiteracy of the non-tech press to be highlighted.

Charles Arthur thinks you can make money forking Android.

I love this one.

Charles Arthur is Grauniad's technology editor. Apparently this means he gets the first iPad every year but very little else.

Charles thinks Satya Nadella should dump WP and "just fork Android" because "it's open source" and "loads of stuff works on it". However..

I don't think Charles knows that AOSP is buggy and largely superseded. I don't think he knows that it's the only open source bit. I don't think he's imagined for a second that Google move more functionality and more APIs into Google Play with every release and that Google Play is not even the shoddy attempt at "open source" that AOSP is.

He thinks you can just drop equivalent services in. And you could. But it would, at this stage, be more work than just coding them for WP8.x. Amazon do it, after all, but they only replace a minor subset.

But apps! Charles wails.

But most games won't work without the Play APIs. Which are closed source. Which feed all data to Google. And which are an all-or-nothing proposition - you can't say "yeah, we'll take maps but not GMail". You also can't make any non-Play phones in your factory if you make Play phones.

And Play's not even free, Charles. You dickwad. It costs less than a dollar per "certification", true but add up the (frankly lunatic and utterly unfeasible) claims of how many Android handsets are activated every second and that's big, big money. Although I admit that if those were true we'd all be knee deep in Android phones by now anyway.

Go back to your iPhone, Charles. And shut up.