Is there too much Google in Android 4.4 KitKat?

Ralph Niederlander

Too much google? Get an iPhone. Android is Googles operating system. It is like saying there is too much Microsoft in Windows.

Agree. Currently I'm happy with Google Now on my phone. And the "always listen" Google Now sound interesting. But I think it would be better if Google should push an option to disable it for other guys don't like.

Kris Carlon

Before KitKat I didn't need or think about Google Now and wasn't a user of Hangouts (or even Google Maps for that matter as I have lots of alternatives I prefer), so kitKat has certainly managed to win me over to more Google services. Well played, Google, well played!

Hey guys, I don't want to upset anyone but here goes. YOU ARE RUNNING ANDROID which is first and foremost LINUX and secondly a GOOGLE variant of it. I rooted my modest device not even a full week after buying it from Orange. Which of course was to get all the Orange bloatware out of the device. And secondly and as much if not more important, to get what I want to be runing on the device. And Kris well said, "well played Google". All Android experience is opened to public except for the Google package which makes sense, it's Google's package after all. So if you don't want google on it then take it out. And if you guys want to use the Windows crap on a linux variant maybe you don't get the whole Linux being open thing and you are better of with Apple or Windows and go and cry about everey minor problem to those guys. Being a linux user, whatever variant it may be, requires one to think for himself and do what he pleases = open/free. You don't like something...fine, change it. TYou don't know how? Learn or buy an Apple which will alwayas run perfectly but won't let you change anything. So sure Google wants to know everything. But it asks you nicely. And you can very well say no if you please. But people nowadays are so used to being able to complain about their problems and not even considering the "effort" to think, that sure it seems to them that Google is in control. So you get an open platform on which Google has put some of its creations and lets YOU decide if you want to use them, or make your own if you have the knowhow and even share them or use someone elses. So it seems to me that all Google is doing is showing us what it could be like and letting us do what we want. Put Apple next to that and the so called battle between them suddenly makes no sense.
PS. I appologise for my Englishm it's not my first language. And excuse me for my ,agresive to some, oppinion. It is not my intention to judge or to offend anyone.

By the way I am running Kit Kat X86 on my Lenovo T400 laptop and it rocks. Sure I have Win 7 installed on it in dual boot but it's slowlly getting covered in spiderwebs. I run the same Kit Kat on a Dell Inspiron 910 mini and rocks as well. Sure its diffrent from what you are used to on a laptop its better. everything is insta-on & running and boy does it run.

Google simply can't make itself too much part of Android, because Android is opensource.

That means, without Google, Android has to be a full featured OS. And it is. Have you ever installed CyanogenMod and not put the Google Apps Framework zip? The result is a fully working Google-less smartphone OS.

Sure, being Google-less means no Play Store. But hey, you can download APKs and install them or even download Amazon App Store.

And of course the opensource bundled apps may not be as good as Google's counterparts (I.e. Play Music and Chrome). But, it's an open platform! Go and find a good replacement app! CyanogenMod actually already comes with good replacements for many of these apps.

But maybe your not that radical, and still want Play Store, YouTube and/or Maps; or maybe you don't want to root and stuff. What now? You can still do it! Android is not iOS! You can disable Google apps selectively, set third party apps as default, replace your keyboard, your browser, your map engine, even your home screen without touching your bootloader!

As I mentioned, the Google Framework comes separated from the basic OS+apps in custom roms (for legal reasons). That means Google stuff come as an attachable layer, not an integrant part of the OS source code

Oh, but you wanted the cool stuff to be part of the open source OS and not of the Google Framework... What else? Google is a company! Not a foundation! And allowing you to replace theyr functionality with third party solutions is far far far far ahead of the competition. Just try to sidestep Apple and Microsoft in iOS and Windows Phone without jail breaking. You can't!

— modified on Aug 31, 2014, 7:24:25 AM

Hey Kris! Thanks for the read, but wasn't this about taking Google out of Android not every component manufacturer. If you want a completely "free" device + os you need to make one from scratch, yourself. Windows runs on proprietary drivers and lots of other platforms and devices. We were not talking about drivers but apps. And I don't know how many drivers Google owns on the nexus platforms or any other but I doubt them being many. In which case get another device. As for software, yes it's true that if you take the google out of android and replace that with something else, it feels strange. But that's to be expected as someone else said, android being a google variant built by google to use google cloud services. So if you dump google you must be aware you are dumping alot of the android fee also. This does not mean you cannot replace that feeling to an alternate one it just won't be the one everyone knows. Anyway I still don't understand what is so bad about google that you want to replace it in the first place. If you are worrying about privacy...cellular companies do the same. They route the voice tragic and they listen to some of that. And so do many many service providers. So if you come to ghat ...well that means you don't use anything that is made by someone else and which doesn't offer you complete control. And that's almost impossible. Use a spoon inatead...ooh no what if it's an antena of some sort

Interesting articles, thanks. I happily disabled pretty near all Google apps on my Moto G 4G, it was the first thing I did when I activated it for the first time. I love Android and think it has a lot of potential, but I have grown to dislike and distrust Google.

— modified on Sep 4, 2014, 7:18:00 AM

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