Last week’s Facebook announcement was not much of a surp startle. Every unitary k saucy Zuck & Co. were out to invade android, offering big, blue and albumin thumbs to stamp on every aspect of a drug user’s mobile experience. Sure, Chatheads ar neat, and coverflow looks pretty. merely Facebook berth, in and of itself, isn’t that big of a deal. What it represents, however, is huge. We’re calling house an apperating ashes, one of a new breed of software platforms that sit betwixt run systems and apps. Apperating systems are coming—in a major(ip) personal manner.
Facebook Home is the more or less fully realized apperating system yet, enclose the underlying Google humanoid operating system with a stand new look and augmenting it with important and genuinely useful new social features, all while preserving perfect compatibility with mechanical man apps, including anything you super function d possessload through the bundled Google contact app store. It proves that a mobile platform shag be custom tailored for a detail audience or context without sacrificing power and extensibility.
But Facebook Home is scarce the first of its class. Amazon’s set fire to Fire tablet contains probably the most prominent apperating system, a entourage of apps and humanoid customizations developed by Amazon engineers. Software makers have similarly developed platform layers on sack up of orchard apple tree’s iOS, a system that offers far fewer opportunities for integration than Google’s famously customizable Android. As apperating systems spread and improve, they bequeath help Android and iOS better serve niche audiences and serve as labs for features that transmigrate gumption to the host system and into general use. At the same time, they’ll raise thorny questions about the appropriate balance of power between operating system vendors same(p) Google and Apple on the one hand and app makers like Facebook and Amazon on the other.
A drop off from the Facebook Home launch razet shows how Facebook Home sits between the Android operating system and apps — i.e., it’s an apperating system. Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired
More so than Facebook Home, the Kindle Fire already seems to be pushing the limits of the operating system/apperating system relationship. The Fire ejects Google’s digital store, Google’s browser, and Google’s email client from Google’s own operating system, substitution them with Amazon-native alternatives. Unlike with Facebook Home, rearing core Google services like the Google Play app store and basic Android apps involves hacking the thingamajig and voiding your warranty.
Still, Facebook Home makes its own big changes to the default Android experience. Most significantly, it buries most Android apps several clicks away from the home screen, meaning they are less likely to be used — or even discovered — by consumers. Facebook content and advertisements, meanwhile, will get top billing, appearing even when a user has the phone or tablet locked.
These system tweaks could mean a big release of revenue for Google. The company spends heavily to develop Android except freely constituents the source code, betting that the operating system will usually be distri onlyed in the default, Google-approved configuration, in which it is bundled with Google’s suite of proprietary apps like Gmail, Chrome, and Google Maps. These apps, rather than Android per se, are where the bullion comes from; once in use, they begin displaying advertisements funneled into the device by Google, ads that can be carefully targeted based on situationors like location.
Undermining the tie beam between Android and Google’s proprietary apps, as Facebook Home and Kindle Fire do, upsets the Android business model.
Apple’s tightly-controlled iOS faces its own subversives. A proprietary, locked-down system, iOS isn’t nearly as customizable as Android. But Apple’s restrictions have only fueled the rise of Dropbox, a third-party system that allows data to be more easy shared between apps, silo-ed off from one another at heart iOS, via Dropbox servers. Originally designed to sync files between desktop computers, Dropbox has fetch “the linchpin in the workflow” for Apple’s iPad, in the words of Apple fan John Gruber, thanks to the fact that a great many iPad productivity apps have added Dropbox sacramental manduction hooks.
Normally, apps on iOS are locked into their own sandboxed portion of a device’s local flash storage, meaning they can’t read files written by other apps or by the same app on a disparate device. If you have a Dropbox account, however, apps can send data over the internet to your globular Dropbox folder, assuming the apps are Dropbox enabled, and read data from that same folder. If you install the Dropbox app, you can even use it to send files to apps that aren’t Dropbox enabled, like Apple’s Pages.
Also on iOS, Google has launched its own constellation of apps that share data with one another, including Google+, Snapseed, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Talk, and Google Voice. Many, like Gmail and Google Maps, are arguably the opera hat in their class on iOS, and together they form a sort of apperating system.
Apperating systems can hap themselves in conflict with the operating systems on which they are based. If they add a useful capability, as Dropbox does, the operating system might try and co-opt their functionality, as Apple’s own iCloud has tried (poorly) to do with Dropbox. If they demoralise the goals of the operating system vendor, meanwhile, they might find themselves banned, as when Apple tried to block certain Google apps from its iOS store (federal regulators eventually intervened)
Because of this built-in tension, Facebook executives faced a barrage of questions this week over whether Google would find a way to lock Home out of Android in future versions.
“Anything can change in the future, but we think Google takes their commitment to openness in this ecosystem really seriously,” Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg told assembled members of the press. “Their operating system really is designed from the launch up to support these things. It is theoretically possible that they go back on their commitment to openness, but I don’t think they will. It would take a lot of really concerted effort to change the rules of something like this and make the system different… It would be a complete 180 on their school of thought and promise of openness.”
Of course, revenue threats have a way, historically, of undermining prior commitments in the tech world. The best way for apperating systems to protect themselves isn’t to put one over promises but to make themselves indispensable to users. Dropbox is well on its way; whether Facebook Home and Kindle Fire ever become quite so essential remains to be seen.
Materials taken from WIRED
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