Apps like Firefox, Whisper Systems Signal, and many more are all free, open source software except for the jars they include to support Play Services GCM. This is becoming such a problem that people are implementing their own version of the GCM library so that the apps can be all open source.
A better solution would be for Google to open source their GCM jars. I'm talking about only the jars that are distributed as part of the google_m2repository distributed as part of Android Studio. This jar is 32k, so a pretty small bit of code. I talked with some reasonably high up Android people and they thought this was a reasonable request. Let's lobby Google to open-source the jars that Firefox, Signal, etc use so we can have 100% free Firefox, etc on Android. I also asked Mozilla to join in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1346761 And I also sent an email to the email that I could find for Play Services. Contacting Play Services is pretty opaque. Anyone know a good way to get through to the Play Services team? They are based in London. .hc _______________________________________________ List info: https://lists.mayfirst.org/mailman/listinfo/guardian-dev To unsubscribe, email: [email protected]
