Boot up: Pichai profiled, can smart homes wait?, AOSP numbered

Sundar Pichai and John Battelle on-stage at SXSW in March 2014. Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian

A burst of 7 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Detailed profile which also goes into the friction that evidently saw Andy Rubin pushed aside:

At the beginning of 2013, CEO Page told Rubin he had to integrate Android with the rest of Google. Rubin agreed at first, then changed his mind and decided he couldn't do it. He resigned his position, though he remains at Google, working on a skunk works robotics project. A person close to Google's management says that forcing Rubin's hand was the most difficult decision Page has made since reclaiming the CEO spot at Google three years ago. Page then handed responsibility for Android over to Pichai.
Pichai says his first task was to do no harm. "I was worried about disruption," he says. "This was a small team executing well." Others at Google say he quickly started opening doors between Android and other product groups.

Pichai is described by everyone as a nice guy who creates consensus, not conflict. Certainly a coup that he has managed - as the opening describes - to get Samsung to back down on diverging from Android's user interface in favour of its own. You can also read the full interview with Pichai.

We have uncovered a range of cases where "lawful interception" software has been used against political targets by repressive regimes. Political and civil society targets have included Mamfakinch in Morocco, human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor in the UAE, and ESAT, a US-based news service focusing on Ethiopia. In all of these cases, a tool marketed for "law enforcement" was used against political, rather than security threats.  In still other cases, like Malaysia [PDF], we have found bait documents and seeding suggestive of political targeting.

Investigates malware used against Android users which roots any but the latest phone and escalates permissions. It's unclear if there's an iOS exploit - the report doesn't find one, but it does find a malware creator which can target Windows, OS X and Linux.

According to a new report from CCS Insight, the dramatic and continued growth of the Android smartphone operating system may not be the boon to Android developer Google that some may have expected. According to the firm, fully one in four Android phones don't currently access Google services like Maps, Gmail and the Google Play app store - and that number will likely grow in the future.

"Android's dominance will increasingly fail to translate to Google dominance," the firm wrote in a wide-ranging report on the smartphone market. "The proliferation of forked variants of Android and the Chinese government's blocking of Google search in China is producing a growing proportion of Android devices that pose a challenge for Google's open-source Android model. Such devices provide Google with little or no revenue or data and provide a platform for services from Google's competitors. We estimate this could increase to over 30 percent in 2015. It also raises a question about how Google will control Android in the future as policing the platform through access to Google services will prove increasingly ineffective."

Though the Chinese phones don't run Google services, they're recorded as "Android" in figures about handsets shipped. A reminder: China is the world's biggest market for smartphones, expected to consume about 400m units this year - which is about a third of the expected total smartphone market.

Yet another Bitcoin miner manufacturer, CoinTerra, now faces legal action for not fulfilling an order when it originally promised to. CoinTerra is the third Bitcoin-related startup to face litigation for breach of contract and/or fraud in recent months.

The CoinTerra lawsuit was filed in late April 2014 by an Oakland, California-based man seeking to be the lead plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit. Lautaro Cline, the suit alleges, purchased a TerraMiner IV in October 2013 for delivery by January 2014. The company promised, he claims, that this miner would operate at two terahashes per second and would consume 1,200 watts of power. It did neither.

Jan Dawson:

[At WWDC] Apple reiterated its commitment to securing its users' data and protecting them from intrusions from both malicious actors and over-zealous marketers. Google has always pushed the boundaries in terms of privacy and security, both policing Android less than Apple polices iOS from an apps perspective and itself intruding ever more on users' privacy. With the Nest acquisition (and now the Dropcam acquisition) Google has been forced to make clear statements about the separation between these units and Google itself from a data perspective. DuckDuckGo continues to grow rapidly if at a very small scale as an alternative to Google in the search engine world. Reverberations from the Snowden revelations continue to be felt. Samsung continues to build its own enterprise security and device management capabilities on top of Android. How will Google respond to all this? How will it demonstrate that it is creating not only secure platforms but platforms and services which respect user privacy?

Christopher Mims:

This is a technology in its earliest stages. And I wonder if the problem with modern smart homes and connected devices is that they lack any sort of "wow" factor. Where's that slick future we were promised? What can a smart home do that is truly new?

The most compelling things I saw in Mr. Hawkinson's home were also the most novel. When a light on a bookshelf changed color to indicate that the postman had just dropped a letter in the mailbox, I found myself envisioning the ways these simple hacks might at least create the illusion that technology could change the way I live.

Right now, it still feels like makers of smart-home tech are struggling to find the "killer app" that will drive broad adoption. For some people it might be home security. For the rest of us, it might be energy management, or pet and child monitoring. But whatever it is, it will have to accomplish something our current homes simply can't.

The key problem with "smart home" stuff is that it's currently product-driven; it's as if mobile phone companies were telling us the best uses for text messaging.

Neil Shah on the launch of the X2:

According to Counterpoint Research's Market Outlook service while overall smartphone growth will slow down in 2014 compared to previous years but the sub-$100 wholesale smartphone segment will grow above-average to more than 350+ million units in 2014. Also, majority of the growth in this segment will be driven by Android based smartphones considering the low-cost advantages.

Hence, for scale  players like Nokia competing in this segment with Asha devices is not enough and thus need the Windows Phone based Lumia series to trickle down in this price-range quickly. However, pushing Windows Phone down the price-tier might be difficult in near-to mid-term as  building a broader Lumia portfolio with low BOM costs is difficult to achieve mostly due to Microsoft's tightly controlled restrictions to maintain the optimal User Experience. Hence, Nokia X family fills this big and important  gap left between Lumia and Asha range brilliantly by addressing multiple challenges ( & that too immediately) which have been restricting Nokia from growing in this high-volume segment.

The Nokia brand is still big in emerging markets.

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