[gbl08ma]

I too thought about OSX and Darwin when I saw this. Except that before, with Android, you had an open userland system on an open kernel. Now you have a huge binary blob that can do everything without control, on top of a open userland with an open kernel. It's a closed layer on top of two open layers. And the best of all, more and more things seem to depend on the closed layer instead of just on the other two. From what I see, as it "defrags" Google has been moving core functionality, previously open, into that closed-source Play Services thing. I think the plan is probably to take everything related to UX into the closed part, that Samsung, HTC and etc. won't then be able to change to create their own UX, and leave as open source the essentials needed for porting to new devices. I have mixed feelings about this... it's great if they manage to dismiss those who think there's a fragmentation problem in the platform. But they are doing it at the cost of decreased openness, and I don't like that.

[wtracy]

"I think the plan is probably to take everything related to UX into the closed part, that Samsung, HTC and etc. won't then be able to change to create their own UX,"

I doubt it. The manufacturers would revolt at that point, and potentially fork the entire platform.