Google touts the Android platform's openness as a benefit for developers and end-users.
And yet:
As a developer, I have, if anything, less visibility into upcoming changes to the Android SDK than I do into upcoming changes in iOS 4.2.
As an end-user, Android's openness hasn't stopped carriers from foisting unremovable crapware on me, or given me any more control over my Droid X than I have over my iPhone 4.
But whenever anyone dares to point out this disconnect between Google's marketing rhetoric and reality vis a vis openness, suddenly "open" means nothing more than "fulfills the letter of the contractual agreements of the GPL version 2 and provides no promises of anything beyond that". It's farcical.
As a developer, your customers can run the app even if the app store says no.
>As a customer
As a customer, you can choose from a range of android powered devices including those not approved by Google. The nook would likely not exist were it not for Android.
As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un-appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.
Openness is only a virtue if it has practical benefit. If Google is arguing for openness from a purely dogmatic, non-practical standpoint, then they should be honest about that instead of pretending that Android's openness is some kind of unicorns-and-candyfloss fun ride for app developers and end-users.
Or support it with ads?
>As a customer, the freedom to "choose from a range of Android powered devices including those not approved by Google" simply means the burden of having to perform a complicated cost-benefits analysis, deciding which specific combination of carrier crap-ware and carrier locked out features, or unsubsidized hardware from little-known Chinese manufacturers is least un-appealing to me. I have to spend an enormous amount of time researching to ensure that the official app store is supported on such-and-such phone, to find out whether tethering works freely or not or whether I can side-load or not on such-and-such carrier. From a pragmatic standpoint, there is no practical benefit to this openness for me, as an average consumer.
This seems no different to me than any other free market. I buy the argument that Google should simplify your purchasing decision by being more selective with the trademark, but that's an entirely different argument than the one we are having.
Sure the original OS is open source (and "open" as in visible), but how open is the platform when some companies put chains and locks around it?
I can see how in Google's eyes the core platform is open - code is public, it can be forked, etc. But it's still an environment in which some vendors are free to lock down the system they sell to end-users to the point where a user is no longer free to uninstall programs they don't want. This dilutes the "openness" of the overall platform, since the lack of freedom and control on some Android devices reflects on the average perception of Android.
Is linux not open because the PS3 exists? It seems like all of your arguments apply equally well there.
I'm astonished at how muddled and downright bizarre the argumentation on these threads gets. Yes, they don't develop future platform versions in the open, they just make delayed code dumps. Annoying. But hardly "open"-negating. The process may not be open - the deliverables are. And all of the usual advantages of that open are in full effect with Android and its many, many active mods.
Yes, carriers are free to add unremovable shovelware, to try and prevent flashing with the aid of the hardware manufacturers - all that nasty stuff they are free to do with any apache/bsd-licensed codebase. It's very hard to understand how this is Google's fault, or why it somehow renders the underlying platform "not open". Should they have stridently disallowed such behavior from day 1? I'm guessing that would have left them with a lot fewer partners, and a go-nowhere platform, but hey, at least they would have been pure as the driven snow ideologically.
Saying with a straight face that Android is "not open", "not meaningfully more open than iOS", "nothing like what we would traditionally call open-source", and so on is ridiculous hyperbole. The only interest I take out of these instant train wreck threads is in playing a game: guess at what horses individual commenters have in the mobile race, that their perceptions can become so severely distorted.
It's certainly open from a perspective of "you get the occasionally tarball of source". Nobody is debating that. This isn't about whether Android is open or not; it's about whether the way it is open is at all consistent with the way it's openness is marketed to end consumers.
For the vast majority of users that openness, from any practical standpoint, might as well not exist. The popular, high selling handsets are simply too locked down for them to benefit from anything anyone does with those tarball drops.
Which is fine, but it's certainly not the way people paint the platform when they talk about how much better Android is for the user thanks to its openness, because the openness is primarily for the benefit of handset makers and carriers who can use those tarballs.
For what it's worth, I think this whole game of treating a thriving market like its some kind of horse-race is ridiculous. 90% market share was an aberration in the PC market; there's going to be room for multiple competitors for decades to come. There are no sides. Nobody is going to win anything.
I keep hearing this, but can you demonstrate where Google has represented Android as the product of some vibrant and continuous interplay between the wider open source community and their own engineering teams?
Interestingly enough, there's more of that going on than you're giving credit for. http://android.git.kernel.org/ isn't an iota of what it could be, but it's certainly more than an "occasional tarball of source".
Look, I think what Google is doing with the periodic drops is pretty lame - but the Android software is open. More than that, they've tried to spur on some pretty radical freedoms - like my Nexus One which they convinced HTC to provide fully unlockable: a simple command and a warning screen away. This was unthinkable not so very long ago, certainly in smart phones. Frustratingly enough, the market wasn't interested, but they tried. And may well try to keep pushing that bar forward. But you'll give them no quarter - they are damned for not reshaping things to your preferred standards in one fell swoop, they are responsible for both the hardware and the regressive policies of every idiot vendor whose usage of the platform they bless.
It's a bit overdone to say that "the openness is primarily for the benefit of handset makers and carriers who can use those tarballs". I'm interested in where you've acquired this insight into Google's treacherous true motivations, and I'm surprised to learn that it's so hard to take those "tarballs" and get them running on arbitrary hardware. That damned linux kernel, so notoriously hard to get running on variant hardware.
When you get down to it, your real problem seems to be that Android strikes a fairly neutral deal, allowing the carriers and manufacturers to keep their freedoms too. They're free to try to turn back the clock, release terribly gimped phones, and just generally be the dicks that we have always known them to be. We're free to reject it, and should.
Why did you buy the wrong phone? It was all over the news, that Motorola locks down the bootloader. How is that Googles fault? How does that make Android less open?
What about all those Linux boxes with locked bootloaders? How do they make Linux less open?
If your reply to this is that you can always bypass whatever DRM they put in place: well, you can do that on the iPhone too. And if you're willing to count something as "open" when reverse engineering is required to use modified software, then the availability of source code for a reference implementation ceases to be a meaningful difference. Android is no more "open" than iOS under that definition, just easier to work on.
Assuming you did not break it while altering. Then you can always deploy your altered version to the ADP-Phones. For example the Nexus One. And this is not a theoretical possibility. I have done it. It works. I use it every day since.
Those other devices are still closed because people still buy them. Vote with your wallets and you will have freedom.
There are a lot of new & unused N1s on ebay.de and ebay.com
With a bit of work you can probably get Android to run on commodity hardware.
But Android as a platform is still open. The same way that Linux is still open.