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Motorola's Linux Phones Frustrate Developers
n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.
Motorola has its head squarely up its ass when it comes to community and its customers. They are a lumbering elephant of a company stuck in 1980s mentality.
...Steve
I think one problem might be availability. Here in Europe, we CAN get exotic GSM phones, but you have to go to a specialty dealer. If you just walk into a mainstream electronics and home appliance shop or a cell phone booth you can't find any linux phones.
The specialty dealers take a large profit off the phones since they don't sell that many of them. So nobody has one, you never hear about one so you never know you might actually want one.
This, I think, is really too bad.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Motorola's UI department is seriously THE WORST in the industry. Having owned numerous Motorola phones I really think they need to stop hiring artists to design their phones and employ some UI engineers.
The real customer is Verizon, or Voda, or whomever the cell provider is. And the providers want to sell the crap they make, not good and free alternatives.
Anyone who has ever owned or used a motorola phone, has to know that their software is horrible. I think this is a good situation where it may help to actually replace their entire software development team with people who are competent? Or else I (and many like me) will never consider buying a motorola.
The big question is, what does Motorola gain by obstructing willing developers from bringing software to their platform?
Control.
I though it was blindingly obvious at the announcement that Mototola only saw Linux as a free os to run a Java VM on, if they had a hardware chip they could run the VM on Linux would be in the bin for the next product release.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Well as i said on Osnews already, i'm one of the moderators/editor from motorolafans.com, and have been since the beginning, and it's true that motorola hasn't been exactly helpfull with getting the sourcecode and they still owe us the bootloader code, too. The reason that they are so unhelpful is ofcourse really obvious. Who are their customers? The big telco companies. Where do big telco companies make their money from? From their customers calling with their phones. If you start giving out the kernel source and encourage hacking on these phones (with sdio hardware and a mini usb host controller), the users will be voiping in no time, which would piss of their customers, the telco's.
Verizon, Cingular, etc. : "Hello Moto, we make a significant amount of money charging total idiots for the right to license crappy ring tones, useless apps, games, and backgrounds. If you release a phone to our customers that allows them to install their own apps, music, and images we will stop buying your phones. Speaking of which, make sure we can lock out DUN and OBEX on your new line of bluetooth phones."
Motorola: "Yes sir, sorry sir."
They dont want native applications because they are more likely to brick the phone, causing warranty and customer support nightmare for carriers.
I definently have to call bullshit, at least based on what's in the summary in this article.
The Motorola SDK for their mobile phones is available right now, both the linux and non-linux varieties of phones.
This article is discussing, of course, the availability of the linux source code itself, not the SDK. You do not need the linux source code in order to develop applications for their linux-based mobile phones, and to be perfectly honest, having to jump through hoops to get the kernel source really isn't that big a deal, since getting the SDK is as simple as signing up at www.motocoders.com
ash
1.DRM. Allowing people inside could allow access to the secret key of the phone that is used to decrypt protected content.
so why bother with linux at all ? trying to ride da wave ?
2.Featureset. Motorola might want to sell a phone with in it. This camera & chip might be physically capable of recording video but Motorola might decide to disable the feature...
oh. i just hate companies that act like this. it seems like an advertisment for capitalism.
3.Carriers. For example, Verizon might want Motorola to disable the abillity to access camera pictures except by sending them in an (expensive for the customer) MMS
this is like 2nd, just slightly shifted...
4.Radio, phone functionality and FCC. There may be things that it is possible to do through linux that would have a negative impact on the phone/network/radio functionality of the phone or that could risk the FCC certification of the phone.
this seems to be the single one that is plausible and _seems_ reasonable, but come on. there are devices that run linux and other software that you can crank up power etc - it's the responsibility of the user as you can do that to most devices even if they ron absolutely proprietary software.
5.Viruses and the like.
ok, this probably was the funny part of the post =)
Rich