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Carriers, Manufacturers Are Strangling Android
loconet writes "This article in Gizmodo claims that Android's fragmented model is harming it, but Google has the power to save it. The rumored Google Phone could be a ploy to upset the wireless industry, or it could be an expensive niche device. Either way, it would be a bid to take Android back from the companies that seem hell-bent on destroying it. '...once handset manufacturers (and carriers, through handset manufacturers) have built their own version of Android, they've effectively taken it out of the development stream. Updating it is their responsibility, which they have to choose to uphold. Or not! Who cares? The phones are already sold."
You have to hand it to Apple, at least they handle updates pretty well.
Here is the Ars article from time past on the subject of just why Google decided on the ASL instead of the GPL:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/11/why-google-chose-the-apache-software-license-over-gplv2.ars
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Cell phone carriers are, at least in america, holding back cell phone software. The subsidized-phone business model gives them the oppourtunity to control everything about customer's phone software. Most basic carrier-sold phones are a nightmare to use, filled with ugly, confusing branded interfaces and annoying "stores" that sell overpriced useless games and ringtones. Apple did something right by cutting a tough deal with specific carriers in order to prevent them from branding the phone. Google's "all comers" strategy has opened them to the megalomania of the carriers.
Windows Mobile, which unlike Android has always ranged from okay to sorry, must be updated by the phone manufacturers unless you luck out and your model gets attention from ROM cookers. Yet it has lived for over ten years... why would the expectation for Android be any different? Perhaps I am being cynical, but this smells like fear-mongering from parties that still think WinMo has a future.
1) (Practically)Free VOIP when in WIFI zones instead of using minutes.
2) Internet Browser in WIFI zones.
3) No commitment plan, but maybe minutes bought on a trak phone style buying.
4) Ability to write my own custom aps on the phone.
This is my dream phone because I can use it as a home phone and never have to pay for it. Everything past that is bonus.
God spoke to me.
I'm not entirely sure what this article is trying to prove. Android has been out for a year. It takes most software companies 6 months to ready a new release, test it, and put it out to market. If anyone (carriers or manufacturers) are interested in keeping their hardware on dated software, that won't be clear until at least June.
And his supposition that handset manufacturers have no incentive to make their already-sold handsets operate well is just stupid. If you get a reputation for not updating your software, people won't want your hardware. And the carriers have even more interest in keeping software up to date.
Look at all the people will ing to jailbreak iPhones
The main reason why people jailbreak is to get decent apps that will never be approved (such as emulators) on their phone. With a lack of a central authority forbidding such things, most people are less likely to root their Android device unless they are geeks.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The manufactures aren't trying to destroy Android, but the negligence is sure to stunt its growth. As long as Android is free and provides a good tech demo companies will continue to use it to sell the newest version of their phone.
Without a more cohesive foundation it will probably stagnate though. The same thing happened with Linux; 'the year of the linux desktop'. Linux has survived not because of market viability but because technical people liked it. It still doesn't have more than a couple percent of marketshare (in the consumer market.) Android has an advantage in that smartphones are more integrated platforms than desktops, and people expect less expandability, but each smartphone will be a part of the manufacturers brand, rather than the Android brand. On a fragmented market it's much more difficult to deliver expanded functionality in the form of applications to consumers. It will be more like the crappy java games that you'd see on old phones than the market for desktop software.
It's a new concept for phone companies though, and they'll probably start updating the OS once they get used to it. If they don't though, Android will probably see a limited success.
I will admit that I don't understand the standards behind the cell phone industry, but why are cell phones so strongly coupled to the service providers and, well, not open?
If I want a landline, I can go buy any old phone I want, and as long as it speaks the right protocols (which are pretty simple for analog landlines) I can plug it into my wall, and it works.
If I want internet service, I can go buy Ye Olde Acme Cable Modem, plug it into my wall, call up my local ISP, and poof! I have internet.
If I'm out of disk space, I can go get a hard drive from Seagate and stick it into any machine I want to.
In so many other engineering situations, interoperability between one component and another is restricted only as far as it is required to be based on the manufacturer's engineering decisions. (I can't mount a Nikon lens on a Canon camera because they have two different ways of doing autofocus, for instance.)
Why the hell can't cell phones be this way, instead of the current quagmire where they're hopelessly entangled with what the carrier wants? I want a cellular carrier that charges a fair price for service (per byte and per minute, or whatever), and then lets me use whatever device I want to use that service. If I can stick a radio into a TI-89 and make it speak CDMA, let me make phone calls with it.
It may be different where you live, but here in the United States we sign two year contracts that come with subsidized phones. That means that the majority of churn on handsets is rated at two years per device.
Two years is a long time. I would not want to be stuck on Android 1.5 for two years when a fairly simple upgrade to 2.1 would unlock a huge new increase in functionality of my existing hardware such as turn by turn navigation and Google Goggles.
I much prefer the European model of unlocked phones, but changing the industry is a whole other topic in itself. I am hoping Google has the ability to change that, but we will see.
It's hard to believe that Google chose to go with what essentially is the open-source version of the broken WinMo model in a post-iPhone world. They got this thing all backwards.
Perhaps they should have came out with Nexus One from the outset and then set up some kind of a reference design for all other manufacturers, instead of letting various handset manufacturers to cook up their own custom distributions. That way you could have one unified experience for the developers to follow. It's starting to look like Linux on the desktop -- something that sounds amazing on paper but doesn't quite work in the real world when you put it in front of non-geeks.
Apple maintains total control over it, sticks to their guns, and the product isn't bad.
Google gives the carriers complete control, and it turns to shit.
This isn't a new pattern, this is the way its been all along and is one of the reasons the iPhone is doing well.
You wouldn't get email on your phone with out an extra $10/month charge from AT&T if it was in their control. Maps would be the same way. Data would be $0.10/kb or packet, whichever amounts to the largest possible bill.
Apple and the iPhone didn't sell so well just because of the hardware or software specifically. Apple's total control over the system is actually a blessing, contrary to what most seem to think.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How about:
Journalists, Bloggers Use Overwrought, Hysterical Headlines
From the stop-taking-yourselves-so-fracking-seriously dept.
The linked article basically talks about how different phones are using different versions of the Android OS.
OH NOES. You mean they aren't all running identical versions?! It's being strangled! It's strangulation, I say! Woe unto those who have slightly different versions of software on their phone, for truly they shall be cursed from on high!
Seriously people. Take a deep breath and calm down.
The 10 years when WinMo was a major player was characterized by NO consumer choice after the original purchase. Blackberry and Palm were the same way. Now the consumer is beginning to understand the benefits of having an open platform untied to their carrier. So if Android phones get locked down to the same level that WinMo, Palm, and Blackberries where for years then it will have to compete on crutches with the iPhone. Sure there are unlocked phones available but not enough to justify a vibrant marketplace al la iTunes.
Except Apple have a few per cent market share - so actually, by your logic, people prefer more open solutions.
Believe it or not, there's more (far more) to the mobile phone market than Apple and Google. Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, RIM. But you wouldn't know it from reading Slashdot.
At this point there are very few classes of desirable apps that aren't able to be on the app store.
There are a lot of apps though that are rejected for little to no reason. Such apps would be good for jailbroken phones. Things that "were too similar to iTunes", had "objectionable content" or used "undocumented APIs".
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I don't think the article appreciates where most consumers are at. Most consumers have simply cell phones and will continue to have simply cell phones. Most cell phones today are for all practical purposes, smart phones. What most consumers do not have, have rejected for the past 15 years, and will continue to reject, is a device that is a big rectangular brick that happens to also let you make calls, what used to be a PDA, and is now a mobile internet device (MID).
Android is an OS that is first and foremost is for smart phones. The iPhone is not a smart phone at all. The iPhone is a MID that happens to have phone functions. See: iPod Touch.
With Android, Google isn't focusing on the iPhone market. Google is focused on the Symbian market where Apple does not even compete today.
Apple is going to need to decide very quickly whether they want to remain only a player in the niche mobile internet device market, or whether they want to enter the smart phone market proper, where most consumers are and will continue to be.
With any luck, Apple will enter this market with something like an iPhone nano. I really like their interface, but like most consumers I don't want a mobile computer, I want a phone, one that flips open and follows the contours of my head, and in this day and age gives me email, gps, search, and music in a phone, not in a pocket computer.
We've been working on native mobile apps for our systems the past 6 months. iPhone has been pretty good to work with. You build your software, if it works on one iPhone (or iPod Touch even), it will work on the next in the same exact way. Now there may be differences in OS (2, 3, 3.1, 3.2), but at least the hardware is the same and operates the same way. Same pretty much with Blackberry as well as they have the classic Blackberry style and then the Storm. There are some hardware differences between models, but basically you have to make sure it works on your normal blackberry and then the Storm series phones.
Windows Mobile is a nightmare. You can write the software, but it runs on so many different hardware platforms, each with their own difference (some have a stock UI, others a manufactures UI, others a carrier UI), that it takes a lot of time an expense to debug it. And even then we still get complaints that things don't work on XYZ model phone that we had never even heard of before. Our app maybe perfectly usable on one phone, completely unusable on the next because of screen size or one has a touch screen, one only has a keyboard interface, etc..
Unfortunately for Android, they're going down the same road as Windows Mobile. As it stands right now, we have to test against 3 different OS versions (1.5, 1.6, 2.0) AND test usability against different configuration. How does it look on AB size screen vs. CD sized screen. How well does it interface with touch screen? How well does it interface with keyboard? Does it run well on processor version X vs. Y, etc.. That adds a lot of cost to develop for in testing and QA.
We'll give Android another year and see. But if some of these problems don't look to be righted by Google, then in the future we're likely to support iPhone and Blackberry native and then develop a web-based interface for everything else to keep down costs.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Somebody please explain to me why Android matters. What does it have that all the other phone OSs don't? Better APIs? Nicer SDK? I imagine a lot of geeks like the idea of owning a hackable phone, but that's not enough by itself.
Whenever I ask this question, I get answers that only address issues with the iPhone, like the fact that nobody tells you what software you can run on it. Please recall that there are a lot of phone OSs out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_operating_systems
nobody is stuck on 1.5, after rooting the g1 that enabled every phone to be on 2.0 if they desire, merely some root exploration is required.
Exactly. Community distro CyanogenMod is already bringing tons of 2.1 features to the first Android handset, the G1.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
That doesn't really look like that in the real world...
First, you have Creative Zii, some Archos devices, etc. Essentially an Android iPod Touch-style thing.
Secondly, I don't see Android competing with Symbian devices that much; the latter are, most often, sturdy candybars at least two times less expensive (without contract!) than cheapest Android phones, which are all large touchscreen devices - not really cheap, but definitely on the cheap, a bit.
One chart is worth thousands words: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Smartphone_2009.svg
Most importantly, you forget that vast majority of phones sold today are not smartphones, but simple feature phones. This is the area in which smartphone OS can grow, bigtime. But manufacturers don't really target their Android offerings there (if it even can be done - can Android run properly on the slower spectrum of ARM CPUs, with small amounts of RAM, and small non-touchscreen?) OTOH Symbian phones are nearing $100 mark...
One that hath name thou can not otter
As a rooted Android phone owner, this is definitely the case. Without "Apple like" application control there is no reason for most people to attempt to gain elevated privileges. I can install a tethering or OBEX (bluetooth OBject EXchange) application without root permissions. There are a few applications that require root but as Android develops more and more as a platform developers are finding ways to perform functions (like tethering or OBEX) without requiring root access.
You also don't need root access to install a new ROM from the standard boot loader but the ROM has to be signed, this means Google and the Manufacturers can do an end run around the carriers if need be.
The only reason carriers aren't trying to control the Iphone is because Apple has already restricted the device beyond even a telco's imaginings.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
have you ever looked at XDA or considered you know what you're talking about? Hero is on 2.0 and mytouch runs the same stuff as g1, 100%. There are 2.05 android (flan) mytouch builds with no feature loss.
When will people stop being idiotic and realize that any phone that can run android = any rom of android can be flashed onto it = everyone can run cyanogenmod and not be lacking features. Do you know how often I read this fear of rooting, and fear of the "mystery" of the rooting of the phone? Constantly. Your post is not the first or the last.
you'd not lose bluetooth, the camera, calling, or anything else - it's pure ignorance if people think you'd lose that stuff. There are lots of issues with the first flash of rooting, but after that nothing. The community which supports android is the entire howardforums and xda crew. That insures that the phones have a lot of seriously talented people rooting and adding features.