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The Shortcomings of Google's Open Handset Alliance
eldavojohn writes "Former T-Mobile and Apple executive Leslie Grandy reports some pretty harsh words about Google's Open Handset Alliance. We've heard grumblings before about control in open source projects, but now an unnamed former leader of an OHA member company is calling the OHA 'oligarchical,' and said, 'The power is concentrated with the Google employees who manage the open source project. The Open Handset Alliance is another myth. Since Google managed to attract sufficient industry interest in 2008, the OHA is simply a set of signatures with membership serving only as a VIP Club badge.' But what privileges do they have? Not many. The OHA's problems don't stop there; Grandy maintains that 'many OHA members are developing proprietary user experiences, which they are not contributing back into Android — as is standard for open source projects — for fear of losing competitive advantage in the marketplace.' She goes on to paint the OHA as toothless and directionless, with a nearly abandoned message board. It's been around for almost three years, and while Android has become more prevalent, the OHA's contributions seemingly have not. Do you agree that the OHA has amounted to nothing but a checkbox for manufacturers?"
Its not a checkbox, but rather a shortcut.
If you are making a smartphone, you need a powerful OS, with a lot of low level features, and as robust as possible an app market.
And if your name isn't Apple or RIM, you need an off-the-shelf OS from someone else. WinCE (or whatever Microsoft calls it this week) doesn't have the app ecology and costs money to put on a phone. So you go with Android.
So its not a checkbox, but rather a necessary shortcut, if you want to bring a smartphone to market, you run Android. But at the same time, of course you customize it: you don't want to be a commodity vendor.
After all, whats the difference between Dell and HP? Not much. HTC doesn't want to be the same as motorola, so in order to preserve a competitive advantage, you try to make your GUI better AND don't feedback your gui changes back to your competition.
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I love my work Droid- best work phone I've had, but fragmentation really is a problem with the Android eosystem. To show my point check out this site. Now I realize this is an Apple-fansite, but the numbers quoted are from GOOGLE's Admob. One of the smart things Apple has done is make sure old HW is supported. An original EDGE iPhone for instance, runs the same version as the iPad or 3GS. Fragmentation not only affects the user experience, but it makes things a lot harder for developers too.
First Steve, now Leslie - OHA is still a hundred times better than anything Apple has come along with - at least for users.
Also all the article does is spread FUD about Android.
Did anyone really expect the OHA to be a real collaborative effort? By getting the big names on the OHA list you bolster OEM and consumer confidence in Google's platform. It doesn't really matter if the members of the OHA have not made any meaningful contributions other than their names. The names were enough to get the product out and get people using it.
I am not familiar with OHA at all, but doesn't it seem like someone who once worked as the CEO of two of Google's competitors might just be biased a little bit? I guess what I am asking is why should I take Grandy to be anything other than an astroturfing shill?
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So Apple's main complaint against OHA is that its mostly proprietary?
This is kind of like Steve Job's open letter about flash where he warns that Adobe could make it proprietary at any time.
Meanwhile no apps can be accepted at the App Store if they even mention Google...
Mr. Pot meat Mr. Kettle
So google is doing all the contributing, but they have undue power over the direction of the platform?
Shouldn't those that contribute have the most influence?
If they want to take the OS in a different direction, why don't they just write the code themselves and fork?
Oh, right. Because it's easier to whine and complain than to actually write good code.
Google's Android specific code is released under an Apache license which has no restriction on creating proprietary derivative works. Members of the OHA were not required to commit to releasing open handsets, and in fact some mobile companies are already planning on shipping versions of Android that will only run signed code purchased from their app store.
This is what happens when you don't demand reciprocal behavior in your contracts and licensing - the freedom you give to others will be used to restrict the freedom of end users and third parties.
many OHA members are developing proprietary user experiences, which they are not contributing back into Android
So you are saying that every smartphone in the market will not have the exact same UI?
Say it ain't so!
Why does a teenager who is concerned with facebook and twitter have to necessarily want the same user experience as the corperate employee who is more worried about Outlook sync and calendering?
Having a diverse platform ecology, while still maintaining a consistant underlying architecture to enable a vast application ecosystem, is the main strength of the Android platform (especially compared to the iPhone or Windows Mobile), it is not a weakness.
At least google doesnt send private 'representatives' to ask permission to 'search' people's homes
Why should they search your home? They already know more about you than your mother does. Or have you not been paying attention to the information Google has been gathering at a dramatic rate?
... how many shares does she still own in Apple?
That article reads like pure FUD to me.
Ugh. Both articles are pure innuendo. For example:
Golly! Missing features and glitches...that sounds really bad! But wait, aren't all new revisions of software always to add new features and fix bugs? Seriously, in the four revisions over the last year, Android has far surpassed the firmly established competition in just about every respect. I don't know if I've ever seen such a rate of innovation in a platform before.
Thought they're written to sound alarming, there's nothing surprising about anything in either of these articles. We already knew that Google's doing all the development in the core platform, so why should we be concerned that they are the ones making the decisions about its direction? We already knew that Android is designed and licensed to allow pieces of the system to be replaced by OEMs and users, so why should we be concerned that they're doing that?
You mean supporting phones from four different makers costs more than supporting one?
Meego is the obvious choice apart from Android. Only think is... Intel seem to be focused on netbooks, and Nokia can't seem to support their hardware for more than a couple of months.
In particular, Nokia's N900 came with Maemo, which was largely incomplete (the front camera driver is very noisy, for instance, the GPS is slow, FM transmitter is underpowered so much that it doesn't work, portrait mode is largely unavailable and buggy, navigation isn't turn-by-turn, doesn't sync to PC, etc.) An upgrade to Maemo 6 was supposed to be coming, but this is now Meego, except that last Nokia said, they're counting on the community to do their support for N900 for them. This is their flagship product and they're trying to attract open source developers based on that kind of support? Don't they realise that open source developers are used to having hardware support for much longer than windows support periods? Who is going to develop for a platform that routinely doesn't even last a few months before it's abandoned?
Also, Intel and Nokia are claiming they want to do this Meego development all out in the open. But they seem to want to develop the source code only in the open, and then roll their own very different distros, with their own branding, including separate app stores, which is pretty much insane. That said, I'd welcome a nokia app store, since intel's app store for Moblin required credit card details just to browse it. Also insane.
I'm interested to see how this plays out. But really, I suspect Nokia will need to produce a properly supported Meego 1.x (and maybe even 2.x) on N900 if Meego is to have any chance of competing with the already established Android. Otherwise, a lot of N900 owners will probably do what they're already trying to do: replace Maemo/Meego with Android.
Wow, its amazing the PC industry hasn't collapsed under the weight of all this testing, I mean with so many versions of Windows, .net, DirectX, Java. I mean it's so fragmented. Then you have the hardware.
All these problems have been solved on the PC, now they just need to make the transition to Android. How does MS, Adobe, Blizzard, ECT... ensure that their software works on multiple platforms. Beta testing, various other testing tools. You know that you can run any version of Android on a VM, it's in the SDK, simple applications can be tested in that fashion, only the complex applications have the issue you describe. Many of the applications I use on my Motorola Milestone have not been updated since the HTC Dream was the only game in town and they still work, some get updated on a near weekly basis.
Android is new, we are waiting for the tools to catch up. Soon the costs chances of getting a random rejection from the Apple app store will be higher then developing for Android. Fortunately, most of the companies jumping into the mobile development space are simply doing it because it is the Latest Cool Thing(TM) and havent put too much thought into it, thus they wont survive.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.