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G2 Detects When Rooted and Reinstalls Stock OS
RandyDownes writes "And you thought the Droid X's kill switch was bad. HTC and T-Mobile's new G2 can detect when it's been rooted and responds by reinstalling the factory OS. This seems like a violation of the Apache license Android is licensed under and is especially ironic given Eric Schmidt's recent statement about not requiring carriers to give consumers the option to install Google's own version of the OS. Schmidt called it a violation of the principles of open source."
Update: 10/06 17:47 GMT by S : As readers have noted, the G2 is not from Motorola. Here's a better source, and here's the XDA Developers thread discussing the issue.
You get what you pay for.
If you really want to have an "open" device, you should have supported the various open hardware platforms that eventually failed because of your lack of support.
You can't really complain that you don't have choices when you made no effort to support the good choices that you had.
This seems like a violation of the Apache license Android is licensed under
Yes, it "seems" like a violation of the Apache license because you don't like it (i don't either for that matter), but please explain to me how it is an actual violation of that license. Have you ever read the thing?
So, I'll take the karma hit and ask - to all the people that rant and rave about how closed and proprietary Apple is and how wonderful Android is, how does this sit within your vision of things? I thought the entire appeal of Android was that it was your phone and you could put what you wanted on it yet this is far from the first example of another Android manufacturer exerting (rather extreme, in my opinion) control over what you can and cannot put on the device.
This is why I'd like some type of thing akin to a seal and a printed notice, "warranty void if seal opened". The N1 had this when flipping on OEM unlock.
Perhaps this is the best compromise. To keep Joe Sixpack from getting exploited by a Dancing Bunnies exploit, what would be ideal is to require ADB to be installed, a command issued from the PC that would pop up a lengthy, scary as hell to uneducated users that they are about to cross into Mordor, and that they can easily back out right now with no harm done, or proceed and void their warranty. Some warning dialog that even someone who is drunk, baked, high, coked up, and tripping has a good chance of understanding. User clicks "proceed", fastboot is opened, signature checking is relaxed to allow any keys to sign recovery, boot, and OS ROMS, ro.secure is set to 0, /bin/su is enabled and a .apk file for the confirmation part of su installed.
Of course, there would be a method to put this all back and shut the barn door if the user wants to have the phone back for service, similar to a DFU reinstall on iOS devices, but that will be buried in the fine print. This way, if someone does hose up their phone, it isn't hard to get them back to a known good OS level.
The problem is that companies like Google and HTC bend to the will of the carriers. They openly permit garbage on these phones. The irony here is that they're decimating their own brands this way.
The carriers themselves have this desperate hope that consumers will accept their walled garden as willingly as they accept they accept Apple's. The problem is that their garden is overrun with weeds and has an overflowing outhouse sitting right there as a centerpiece. People tolerate, even embrace Apple's practices because there's a good level of quality and consistency. A lot of money and effort is invested in maintaining this quality. These other carriers, however, cut corners everywhere they can and put no effort whatsoever into maintaining quality. All they want to do is keep consumers locked in forcibly. They're deluded into believing they can offer something competitive with Apple's app store. They might drive away that consumer at some point, but for now they've got them trapped.
This is one of the consequences of having separate companies develop the OS and the device. Beyond the problem of countless variations of the same basic thing, a user experience that isn't seamlessly integrated these companies simply don't have the leverage Apple enjoys.
This is not to say that I believe that the iPhone reflects some wonderland of technology but simply that the iPhone and the app store have become the benchmark.
AT&T probably isn't that pissed. Due to their pricing you're still subsidizing the new phones you never got...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
app prices
What is different from Maemo than Android, iOS, or WinPhone 7 (when released)? The OS vendors aren't the ones controlling the prices, the developers are.
I think he was talking about "apt-get install packagename" type applications. In that world, the price is pretty much set in stone by the license, usually GPL, and for end-users is effectively zero no matter how you measure it.
When I rooted my Droid X, all it took was a replacement of the Busybox executable to give me all the tools I needed. It isn't Maemo, but I have pretty much everything but gpg and mutt available [1].
An iPhone just doesn't require just an exploit to UID 0, it requires one to get out of the BSD jail() with root. It also requires the jailbreak to install a complete userland including an install system (dpkg), shells, an app (Cydia) to manage everything. Even worse, the jailbroken Mobile Terminal app is barely usable, and has to be hunted down from a repo, as the one that comes as default from Cydia does not work on iOS 4.
This doesn't say that the iPhone is bad; it means that a jailbreak on this device is a lot harder to do elegantly than rooting an Android phone.
[1]: Even in the days of Web applications aplenty, there is no faster mail reader than mutt on a decently responsive system, especially if the spool file is local.
By the hardware manufacturer, of course. This has nothing to do with Google.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.