Motorola Sticks To Guns On Locking Down Android

jeffmeden writes "'These aren't the droids you're looking for' proclaims Motorola, maker of the popular Android smartphones such as the Droid 2 and Droid X. At least, not if you have any intention of loading a customized operating system. According to Motorola's own YouTube channel, 'If you want to do custom roms, then buy elsewhere, we'll continue with our strategy that is working thanks.' The strategy they are referring to is a feature Motorola pioneered called 'e-fuse', the ability for the phone's CPU to stop working if it detects unauthorized software running."

Comments

What a great way to die

[aliquis]

Hundreds of thousands of potential costumers go "ok."

Re:What a great way to die

[chaffed]

However, for that to happen, people need to care.

For the vast majority of the smart phone crowd, they do not care. Just as long as they can get that "urgent" work email, post a picture of their lunch and tweet about how tired they are in the evening.

Re:What a great way to die

[TheRealGrogan]

I despise Motorola and their rubbish. My parents had motorola phones previously, and they were so proprietary they wanted $90 for a program just to let us transfer pictures from the phone to the computer.

I dicked around (for hours) trying to get a home grown solution working and finally just gave up. It involved installing a driver from motorola (deeply buried on their web site), and a third party app for accessing it. All it did was hang. What I learned (but wasn't sure if I believed) was that even the USB cable was proprietary and while it was the same connection as a camera cable, it was wired differently.

So I don't particularly care what they say and do, there will be no more Motorola devices in this household anyway.

The folks have since switched to Blackberries.

Long before this, I hated Motorola for their shitty modems. Some of the worst rubbish that I have ever had the pleasure of tossing in the garbage.

Re:What a great way to die

[h4rr4r]

There are something like a million downloads of cyanogen mod. Even if that is the same folks downloading each release you are still looking at hundreds of thousands. That is one ROM, not all of them.

Re:What a great way to die

[dlgeek]

In other words, a manufacturer is selling a product that does exactly what the vast majority of it's customers want.

Re:What a great way to die

[PopeRatzo]

Are we really so weak that we absolutely cannot do without a smart phone until manufacturers actually start giving us what we want? I mean, we're the goddamn customers. Vote with your feet.

Some company's going to do the right thing and that's the phone you buy. That's all. You're not going to die if you wait a few more months to buy an Android phone. Or, you can do what I did, and buy a wi-fi only handheld device and use your regular phone because who wants a phone with 4 hours of battery life anyway? Do you really want to have to run to an AC outlet as soon as the plane lands so you can make a call just because you wanted to watch two movies on a cross-country flight?

There is power in being a consumer, and it's astounding that people have been so diddled by advertisement and marketing voodoo that they won't even consider using that power to get what they want.

Re:What a great way to die

[AchilleTalon]

Since the vast majority of the smart phone crowd just don't care, why did Motorola spent so much time to make sure they have a technology to prevent it? I mean, if peoples don't care, there is no reason to make sure they can't. And for the rest of us, what's the problem?

Re:What a great way to die

[postbigbang]

I have a Moto Droid 2. I rooted it. It works FINE. Not bricked. It's using at most, a nice tethering app. Does all I want.

If I wanted a playground, I would have bought a park.

This is my experience. Yours will vary.

Re:What a great way to die

[rk]

What's wrong with Angry Birds? I run that all the time on my Droid running CyanogenMod-6.1.2 when I have a few minutes to kill and don't feel like reading, thankyouverymuch. Rooting your phone and mindless entertainment are not orthogonal activities, after all.

Re:What a great way to die

[eggnoglatte]

Yeah, you can keep telling yourself this - everybody who doesn't want exactly what you want clearly doesn't have a clue.

Here is a reference point: I am a computer scientist, I've been using Linux both professionally and privately on the desktop for almost exactly a decade now. But the very last thing I want of a phone is yet another device to upgrade or configure a kernel for, or worry about malware and viruses. Locked down sounds pretty good to me. I just want to have access to email wherever I go, I don't buy a lot of apps (I have 4 total), and I am not going to start developing for the darn thing. There is only so much time in a day, and the phone is one device that I don't want to have to fiddle with to have it work.

Dump your Motorola stocks

[Ariastis]

A company who tells its clients to go buy from someone else is usually on the way out...

Re:Dump your Motorola stocks

[Bogtha]

Apple have this exact attitude and they just posted a record revenue of $26bn for this quarter, beating Wall St estimates by $2bn. Looking at their iPhone sales alone, they are the largest mobile phone vendor in the world by revenue. They have $60bn in cash reserves and no debt.

All other things being equal, sure, more customers = more profit. But all other things are rarely equal, so summing an entire company's future up into one single factor is idiotic.

Re:Dump your Motorola stocks

[vikstar]

Apple has the opposite attitude. They don't say "buy elsewhere" they say "by our stuff instead because ..." and then continue with 20% truth.
Motorola's mistake is that they're telling people to "buy elsewhere" instead of just lying to everyone like Apple does.

"Then buy elsewhere"

[SquirrelDeth]

Fine I will.dumbasses

Misleading Headline.

[mjwx]

This is not locking down Android, this is locking down a Motorola Handset.

Hardware lock down, not software. Pretty big distinction.

But Motorola has jumped the shark. HTC are offering better handsets and MotoBlur is a complete joke. I liked my Milestone too, but due to Motorola's insistence on locking it down I wont be buying the Milestone 2. HTC Desire Z looks a lot better.

Re:Misleading Headline.

[CharlyFoxtrot]

What's the practical difference though ? The big advantage of Android compared to iPhone, I'm always told, is that it's open and there are so many different models to choose from. But what remains of those advantages when you have to eliminate a lot of phones because they are just as locked down and then have to research the remaining models to see which can be rooted, what the difficulties are, etc. ?

Bootloader Feedback Policy

[Vap1d-]

Seems that sentiment was pretty quickly retracted. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=495971028278

Re:Is that a challenge?

[teh31337one]

The e-fuse has a 1024 bit RSA key. Good luck trying to brute force that.

But if you want to waste electricity, you can sign up for the efforts to brute force Motorola Milestone - their first phone to feature this draconian lockdown.

Re:Who should I buy from?

[teh31337one]

Go for the Nexus S - they're the most dev friendly. You'll also find that HTC phones are also supported pretty well, even though they have a similarly draconian nandlock in place. It's just been cracked :)

Re:Dumbfounded...... Can anyone explain?

[Spykk]

e-fuse doesn't stop you from rooting your phone and installing wireless-tether. e-fuse is there so that Motorola can stop releasing kernel updates when the droid 3 comes out so that you are forced to buy a new phone if you want the latest version of android.

The word 'e-fuse' doesn't mean what you think

[pslam]

The strategy they are referring to is a feature Motorola pioneered called 'e-fuse', the ability for the phone's CPU to stop working if it detects unauthorized software running.

Oh not this bullshit again. This was first published by an ill-informed "hacker" a while back and regurgitated by every blog in the world with no fact checking.

• Here's what an e-fuse is: a write-once programmable bit.

• Here's what they're typically used for: unique IDs (serial number), RAM repair (mark bad rows etc), feature selection, keys, miscellaneous factory config things.

• Here's what you find with e-fuses in them: almost every CPU in the world, probably all of the SoCs used by Motorola's competitors, probably every SoC in every cell phone.

• Here's what they're not used for: bricking devices.

Motorola has even stated very clearly that they never intend to completely brick a device if it detects an unauthorized ROM. It'll just need restoring. The SoCs Motorola uses are in no way pioneering e-fuses. Someone just read a gigantic amount of conspiracy into the tiniest of press release. This is OLD technology. Can this lie please go away?

Re:The word 'e-fuse' doesn't mean what you think

[Tacvek]

Correct. The actual technology here is TI's M-Shield, a feature of the OMAP processors. Motorola was just one of the first to use it in a noticeable application. M-Shield which lets OEMs burn a public key into a set of ordinary e-fuses, which the processor will use to verify a boot-loader signature, falling back on a recovery firmware if the signature is not valid.

Re:welcome to the future

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Without free software to do the heavy lifting, the phone manufacturers wouldn't be able to compete at the same price point in the market, so free software developers actually have some leverage to prevent lockdowns in the future.

Here's a newsflash for you: Google created Android to make sure they have a presence in the lucrative mobile market and could care less about "open" and "free." The reason Android was released as open source is to take advantage of the geek word-of-mouth (or geek internet press) and the geek anti Apple backlash. There won't be any "leveraging" done. I guess this is the point where a a bunch of disillusioned geeks get together and vow to create a 100% pure open(tm) alternative (ETA: 2015.)

Re:welcome to the future

[icebraining]

Android's core is composed of the Linux kernel and the Apache Harmony libraries. They don't get to decide the license of those - and any code of the kernel they modify and distribute _must_ be released under the same license (GPLv2).

If Torvalds et all changed the kernel's license to GPLv3, Google and the phone manufacturers would either have to comply with it or stop upgrading.

So thinking that Google holds all the keys is wrong.

Update to article

[Georules]

This article needs an update. Motorola has already officially apologized for the youtube admin's tone.

Fractional Users

[Roger W Moore]

That isn't what they are saying, it is just what the 0.0000000000000003% of users that might want to install their own OS

Got a little carried away with the zeroes there did we? Even if everyone on the planet owned a Motorola phone that would be about 20 billionths of one user who is understandably going to be rather upset when several thousand brain cells attempt to install their own OS.

Re:welcome to the future

[M. Baranczak]

We've been over this. Torvalds can't change the kernel to GPLv3, because the copyright is owned by a thousand different contributors.

Re:Is that a challenge?

[mug funky]

i get quite annoyed at the constant arrogance and elitism on /.

sorry to burst your bubble - this isn't an elite site, and the "99% of the masses" argument is pure shit that i hear everywhere all the time, in many different disciplines.

whenever someone asks me to recommend them a TV, the conversation will lead to "nobody would ever notice that", but yet we're talking about it and a choice about what to buy is being made based on it.

what do the masses do when they need advice? they ask that nerd friend of theirs. if the nerd has communication skills slightly above the lower end of the Autism Spectrum, the masses will even get a useful answer.

be honest, how many times have you heard a friend say something to the effect of "i'm looking for a smartphone but i don't want an iPhone... what should i get?".

consider each time someone asks that as a lost sale for Motorola...

i don't think it'll kill their business, but their overall crap products certainly are having an effect, and political issues such as this (yes! political! not technical and therefore outside the grasp of the average simian on the street!) will certainly make a large dent in the long run.

Re:Is that a challenge?

[mea_culpa]

That link is for the old project.
Here is a link to the new AndrOINC Project

Dirty Secret - Carriers want this, not Motorola

[Anonymous Coward]

Motorola does not want to lock them down, the carrier(s) are forcing them to. I have inside info from a dev about this, and I've argued with him about it at length angrily. Unfortunately, their hands are tied, it's the carrier's way or the highway.

If you want to be upset at anyone, be angry at e.g. Verizon. People need to fight the carriers on this, it's about our freedom!!

Re:Is that a challenge?

[Opportunist]

Quite the opposite, we're very uninteresting as customers.

Do we buy ringtones? No, we know how to make our own (provided we care about them altogether).

Do we buy background pics? No, same applies.

Do we buy applications? Rarely. More often than not, we'd know a free alternative.

We're not really the dream customer of someone trying to peddle phone crap.

Apple doesn't sell a commodity

[rsborg]

Motorola plays in the commodity Android space. You know, where features rule and competition is fierce.

Apple doesn't play by those rules and makes up their own... but they write their own OS, design their own chip, and create a unique product out of the whole mess.

Apple "gets away" with their arrogance because they have something other companies don't... and consumers like what they have.

What has Moto done lately that HTC or Samsung can't match?