Google Fights Back Against Android Fragmentation

bonch writes "Google is tightening its control over Android in an attempt to standardize the platform. Licensees must agree to a 'non-fragmentation clause' that gives Google final approval over operating system changes, allegedly sparking complaints to the Justice Department. This follows Google's recent decision to withhold the source to Honeycomb from non-privileged partners, a move that has drawn criticism from openness advocates. Google says that Honeycomb will be open sourced when it's ready for other devices."

Comments

Easy solution

[MDillenbeck]

Allow the manufacturer to customize the hell out of it, but write into the license agreement that all functionality must work a vanilla install that is made available OTA. That way a user can go into the update menu and select "update to latest Google version of Android supported by your phone's hardware WARNING: ALL MANUFACTURER CUSTOMIZATION WILL BE LOST". When on vanilla, make the latest manufacturer switchover available. If they did this, how many of us would still be on 2.1 or 2.2? That would be the best of both the worlds.

Re:The Case for Google's Control: Atrix

[tepples]

The problem comes when all three carriers force bad ideas on their customers.

Allow fragmentation, but without the trademark

[Midnight Thunder]

Google could reserve the Android trademark for non-fragmented distributions. This would make handset manufactures make the choice between keeping the brand recognition of the Android OS or going it on their own and losing that right and any support that may go with it. The attitude could hurt Google, but it would probably hurt handset manufacturers more as people decide they want the security of a platform with less surprises.

Technically no one can really stop Android from being forked, but at the same time there is nothing stopping Google preventing you from being able to use their trademark.