Google Pushes Openness Over Rooting 196
jamlam writes "The Android developers blog has a comment from their dev team on the recent 'rooting' of their Nexus S phones. It contains a call from Google to handset manufacturers to open up their phones to give users choice. But will this ever happen in a market dominated by lock-'em-down cellular networks?"
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
"It contains a call from Google to handset manufacturers to open up their phones to give users choice."
What possible incentive would they have to do that? The vast majority of consumers already have all the choice they want.
Re:Developer's Choice (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the handset vendors don't want that, as it leaves an easy avenue for self-support. Rooting is why Motorola locks the kernel down, so you absolutely cannot upgrade to new versions of Android directly.
Carriers hate it because it means that you're less likely to upgrade to a new contract, since your old phone will last longer.
Their own bottom line... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can put latest and greatest Android on an end-of-lifed handset they haven't gotten money for in two years, they get nothing.
If they successfully lock things down so that you need to buy a *new* handset to get the snazzy new features. If most of the reason people get new things is for software, then the hardware vendor has their own interests in making sure their stuff comes along for the ride.
Application usage logs and restrictions (Score:5, Insightful)
All applications are required to declare the permissions they use, ensuring the user is in control of the information they share.
I want more than the application to declare what permission it uses.
I want to be able to run an application that say wants access to my GPS coordinates, but I can say no you get fake GPS access.
The same with internet access, phone directory access, and so on.
I do not want to be restricted to all or nothing, and have to forgo an app all together over a potential security issue.
The best example I have is the Bible app from LifeChurch.tv. I love the app, but for awhile it wanted access to my GPS coordinates.
Why? God knows where I am already LifeChurch. But unlike the nagging iPhone version which I could deny location information every time I ran the app it was all or nothing, location information transmitted.
Heck I want everything the damn apps do logged, if I allow them internet access I want to know what pages and logs on the packets sent.
Then we can really avoid these naughty apps that are transmitting things, because the OS says hey this app is transmitting this user, and the user can say hells no.
I do not ever want to install an anti-virus application to my phone. Never ever, I do not need them on my desktop, do not need them on my phone. Die McAfee and Norton, die!
Just my two cents. Perhaps I should download the source and make my own build. But it would be much easier on me if a Google engineer did it.
It's all about the "Gapps" (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, the people who are talking about "rooting" an open platform are morons. The rooting occurs when the carrier and phone manufacturer -- yes I'm talking to YOU, HTC-- put gobs of needless, expensive, and ultimately pointless security on top of stock AOSP.
They want control. The EFF [eff.org] (did everyone donate this year?) helped affirm our rights [eff.org] to control over our own equipment, but the carriers and manufacturers are responding with more and more technical hurdles.
These short-sighted obstacles cost them money in R&D, which is ultimately passed on to us, the customer, or absorbed by their stockholders. These technical measures (locked emmcs) are pointless, immoral, bad for business, and an entire subculture [xda-developers.com] has emerged dedicated to sidestepping them.
Google has some mixed motivations here, but one thing I can think Google might do about this is to license their Google apps (or "Gapps"-- Maps, GMail, etc.) to community firmware so that they can legitimately compete with the carriers in the market. The competition and choice would benefit the consumer (example: Gingerbread is already running on the T-Mobile G2 and Froyo is available only on other platforms through community roms not offered by the carrier, who has abandoned older phones.). Plus support for community roms would help Google reach those customers who are now "locked out" of the Google market.
The downside might be more support headaches or returned bricked phones for the phone companies. But can't they look at that as a potential new market? Yeah, when you sell someone a computer and they trash it, it's a headache. A headache you can charge them to fix. Right now people brick their phones after trying to install a rom in the shadows and then return them. If phones were treated by carriers as the computers they ARE, it would be no different than someone trashing their DELL and needing Best-Buy or whomever to reinstall Windows. Or maybe they'd pay $10/hr in support.
The point is-- if tomorrow people were locked out of their computers' operating system by the manufacturers or told what software they could run on their laptops by their ISPs, there would be revolt (I would hope). But we're slowly being conditioned to accept such control starting with smartphones, working up to tables...
what's next?