Don't get too excited about Android
Anyone who has used a cell phone in the US knows that providers are
total bastards. They lock down everything so you are basically
powerless to use the hardware that you purchased. Sure, people say
that the phones are highly subsidized and all that but that’s why I
get locked into a contract and pay a termination fee if I leave
before my two years are up. I really am paying for the hardware
over time so just let me do what it’s designed to do.
Yesterday I started to get really excited about Android, Google’s
open-source phone platform. It sounded like just what the cell
phone industry in the US needed to really get innovation flowing
and get people excited about phones again. Java promised all of
this a long time ago but
application signing pretty much killed it for all but the biggest
developers. How many successful, cross-network, J2ME
applications do we have today? Probably zero and it’s because the
network providers want it that way. They can’t stand to give up
control because they think they’ll lose revenue.
Anyway, Android is backed by Google’s muscle and had a chance to
fix this. Unfortunately David Burke, an engineering manager from
Google, said “
Android
will be open, but device makers will be free to limit and reduce
it”. Now, with the providers’ stellar track record, who thinks
Sprint or Verizon will leave the platform alone and let developers
do what they want? I have been given no reason to believe that it
is anything but an inevitability that developers will again be left
out in the cold.