Posted on 08/23/2010 4:53:52 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Google Android began with the greatest of intentions — freedom, openness, and quality software for all. However, freedom always comes with price, and often results in unintended consequences. With Android, one of the most important of those unintended consequences is now becoming clear as Google gets increasingly pragmatic about the smartphone market and less and less tied to its original ideals.
Here’s the dirty little secret about Android: After all the work Apple did to get AT&T to relinquish device control for the iPhone and all the great efforts Google made to get the FCC and the U.S. telecoms to agree to open access rules as part of the 700 MHz auction, Android is taking all of those gains and handing the power back to the telecoms.
That is likely to be the most important and far-reaching development in the U.S. mobile market in 2010. In light of the high ideals that the Android OS was founded upon and the positive movement toward openness that was happening back in 2007-2008, it is an extremely disappointing turn of events.
When Apple convinced AT&T not to plaster its logo on the iPhone or preload it with a bunch of AT&T bloatware, it was an important first step for smartphones to emerge as independent computers that were no longer crippled by the limitations put on them by the selfish interests of the telecom carriers, who typically wanted to upsell and nickle-dime customers for every extra app and feature on the phone.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said, “iPhone is the first phone where we separated the carrier from the hardware. They worry about the network, while we worry about the phone.”
Almost for that reason alone, the iPhone was an immediate hit with customers, despite the many limitations of the first generation iPhone when it was released in June 2007.
Later that year, Google announced the Android mobile operating system and the Open Handset Alliance. Here was Google’s statement made at the time:
“This alliance shares a common goal of fostering innovation on mobile devices and giving consumers a far better user experience than much of what is available on today’s mobile platforms. By providing developers a new level of openness that enables them to work more collaboratively, Android will accelerate the pace at which new and compelling mobile services are made available to consumers.”
Then in the spring of 2008, Google pulled off a brilliant coup in the U.S. government’s 700 MHz auction when it bid enough to drive up the price for Verizon and AT&T to lock them into the FCC’s open access guidelines (which Google helped form). Verizon had initially fought the open access concept with legal action, but eventually made a 180-degree turnaround and trumpeted its own plans to become an open network.
However, Verizon’s open network plans have never really materialized. To say the company is dragging its feet would be a massive understatement. The best hope for a popular, unlocked handset on Verizon was Google’s own Nexus One.
After launching in January 2010, first with access to the T-Mobile network, the Nexus One was planned to arrive on all four of the big U.S. wireless carriers by spring. The phone was sold by Google, unlocked, for roughly $500. Then users could simply buy service (without a contract) from a wireless carrier. That’s the model that has worked so well for consumers in Europe and the Nexus One was supposed to be Google’s major initiative to start moving the U.S. in the same direction.
Unfortunately, sales of the Nexus One were tepid and customers were frustrated by Google’s poor customer support. By the time spring rolled around, Verizon was still dragging its feet and eventually the Nexus One on Verizon was canceled and replaced with the HTC Incredible, a nice device that nonetheless completely followed the old carrier model.
By some reports, the Open Handset Alliance is in now shambles. Members such as HTC have gone off and added lots of their own software and customizations to their Android devices without contributing any code back to the Alliance. Motorola and Samsung have begun taking the same approach. The collaborative spirit is gone — if it ever existed at all. And, Google is proving to be a poor shepherd for the wolves-in-sheep’s-clothing that make up the telecoms and the handset makers in the Alliance.
As a result, we now have a situation where the U.S. telecoms are reconsolidating their power and putting customers at a disadvantage. And, their empowering factor is Android. The carriers and handset makers can do anything they want with it. Unfortunately, that now includes loading lots of their own crapware onto these Android devices, using marketing schemes that confuse buyers (see the Samsung Galaxy S), and nickle-and-diming customers with added fees to run certain apps such as tethering, GPS navigation, and mobile video.
Just as Google is overwhelming the iPhone with over 20 Android handsets to Apple’s one device, so the army of Android phones that can be carrier-modified is overwhelming the one Apple phone on a single carrier that allows it to stand apart and not play the old carrier-dominated game that resulted in strong handsets weakened by the design, software, and pricing ploys of the telecoms.
Despite the ugly truth that Android is enabling the U.S. wireless carriers to exert too much control over the devices and keep the U.S. mobile market in a balkanized state of affairs, Android remains the antithesis of the closed Apple ecosystem that drives the iPhone and so it’s still very attractive to a lot of technologists and business professionals.
But, the consequence of not putting any walls around your product is that both the good guys and the bad guys can do anything they want with it. And for Android, that means that it’s being manipulated, modified, and maimed by companies that care more about preserving their old business models than empowering people with the next great wave of computing devices.
Changing the definition to fit your needs? Opera Mini allows you to browse the web, thus the term web browser is fitting. The issue of Opera using a proxy is irrelevant. By this logic, most corporate Blackberry users don't have web browsers because they go through the BB Enterprise Server, which has a function called MDS Connection Service. That service can do much of what the Opera proxies do, including format conversion for the Blackberry Browser. That Opera can't faithfully live-render full standards such as HTML5 and CSS, interact using AJAX or pass the ACID test is irrelevant, since a lot of web browsers can't do that either. Opera Mini/Mobile isn't just a web browser, it's a web-browsing system that can speed up your low-bandwidth browsing immensely and help keep you under your data plan's cap.
I'll agree if you want to say the iPhone has no non-WebKit integrally standards-compliant web browser. That is a limitation. Then again, WebKit is by far the best standards-compliant platform for web browing on mobiles, so you aren't missing anything.
Just a suggestion, but you can download Apple's developer kit for iPhone/iPad for free, then you can create applications of your very own and can then install them on your very own iPhone, you just can't install them on my iPhone without Apples blessing.
You can be free at last.
That is absolutely true, except now, with the sophisticated hackers in play, your freedom is limited whether you want to admit or not. Personally I am satisfied with Apple's attempt to keep their platforms as free of malware/spyware/viri, as possible.
I have never had an Apple product down because someone else broke it.
At the risk of being flamed, there’s the massive cost of installing and maintaining the physical infrastructure of a network.
At this late date, no wireless provider has a total US footprint, let alone a total North American footprint.
This isn’t oil, where it was in the ground and all you really have to do is get it out, and where most of your infrastructure has been amortized over the last 40 or 50 years.
I’m not a Comcast customer, but I have had to analyze their company. To install the fiber, the modems, and the cabling necessary to meet the needs of a city of 100,000 people takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to 600 miles of installation cabling of some sort. Cost = $1,000,000/mile and I can’t remember what the maintenance is on it (much lower, but still there).
Wireless has similar issues around number of nodes needed to handle exponential (not geometric) traffic increases.
You can’t do that and return a profit by giving it away.
Unfortunately, yes.
What? Did you know that there were over 80 MILLION smartphones sold in 2006?
By smartphone I meant more than a phone with some PDA functionality and a barely-functioning web browser. I bought my first one of those, Palm-based, in 2003. What an expensive hunk of junk. I'm talking about these mobile computers we're walking around with these days, the ones copying the iPhone. Most of what you used to call a smartphone has been downgraded. For example, the LG enV Touch has more features than that old Palm phone, even a better web browser and GPS navigation, and it's just considered a "multimedia phone" after the iPhone.
Also consider that we consider a modern smartphone to be a heavily Internet-enabled device. The iPhone, while having a small percent of the market, was responsible for 50% of the smartphone Internet traffic in 2009. People just weren't online as much before the iPhone.
Apple's NEVER been a leader in smartphones. Ever. And never exploded the market.
Apple will never be a leader by number of sales because Apple is one company on one carrier per market vs. many companies on all carriers. Added is the fact that Apple doesn't sell in the low-end smartphone market, which is where the volume is, especially considering much of the competition is available for free or with two-for-one deals. Apple is THE leader in pointing the direction phones needed to go. That's why Android, and soon Windows Phone 7, are copying.
That's why Nokia and RIM are wondering what to do as they see their marketshare eaten up by the iPhone and its copycat. Look at your own numbers and realize that Symbian had two-thirds of the worldwide market before the iPhone. Windows had a third of the US market before the iPhone, and now it's much less than the iPhone and continuing to slide, despite being available on more carriers and on much cheaper phones.
Am I really free - and are you really free - if we need Apple to approve a transaction between us?
Good time for you to be discussing those numbers, just after some relatively popular Android phones come out and just before the immensely popular iPhone 4 gets put into the calculations. Let's talk next Q.
Sorry, SPB Mobile Shell and HTC Touch UI both pre-date the iPhone UI. Apple was - at best - 3rd to market with a "touch only" metaphor.
Sucked and sucked. Until iOS, no phone (except the original IBM one) had a system designed up for touch, and it showed. Even WinMo's current touch is a half-hearted retrofit.
A very US-centric view! Overseas - especially in Asia - it's been commonplace for a decade to buy your phone from a phone market and then WALK A BLOCK DOWN THE STREET
Good point. BTW, that phone market, real or cheap copy phones?
This is the TYPICAL model, but because US consumers love to "pay lower prices", the US carriers always subsidized your price to lock you in to the phone and get you to buy it for lower price.
Same in Europe.
Sorry, that's not the way it is? Then I guess you're statement is a bit "zealous", isn't it?
Apple business model, best attempt to copy the Apple UI, copy of the Apple model of application distribution.
THAT is also the big market that is swallowing up Android like crazy. Hundreds of new Android-based devices are available in China alone...
That might just save Android then.
And it's not fragmenting like so many talk about - it's called freedom and innovation, trying new things to see what works.
The biggest thing holding desktop Linux back is the fragmentation. With freedom and innovation comes some downsides for the user in a well-researched, cohesive, universal interface and total experience. Funny you refer to Android as innovation when it's just Linux with a Java VM designed to copy the iPhone. I've been using it for a while, and I haven't found one innovative thing about it.
Oh yeah, forgot that didn't you, I am an Android user.
Can LEOS obtain information from Cell Phones independent of Carriers?
If they can , so can Google.
Given current pending issues with Google, I don’t trust anything google offers in products or software.
LEOs could issue a warrant to the carrier to get information on what was sent to and from your phone, and who called you. They can do that for any phone line, any time.
About accessing the phone, that’s an interesting question! If you own the phone, they would have to get a warrant to examine it. But if it’s a subsidized phone, the question is do you own it outright until the 2 year or whatever contract is up? If yes, then the LEO still has to get a warrant to access your cell phone. If no, then they could - I think - just get a warrant with your carrier and access your phone.
Interesting question!
I am not an Apple devotee.
My first PC was an 088 at work.
At Home I had a MAC 11ci. When I discovered how limited it was due to being a closed system, I switched to what was then known as IBM PC’s.
I just don’t trust Google.
It’s a Norcal liberal outfit.
Never said you were an Apple devotee, and I don’t think I even implied that... I was addressing the question of whether or not police could access your phones. That is what you asked, right?
If it’s your phone, then the LEO must get a warrant for YOUR phone, and cannot go through Google or Samsung or Verizon. If you don’t own the phone, then the LEO would need a warrant for the actual owner (typically the carrier, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, etc) to access the phone.
But since Google doesn’t own the phone at all, nor the operating system (it’s been GPL’d - open sourced) I don’t think an LEO serving a warrant on Google to access your Android phone would do anything. They couldn’t access the data stream (that’s the carrier), and they could not access the phone (that’s the carrier or you, depending upon who owns it).
It would be like the LEO wanting to search your car, and issuing a warrant to Ford or Honda. They have nothing to do with it - the warrant either goes to you or the registered, legal owner. Not the maker of the vehicle.
As far as a NorCal liberal outfit, Apple fits that mold too...;) Of course, MOST companies in the Bay area fit that mold!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.