Rethinking the Openness of Android

If you’re like me, you read MG Siegler’s post on Techcrunch entitled “Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With,” and were a bit ruffled by it.

In the article, Siegler breaks down the myth of Android openness, and though his reasoning is a bit suspect, this is the kind of thing new Android users needed to hear. Describing Android as “open” is about as subjective as you can get. It’s like describing it as “good.” Therefore, people have assigned all kinds of crazy expectations to what “open” means, and most of them are false.

At one point, Siegler says, “Open is proving to mean that the carriers can choose what they want to do with Android.”

Proving to mean?

Wasn’t that what it meant all along?

I point you to Steve Horowitz, Google Engineering Director, speaking at Google I/O in 2008, before Android 1.0 was launched.

There, he said the following:

“We are going to give [Android] to the industry to allow innovation
on top of the platform, and to enable the industry at large to build and deploy devices with rich and powerful features and functionality.”

I’ve embedded a video of Horowitz’s presentation, which includes a nice walkthrough of a pre-release version of Android. I encourage you to watch this and remember why Android was developed in the first place.

So who do we have to blame for this whole “open” thing? Naturally it’s the Open Handset Alliance, that famous group of 78 different mobile technology companies and service providers who fostered the development of Android.

“Android was built from the ground up with the explicit goal to be the first open, complete, and free platform created specifically for mobile devices,” the group’s website still says. Check out this early OHA promo video explaining Android…

Talk about mixed messages. On one end you’ve got the people saying “you will be able to have a phone that does whatever you want it to!” On the other, you’ve got Android co-founder Nick Sears, telling it like it is:

“Andy Rubin…myself…and Rich Miner…the three of us all believed that it was too difficult to get new products out to consumers in a timely fashion, and we thought the missing link was not having an open platform.”

The open platform is to help get new products TO CONSUMERS faster, not to help the consumers do more with those products.

And yes, there are two development branches…Android “with Google,” and the open source version of Android. Personally, I think they should have different names because even the tech journalists are confused. Google’s Android should just be called Android and everything else should have its own name, like MotoBLUR, Sense, TouchWIZ, UX, and so forth. There are 20 handset makers in the OHA…and each will have their own UI, which is actually a whole new OS built on top of the free and open Android framework.

You just need to look at TouchWiz 3.0 to see how vastly different the experience can be on an OEM-customized version of Android. Seriously…try the media player in TouchWiz. It could pass for a whole different OS.

Similarly, we have to look at the OPhone phenomenon in China. That’s a carrier UI and not a manufacturer one, and it again is a totally different OS (called OMS, even though it’s built on Android). Dell’s got a phone running it, and the same phone running Dell’s custom Android UI in the US. That’s kind of the idea behind the openness…not whether or not you’re allowed to tether the phone or sideload apps.

If carriers just re-branded the different versions of Android like China Mobile does, we wouldn’t even have to have this discussion.

Android Knockoffs welcome

Behold. The Android knockoff party is well under way.

With China’s biggest mobile carrier supporting Android under its OMS platform, China Mobile is inviting a grey market Android takeover. Since it’s an open source OS, though, this sort of thing can really only contribute to Android’s impending world domination.

I, for one, welcome our cheaply-made robot overlords. (WARNING, reflexive link which also serves as a segue)

Now, because I’m a logophile for fun and a linguist by trade, I adore Engrish. I simply adore it. On the surface, it’s bloody hilarious, but when you peel back the layer of humor, underneath you see the extremely interesting nature of grammar, syntax, and the consistent fallibility of translation. So frequently, I cruise knockoff sites to laugh, enjoy life, and find weird technology.

A little more than a week ago, a press release for the new “SciPhone” N19 came out, these devices have names that belong in the Nokia N-series, and look to be straight rips of other designs. The N19 promises to be the “World’s Cheapest Google Android Smart Phone, SciPhone N19 support WiFi,Bluetooth 2.0, 2.8 inch LCD with touch screen, 2.0 MP Digital Camera, Android Operating System v1.5.”

Look at that, a BlackBerry Stormdroid.

As you can see, it looks like a Blackberry Storm…and it’ll run you $195.

And here’s another Android SciPhone, the N21, looking to have drawn some cues from the HTC Touch Diamond.

jiao 5 megapixel SciPhone, ni ne?

And let’s not forget the N12 with “Real Google Android TV GPS.”

aww..it's got an antenna.

I just thought I’d include these here to coincide with my “140 characters about every Android Phone” post, to show what I’m intentionally skipping. I very nearly didn’t include the rumored ZTE and INQ handsets because they’re not far off from this crap.

But just for fun, I’ll keep track of noteworthy deviants and include them in aiding the growth of Android.