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.
Well, the rumors are coming in, and they’re not exactly the most positive things. As usual, people are throwing around the same tired-ass fragmentation argument.
Rumor 1.) Android 3.0 (Gingerbread) is due in mid-October, with the first handsets shipping in the Nov/Dec range for the holidays (which sounds like a revisitation of 2.0)
Rumor 2.) Minimum hardware requirements for Android 3.0 devices are: 1GHZ CPU, 512MB or RAM, displays from 3.5″ and higher.
Rumor 3.) A New 1280×760 resolution is available for the devices with displays of 4″ and higher (I keep screaming “convergence,” but I don’t know if anybody is listening…)
Rumor 4.) Completely new 3D-esque UI. This one seems almost logical. Hopefully you will be able to turn off all animations.
Rumor 5.) 3.0 will be for high end devices, and lower-end handsets will keep Android 2.1/2.2
Tim Bray has joined the Android team at Google, so get used to him speaking for the platform.
The 55 year old co-creator of the XML standard left Sun and picked up at Google this week, and explained in his blog some of the reasons why he chose Google over a company like Apple.
In short, he thinks Android is the place to be, and had this to say about the iPhone:
“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.
I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.
The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.”
I don’t think I’m alone in giving this a big round of applause.
“Sterile” …what a good word to describe iPhone.
I too am a daily Mac user who has absolutely no interest in the iPhone. It’s simply not exciting (the goddamn iPad just serves to remind me how boring the platform is) despite the elegant hardware and snappy interface. It’s so uniform and uninspiring and STERILE. Nobody goes “Wow, is that an iPhone?” anymore. Nobody. Because once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, and they’ve been the same for three years now.
My peer group is increasingly being overtaken by Android devices, and any time someone pulls out their phone, there’s a conversation between them about different facets of the platform, UIs, apps, and future developments. It’s a more inclusive environment not only to OEMs and developers, but also to users.
It’s funny that ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn said “This beat is about to get a lot more fun” now that Tim Bray is involved, because I always thought it was the most exciting area in all of mobile technology.
Maybe it just takes someone of his stature to make people believe it.
The problem of widget disorganization in Android has been approaching for some time. Now that many of the most popular apps come with widgets, I’m really beginning to feel the clutter on my homescreen. With today’s release of the official Pandora app and yesterday’s release of the official Facebook app, I now have two more medium/large widgets to deal with, and some reorganization to consider.
Pandora Widget, with some 2nd wave ska
I’ve reached the point where things have gotten ugly. With traditional icon-based apps, I can at least do a cohesive theme where everything is the same size and color and it matches the background. With non-themed widgets, though…I’m kind of at the mercy of the app’s designer.
Fortunately, I can add up to 7 more homescreens with Open Home, but anyone who’s dealt with a pack-rat will tell you that giving a hoarder more space doesn’t solve any problems, it just makes them harder to tackle.
I wouldn’t call myself a “widget hoarder,” but let’s see. In my “Add to Home Screen > Widgets” folder, I currently have: Analog Clock, Calendar, Facebook, Music, Open Home Big Analog Clock, Open Home Music, Open Home Setting Widget, Open Home Weather, Pandora, Picture Frame, Search, Tiny Clock Widget 2, Twidget Lite, Voice Text, Voicemail+ Large/Small, Weather Large/Small/Tiny, Weather Channel WxWidget Large/Small.
Do I really need SIX different weather widgets and three clocks? Not really, but you sometimes need to compare to get the best looking widgets that also provide the best results, plus it’s really only three in multiple sizes. The WxWidget actually isn’t my cup of tea, though it’s a super popular and handy app with more in-depth updates and alerts, but the Weather Widget by Lock2 is 100% better looking and gets the job done (I believe it’s designed after HTC Sense’s weather widget). It’s free too, but I highly advise floating a donation their way if you’ve got some change to spare.
Before I can even begin to think about organizing anything, I have to have a deep philosophical “chicken or egg” discussion with myself: Do services gain homescreen position because I use them more, or do I use them more because they’re on my homescreen? My homescreen is usually a bit of both. I use the weather widget a lot mostly because it’s there, not because I always care about the weather. Shazam is an app icon I feel like I always need on my homescreen, but I don’t use it nearly as much as, say, the Google Search bar, which I have relegated to a secondary screen. But really, I’ve started to feel like I don’t need app shortcuts any more with the way things are going. Everything I use pretty much resides in the “side drawer.”
It’s times like this that I wish there was a Widget “snap to” program, or a position randomizer, where I could just hit a button and have the widgets fit to a grid on my screen and I could decide if I liked it or not.
New Facebook widget with Twidget Lite
Because I prefer an uncluttered layout, I’ve switched to a five-screen layout where each screen serves a different purpose. The main screen has weather and calendar, the “music screen” has the Mp3 player and Pandora, the “feed screen” has Twitter and Facebook, the “utility screen” which right now only has the settings widget, and the “Google screen” only has the search widget right now, but anticipates the arrival of new homescreen toys from Google.
It’ll get the job done for now, but more widgets=more processes which ultimately means slowness. It’s running acceptably now, but we’ll see how things get bogged down in the real world. This is something we need to think about as Android users, since the elegant use of widgets is helping to make Android both stand out above icon-based smartphone interfaces, and run more efficiently for the user.
