Good? It’s open
Bad? It’s open
Ugly? It’s open
Let me explain that.
I am an Android fan boy because the platform is so open that I can do anything I want with it. The U.S. Army loves it, NASA is doing things with it that are out there (literally), and most importantly I just saved 60 bucks in hotel Internet charges (boooo!) a couple of weekends ago when travelling using my Nexus One as a wifi access point – I mean what can’t it do? If you can thunk it, you can plunk it on the Android.
But as some burned soul once said evil is that which takes the good in us into the past to lesser freedom, lesser livingness, lesser intelligence, light and love. As over the top as that assessment is, that’s exactly what carriers out there do. Android is open to the extent that it allows carriers to disable all the goodness in Android and put horribly hobbled devices on the market. I bought a Nexus One a few months back and its such a dream – I can do anything with it. But I am a mobile developer and have had the opportunity (???) to play with devices that will soon be on the market from various carriers and they are horribly hobbled – you cannot download non-market place apps, the wifi hotspot function is gone, no USB tethering – everything that I take for granted on the Nexus One. Not cool.
Also not smart…and ugly as hell. Yesterday Verizon put out a statement saying that there will be no wifi hotspot or tethering on the Motorola Droid (on 2.2/Froyo) because apparently the Motorola hardware does not support it. Except that the same hardware can magically run both features when rooted. I mean come on, be outright about it and say you want to control the platform because you are afraid it will increase network load and you want to charge more for tethering and offer it as a paid-for option in the future. By lying, Verizon is saying we think you are fools who don’t know any better and forgetting that the base that goes for Android phones are usually the geekier of us.
And Google, sometimes you can be too open. Or let me put it this way – you can be artlessly open. Like when you install an Android app, the installer will show you all the permissions used by that app. This is one of the encouraging things about Android – it won’t allow me to develop an app that uses a phone feature without me explicitly declaring in the application manifest that I need those permissions. So when the end user is installing the app, he or she knows exactly what they are signing up for.
The problem is that the permissions listed for the end user state the “what” (what permissions are needed) but there is no framework to explain the “why’ (why does this app require these permissions?). The result is that an end user either gets frightened away from installing an useful app after reading the frightening text during installation that this app needs access to your phone information including your number – when in reality the app probably is using your device id to identify you as a user so if you are to accidentally delete this app and reinstall it, your data would not be lost. Agreed that there are better ways to do it but my point is that brutal transparency is not as helpful as toned transparency. The impact at the other end of this kind of openness is that users become so used to seeing the permissions page during an install that they soon become immune to it and stop reading it all together. The boy who cried wolf thing.
There has to be a solution somewhere between the Android’s brute force openness and Apple’s now clichéd walled garden. But if it was a choice, I would never give up my Android for the iPhone. Thankfully I live in a world where I can own and enjoy both 
.