Google’s big Android chief Andy Rubin has given an interview to PC Magazine, in which he touches on some interesting topics. Sadly, PC Magazine didn’t ask about the patent situation and why Google is seemingly letting its OEMs fend for themselves, but there’s still a lot of other interesting stuff in there.
There’s a loud voice out there which rails against the fact that Android’s openness allows carriers to mess around with the operating system and “add value” by installing useless applications and by disabling features like mobile hotspot and tethering. Rubin is clear about this – open is open, also for carriers.
“If I were to release an operating system that I claimed was open and that forced everybody to make [phones] all look the same and all support very narrow features and functionality, the platform wouldn’t win,” he said, “It wouldn’t win because the OEMs have a lot of value to bring and the carriers have a lot of value to bring, and they need a vehicle by which to put their interesting differentiating features on these things.”
His stance is that customers will eventually decide what phones to buy, and if consumers don’t want crapware, outdated versions of Android or if they want faster updates, carriers and OEMs will eventually adapt and offer these features. I’d like to add to that that nobody is forcing anyone to buy a phone through a contract – nobody is stopping you from buying the phone outright (you know, like you buy other stuff) and flip the carrier the bird.
Another interesting subject is the imminent release of Windows Phone 7, a competitor to Android. Rubin believes the world doesn’t need another platform – something us OSNews geeks will probably disagree with. The more the merrier – competition is good.
“I think the screen shots I’ve seen are interesting, but look, the world doesn’t need another platform,” he states, “Android is free and open; I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons. […] I think it’s good to have the benefit of choice, but in the end I don’t think the world needs another platform.”
As said, it’s a bit sad that PC Magazine didn’t take this wonderful opportunity to ask about Google’s apparent lack of interest in standing by its Android OEMs in these dark times of patent trolling by companies like Microsoft and Apple. I really wish modern technology media were a little less afraid to ask the real questions, but alas.
…the Googfather is going to provide you with everything.
Come, please. We won’t hurt you in any way, we swear.
Seriously, although it has its merits, Android currently remains way too much of an iOS clone. We need more manufacturers innovating and bringing something new on the table. It’s not hard : better notifications, better home screen, a less clunky interface to mobile multitasking than the current implementations… The options are many, it’s only a matter of daring.
Way to quote someone out of context and then rant about the Big Brother. You are way off the mark… He is talking about the Android platform NOT Google’s applications, that could be easily ripped out. The platform itself is fully open source, you or anyone with the expertise can examine, modify, enhance, change the code! In fact, this is exactly what’s happening.
Cyanogenmod rund on kernel 2.6.35 (stock froyo is .32), no Google apps (for copyiright reasons btw), custom mods for a variety of functionalities.
Not to mention that he welcomes competition in the next few lines you conveniently ignore. And finally, it’s rather ironic that his answer pertains to a question about Windows Mobile. The irony!
Yeah, but it’s the Google apps that gives the most value to Android. For example, without Google Voice and the Maps application, I wouldn’t have much use for Android.
As for its openness and the carriers/OEMs ‘adding value’, oh… they’ll add value alright. But it’ll be added value to their pocketbooks, and rarely for the consumer, just like PC OEMs loading down your machine with trialware and other such nonsense in order to increase their bottom line. When you have custom ROMs being released to remove all of the crap that people don’t want from the stock OTA ROMs, something is wrong.
And then there’s the issue with incompatibility – you take something like HTC Sense… oh, it’s great and the widgets are beautiful and all that, and then you try and load Angry Birds (and a host of other apps) on your Droid Incredible and realize that it’s FUBAR. Whatever safeguards Google has in place to make sure the same apps work across different phones is not doing the job. Fragmentation, fragmentation, fragmentation.
As for consumer choice, when was the last time somebody released a high-end ‘vanilla’ Android phone since the original Droid/Nexus One came out late last year? AFAIK, the only decent Android phone that wasn’t locked down by the OEM was the Nexus One, and that never worked with Verizon, so it’s irrelevant to me.
Edited 2010-10-10 01:39 UTC
I agree with almost everything you say – we all have the same gripes with Android phones. I wasn’t saying Android is perfect, or that carriers add value. They add crap. Bought unlocked Nexus One close to a month ago for that reason (Korean version). I was responding to Neolander’s post, which is a different issue. The fact that it’s so hard to find a handset that has vanilla Android supports what I said – although Google has control over how Android is developed, it has no control over how it’s used. It does not preclude anyone from forking the whole stuff actually.
And yes, Android isn’t that much without Google’s apps, but I wouldn’t blame Google. You almost sound like you are blaming them for the usefulness of their apps
) And there are alternatives for some of them.
And don’t even start me on Neolander’s clone remark… Android a clone of iOS? WTF? I guess you can say that Win7 is a clone of OS X in similar vain… Except there are more differences between Android and iOS than between Windows 7 and Mac OS X. Really, I don’t understand where that remark comes from. For instance, it was only recently that iOS added the capability of changing the wallpaper. In Android, you can configure every aspect of the system. Out of the box, they look and behave very differently. Android mandates the presence of the back, home, search and settings button, iOS has home (and reaches different options by tapping it once, twice, et). Their multitasking implementation is significantly different. The languages used for app development are different. From the UI concepts down to the core of the OS the differences are significant. Android is as much a clone of iOS as iOS is a clone of Symbian.
Yeah, that’s what I called the “nice stuff”. But I think that Android does not go far enough. It’s still an attempt to stick a desktop kernel in a mobile OS and the application menu is still a messy stack of applications (I laughed so hard when Apple announced that one of iOS 4’s greatest features would be the inclusion of folders…), multitasking still feels a bit crippled (killing a task is not as friendly as it should be, and I’m not sure you can open the same app several times in a comfortable fashion but maybe someone can confirm or infirm this). The home screen, though better than the iPhone’s, still has some serious room for improvement (see Symbian or WP7 for an example of a good home screen : gives fast access to information at a glance, no screen estate lost), the phone still feels incomplete out of the box due to lack of very useful bundled applications, UI is quite inconsistent between applications like on iOS…
What I’m trying to say is that Android tried to address some of iOS’ design horrors, but they still copied some.
Edited 2010-10-10 06:26 UTC
Ok I agree with that. Info on homescreen depends on widgets you put on it though… I think the homescreen(s) is good as it is, what needs to improve are the widgets.
I hate vendor customizations, but I have to admit HTC did a good job with Sense, at least what I saw on my colleague’s desire looks useful and attractive.
For me, “far enough” would be measurably better than iOS. I think Android reached parity with Froyo. It is as good as iOS yet it is still recognizably different in many, many respects. Some apps are really really nice, others need improvement. The Market is a mess, but that’s a really difficult problem to tackle. How do you preserve openness while providing more security (for both users and developers)?
As to your question about multitasking – apparently you no longer need to kill apps, if you have enough memory. I’ve read a fascinating article about this, and I removed Advanced Task Killer since then.* Don’t feel any difference. Anything that is active in the background shows up in the built-in “Running programs” option. ATK shows more, but they are all suspended, ie not allowed to run any code on the CPU (so they don’t impact battery life). It comes down to how much memory you have. On my nexus, without killing anything in the past week, I have 150-160M free memory on average.
* http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-andr…
Indeed, for what I saw of it, it’s one of the sole Android widgets I know of which uses screen estate with excellent efficiency.
Through a better security model at the OS level. The fact that the Market display which of the phones capabilities applications need access to is a good start, Google needs to push something like this further, to the point where most applications are tightly sandboxed and malware is recognizable right away from the fact that it asks for unreasonably generous security permissions. Apple should work on something like this too, by the way, though they may be relucant to do so because of their PR strategy : without access to the source, the App Store review process does not offer any protection against backdoors, and it won’t be long before someone exploits this flaw.
Yes, but can you still close an application stuck in a while(1) loop or something similar ? And suppose you’re done with writing a message, check it in the “sent messages” folder of the messaging application, then do something else and forget about it. When you open the messaging applications 5 minutes later by tapping on the home screen icon, will you go back to the “sent messages” folder and be confused for a second, or to the main screen of the messaging application ? Third issue I have with not closing applications is that of memory leaks and other bugs that don’t have a noticeable effect until the application has been running for a long time.
Edited 2010-10-10 09:49 UTC
If it’s running, it will probably show up in running apps and you can kill it from there. Another option is watchdog, which monitors the system for suspicious CPU usage and alerts you if there’s a runaway app. Otherwise, Android kills applications as it needs resources. If I understand correctly, exiting an app via the back button quits it, exiting by pressing the home screen, suspends it. The neat thing is, if you suspend an app, its state will be saved. If there are enough resources on your system, you can return to it (without the need to start the app again, ie use CPU cycles). If it was killed (because you started up 20 more apps for instance) the app will be reloaded along with its state, ie you can continue from where you left it. Saving the state happens when you switch, not before it gets killed (so killing to free resources is instantaneous). Quite simple and elegant imho.
Switching from messaging works for me very well. If I’m typing a text message, then suddenly need to check something, I can quit either via the back button or the home button. When I return, I can continue from where I left off. I haven’t tried this, but I think you can type several messages, then leave them and return to continue – my message list shows a draft label near the names of the people I was texting than switched to something else, meaning I have unfinished text message.
As to the security model, I agree completely. Froyo actually alerts the users of all permissions an app asks for. If a game asks permission to access your contact list, that’s suspicious. Problem is us – the users. Since every app does this now, users can get used to clicking yes yes install without reading the list of permissions that app will have. This is true of me as well, I don’t read them too carefully, though I don’t install random apps, just the ones I need. And before installing, I always check what other users had to say about it, both on the Market (comments section) and AppBrainz (I use the latter to install apps).
I’ve seen badly coded apps on AppBrainz, for example this one photo app (with 50+ effects) that drained the battery after you seemingly quit it. And that’s where Google oddly lacks a neat tool for testing. I mean there should be a comprehensive tool that catches misbehaving apps – this could be done automatically for each submitted app. Human intervention may be required to catch apps that need unreasonably permissions. Without the unreasonable censorship Apple sometimes exhibits of course.
EDIT: One more note about memory leaks you mention – those are not a problem. A metafor one developer used was swapping. Basically, you can think of running apps as buffer/cache on Linux – remember the unused memory is wasted memory mantra. Once Android starts to run out of memory, it swaps out these applications (kills them, while retaining their state). This results in always having enough memory. And when I say kill, it means kills brutally (like the kill command on linux). Somewhere in the article I linked they explain the Application Lifecycle very well..
Edited 2010-10-10 10:25 UTC
I will have to agree with him. The world indeed doesn’t need another platform, but this doesn’t mean that more platforms are not a good thing.
I say that the world doesn’t need another platform because everyone has what they want. Apple and RIM (and possibly HP with WebOS) have their own platform, so they certainly don’t need a new one. Other OEMs have Android and Symbian (and in the future MeeGo) that they can customize to their liking while still leveraging Android’s strengths, so everyone is happy. If Android didn’t exist the world would need a new platform, since the second group wouldn’t be able to do what they wanted. I would go as far as saying that Symbian, MeeGo, iOS and BlackBerry OS could disappear tomorrow and the world would still not need another platform. In the same way that Linux, OS X, *BSD could disappear tomorrow and the world wouldn’t need another platform
Of course the fact that the world doesn’t need another platform means nothing. More platforms are always a good thing. They bring new, interesting things on the table and they force the existing players to keep improving their platforms.
Edited 2010-10-09 11:04 UTC
“in these dark times of patent trolling by companies like Microsoft and Apple.”
Wait what ???
http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/whos_suing_whom….
Biased much ???
How about every single company in the business ?
Nice map ! Shows that it’s good to be hardware manufacturers like LG or Samsung in those troubled times : you get insanely rich through a near-duopoly on small screens, and almost no one dares to sue you exactly because of that !
Also, it’s very funny to see Apple, in the mobile business since 2007, suing Nokia about things like wireless data and speech coding. I forgot about that… It shows perfectly how much broken the current patent system is, I think.
Finally, I think Thom uses “companies like Microsoft and Apple”, because…
-They make among the most stupid and revolting lawsuits out there.
-They have typical characteristics of the average patent lawyer : an old and big company suing on a market where they are not even innovating much.
-They have a known past as bastards in computer science’s history.
Those companies illustrate the current mess quite effectively, although there are indeed much more actors, and that’s what the “like” in this sentence is for.
Edited 2010-10-09 11:40 UTC
I believe Apple sued Nokia in response to Nokia using Apple. That appears to be the standard response in a patent lawsuit.
If you want to mention a list but not the entirety of said list, it is an entirely normal practice to mention only the two or three most important items on said list followed or preceded by a list indicator such as “like” or “among others”.
Honestly, Thom, you have such wonderful justifications for your bias.
The largest mobile software/hardware company using patents to defend it’s turf is not Apple and it’s certainly not Microsoft, it’s Nokia, arguably followed by Motorola.
In fact, the only top tier mobile company not current patent trolling in the mobile space is RIM (maybe because their Canadian and think the whole thing is stupid).
The fact that you single out companies that you’ve previously railed against for one reason or another does not help your credibility on this point.
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PS. That’s not to say Apple or Microsoft are guiltless, clearly their playing the game, but it’s a game everyone else is participating in.
Considering the connection to Google and Android, Microsoft and Apple are good examples.
Motorola and Nokia didn’t sue any Android-maker that I know of. Google (directly and by proxy) are being targeted by Oracle, Microsoft and Apple. Those are the big names if you want to talk about Googles part in this.
Uh, why would a vice president of engineering answer patent questions? The magazine groked that, so should you.
So he can answer “I’m not a lawyer… no idea”
Yes the OS is open source. But Google charges fees to provide access to Google apps like Maps and to the Android Market.
If an Android phone without access to Android Market even an Android phone?
Of course it is, you can change whatever you like on it, and install whatever you like on it. Just because you can’t actually access the majority of the apps that can be installed on it without access to Android Market has no relevance whatever … to Google’s definition of open.
You’re free to start your own application store for Android. Nobody is forcing you to use Market. So yeah, Android is open – the Market isn’t.
And Amazon is in the process of doing just that.
Open source initiative dictates that the openness should not leak into other software which means. If you’re software should be distributed with other software, it cannot mandate that the other software distributed with it must be open source. (thats difference between this meritocracy and socialism)
That seems a very random comment I think you may be trying to say something about GPL? What about other open licences BSD for instance?
Anyway here’s another random comment – I think Haiku would be very cool on netbooks and similar shame it isn’t quite ready.
Maybe a few more platforms would be cool – little more competition etc.
Edited 2010-10-09 20:15 UTC
Translation: We don’t want another Google.
Just like the world doesn’t need more Android devices. One of the things that pushed me to get an iPhone was that there are way too many Android devices, and none of them seem to get it right. They are tarnishing a great platform, unfortunately. Just like Windows 7 and PC manufacturers, Windows 7 is good, but the PC OEMs make a mess by selling poor quality hardware and bucketful of crapware.
I’m sure that before the iPhone some people said that we don’t need another mobile phone maker.
Actually, for me at least, the variety is an advantage. Lots of cool apps depend on numbers. The more people have access to them, the better they are. Layar comes to mind, or Air Painter. Not everyone can afford a 500$+ high-end handsets (we are talking unsubsidized, unlocked price).
One of my colleagues has a Desire, I have a Nexus, both high end phones. However, relatively cheap Android phones are available from China (starting at 200$) – and some people I know plan on buying those. As long as the Market works on them, it’s better for me, better for everyone. (I live in Vietnam, it’s relatively easy to find cheaper brands of Android around here).
Another example is latitude. Latitude is very useful for families. A colleague of mine told me a story about getting lost in Saigon. Very easy, street numbering here is almost random (they restart it once a street crosses a district), and there are so many alleys, the whole city is like a labyrinth. He was a bit drunk too. Called the wife to ask her where the fuck he was. Took a lot of time to identify the place. With latitude, that would have been instantaneous. To take advantage of the equivalent on iOS, the whole family would need to buy an 500$+ handset. With Android you have more choice, could buy the LG OPtimus for 280$ for the kids, a Nexus or somesuch for yourself, etc. – while getting more or less the same capabilities when it comes to some of the coolest apps.
Indeed, sell me one phone with no branding and which is open and has guaranteed update support for 2 years and I am sold on it. The Nexus 1 is currently the only phone which comes close to that vision. Apple to some degree is as well with its iphon except for the open thing.
The others simply do not get it, or do not want to get it because it would mean sell less crappy phones and produce quality ones.
Isn’t it a little arrogant to claim that Android is enough, and there is no need for another OS.
How come they didn’t think that before they created Android and there already were so many mobile OS’s. Symbian, Blackberry & Windows Mobile all existed before Android was even developed, and they are surely aware of the iPhone’s development.
But they came out with Android anyway, and introduced a number of new ideas into the market. That was good. And now Microsoft coming out with another OS and introducing their own ideas and competition into the market is good too.
They may or may not succeed, but they have every right to try!
None of those systems was open or suitable for internet usage at that time (2005).
There was Maemo, which is still superior to Android in just about every technical point. The world didn’t need Android and still doesn’t. One OS should be enough for everybody.
All companies want competition…until they’re one of the top dogs. Then competition isn’t actually that important for the free market anymore.
“First of all, the strategy is a winning strategy. We’re talking about a platform where for the first time you can look at the code, you can inspect the code, you can see how it works.”
Really? Because I thought Linux was there long before… unless he wants to chop that down to ‘mobile platform’.
Now whether it’s a winning strategy with most consumers… it may sell more handsets, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s because it has more carriers and cheaper contracts/devices, not because most consumers want to inspect the code. But maybe there’s an extra 1% of users who do care. LOL.
It’s actually “very” convenient as developer or manufacturer.
Also Linux always “forced” you to go open source… Android doesn’t.
Linux always “forced” you to go open source
Really? Because the last I knew, Nvidia’s VGA driver was proprietary, and one of the first WYSIWYG word processors on Linux was Word Perfect.
Plus, Android isn’t the only Linux-based embedded system out there.
The GPL allows that, explicitly: the kernel-user barrier is the boundary of GPL requirements from the kernel. Any user-space GPL requirements, are due to using user-space GPL components. Hence, it is possible to create a Linux-based system, where the only GPL component is the Linux kernel.
Are you sure you know what a patent troll is?
If you do, could you please define it for me?
A typical patent troll acquires a patent for the purpose of suing the patent’s violators, where the patent’s previous owner had insufficient resources to do so.
In the case of Microsoft (and maybe Apple), acquiring the patent was part of buying out a competitor. This buy-out intended to put the competitor out of business, in order to pose no more legal threat. Remember, Microsoft is a convicted monopolist.
WRT Microsoft and Apple, it doesn’t really matter which case applies here.
“I think the screen shots I’ve seen are interesting, but look, the world doesn’t need another platform.”
Great, I’ve just spent the better part of two days campaigning to keep the old GEOS platform alive and what do you and Google do…claim “the world doesn’t need another platform”.
Gee, thanks!
Kidding of course.
that we don’t/didn’t need:
* another web search engine
* another browser
* another programming language
* another on-line office
* another ISP
Edited 2010-10-10 09:24 UTC
Perhaps the world didn’t need another platform before iOS and Android.
Apple changed the game. Google is hot on their heels. If someone can do to Apple and Google. What iOS did to Symbian and Windows Mobile, that can only be a good thing.
We like having the Verizon market to ourselves.
but look, the world doesn’t need another party,” he states, “We are free and open; I think the only reason you create another party is for political reasons.”
Actually, carriers are actively against it. While you can buy a phone out-right from a manufacturer, you still end up with a phone customized for the carriers and all their annoying stuff, just paying a lot more for it; and the OEMs typically want you to assign a contract to it.
Now T-Mobile and AT&T are a little different. They are a little less-evil in this situation due to using SIM cards for the phones; while every other US carrier uses tech that essentially requires you to take the phone to them to get it on your account.
The Google Nexus One has been perhaps the only phone on the market – even for its limited market life – that was truly free of the carriers. It’s sad that they stopped selling it directly.
So no, there is a lot stopping you from buying the phone outright and actually having a useful phone; there have been few exceptions.
Looks like it’s not the case everywhere. Here in France at least, SIM cards and GSM are everywhere, making phones compatible with all networks, and everyone can buy an un-tainted phone from the vendor directly…
It’s not the case here in India either. All CDMA and GSM operators provide R-UIM and SIM cards respectively. All CDMA phones except for BlackBerry have an R-UIM slot, even the ones that are locked to the operator.
Simply because CDMA is dysfunctional in North America does not mean that it is the same all over the world.
Just let the carrier try to alter the search provider from Google to Bing. Let’s see how that works out for the carrier. Google is on them like stink.