They had Motoblur on some devices, and they had "pure" Android on others.
Pure is scare-quoted because of course Motorola still had proprietary drivers and carriers who distributed Droids still added their bundled apps and disabled objectionable features such as wifi hotspot.
The problem with Android being open source is that Google hasn't really got much control over what happens with it. Everyone can tweak it for the better or worse, and lately its mostly been for the worse.
However, if you don't want to root or get a nexus, I've found that simply installing one of the many launchers available for free mostly does the trick of cleaning up your phone (touchwiz, blur etc get removed and you can hide apps completely if you like). Also, this seems worst in the US, where the carrier situation is -forgive me- completely fucked up. I haven't had issues anywhere similar with bloatware here in europe.
I can only hope, but if capitalism works and people don't like scins and crapware on their phone, the cunts in charge right now will eventually realize it's smarter to leave Android as it is because more people will buy it. I'm still waiting though.
Contrary to much received wisdom on the subject, I don't think that stock Android is significantly less user-friendly than iOS. But requiring users to be savvy enough to strip off carrier crapware is asking too much.
Consensus is powerful. Consistency is powerful. Google has to walk a fine line here but if they don't rein in the carriers soon I worry that Apple's discipline in design & execution is going to overwhelm them. I'm a little suspicious of recent claims that Android return rates are as high as 40% but I don't doubt that they're too high.
You could say that about almost anything. "How can you justify commenting on HN, when the money earned in the equivalent amount of time wasted here could save n Nigerians from starvation?" You can't, not really. But Jonathan's card still is one of the more ethical ways of spending money, so I'm all for it.
I comment on HN because I enjoy it. But I suspect that some people add money to Jonathan's Card because it gives them a feeling of virtue. I'd like to interfere with that feeling.
Honestly, why? You can't scold everyone into "real" virtuous behavior, so why not give them a taste of what it feels like and see if they can get hooked?
Do you believe that people putting money on this card would actually donate it towards a more deserving end?
I (think I) understand your goal here, but ultimately I think what you're doing is either ineffective in or outright harmful towards achieving it.
Android pays for itself, in lots of different ways, among them and by far most importantly: Being the default search provider on 550k additional phones/day. That's worth a billion $ to Google any day.
I don't think it's just about search. I think sometimes Google does things Because They Can and then try to figure out how to make money later. Android's most realistic reason for existence, IMHO, is to ensure that Google users can take their data with them. If there was no Google phone, then the world would stick with Exchange, and GMail is not Exchange.
I always thought that Android's raison d'etre was to prevent any other company from dominating the smartphone business (Apple having apparently the best shot at this, but would still apply if Microsoft or RIM seemed likely to) because they would then have a huge opportunity to cut Google out of the loop - they could use Bing for their default search engine, have a built-in mail app that's not Gmail, etc.
There's money back and forth between these companies all the time. It's just behind closed doors for 90% of it. Patent suits are the equivalent of tabloid coverage of a public argument. It could very well be resolved behind closed doors like many other suits.
From the same quote: "Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts", so it's technically wrong that Google didn't let you export your friend's mail addresses anymore. They just made it more difficult, ie didn't bundle it with the Orkut csv file people used to import everything into facebook.
And I think that's actually Google's point: They feel Facebook should offer reciprocity; if people can switch from Google to fb easily, fb should be willing to provide the same feature to their users.
Personally, I also don't agree with your point: I doubt the option to export your friends' email addresses in a useful file format would get abused, as it's only your friends that have access to it. You willingly added them, and thus gave them access to your email address. If you voluntarily tell a friend your email address, shouldn't he be able to remember it regardless of what social network he currently uses?
Why would a clean, user focused "export my info" tool also be exposed to apps? I can't imagine a situation where those two features would be intrinsically tied. This is about an end-user-side button which dumps your friend network 'address book' into a simple machine readable format and downloads it to the users local drive. Implying such a feature would/could, accidentally/maliciously cause a user's contacts to flood out uncontrollably to 3rd party app developers reads like FUD.
I already feel rather uncomfortable about all the information apps can gather about me without me ever having to do anything. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be very easy to restrict that, and only let my friends have access to <i>my</i> personal data? I added my friends, I don't mind them having access to my data, including my email address. But apps my friends use are a very different matter.
Well, if you care about a locked bootloader and similar restrictions (99% don't), but didn't put the effort into googling your phone to find out about them, you can always root your phone and put on the the newest version - If you didn't get a Nexus in the first place, that is. Also, you'd have to live in the US for it to matter, the vast majority of carriers actually deliver Android updates pretty timely.
I agree Android isn't anywhere near a perfect linux dream of open hard- and software, but it isn't as awful as you depict it either imho.
From my position now, I understand that. It is however not: "Get an Android phone it's open source." Instead, it's find out about all sorts of technical minutia and then find a phone that actually allows you to use the open source.
I do live in the US. My phone (Milestone XT720) was released running 2.1 over seven months after 2.2 had been released and I bought it only both after verbal and email confirmation from Motorola support that a 2.2 update was on the way.
Nevertheless, Motorola officially abandoned the phone at 2.1 three months after release. They claim it was an honest mistake and the support personnel were confused. Whoops. Motorola has recently confirmed that we will never even get a security update. I didn't know at the time that Motorola were such incompetent assholes and would both lie and never ship updates. Maybe if I had known that I would have learned beforehand what was the locked bootloader.
Like I said, I've learned my lesson. My family will never, ever buy anything made by Motorola. Motorola points their fingers at the carrier and the carrier points their finger at the manufacturer. I'm tired of these games. That's it. End of story. It's Nexus only from now on. I don't trust any of the assholes selling phones. Period. If I wanted to buy a locked down phone, I'd buy an iPhone.
Are you saying that the GP that complained about a locked bootloader should just root his phone and update the ROM or bootloader? I mean - isn't that missing the point of the braindead idea/implementation of a locked bootloader?
> "With Google+ in the open, Facebook finally needs to watch its step. ... Google is the only web property which can even begin to threaten Facebook’s supremacy. ... That’s the problem with monopolies, and the reason they’re illegal: if you have nowhere to go — if there isn’t an alternative service that you can switch to — the monopoly can simply milk you and stretch you without recourse. But now there’s Google+. With Big G hulking menacingly in Facebook’s shadow and just waiting for a misstep or mistake, Facebook needs to be careful. Mess up now, Zuckerberg, and Google will gladly gobble up droves of discontented denizens."
Of course, but what I think the author meant to say, was that owning those patents should have been worth more than $4.5 billion to Google, as they are crucial to Android's success.
I agree with most of your points - However, I think the author's main complaint was that if you do anything somehow objectionable on any Google service, then all of them get blocked. I don't see why that's the case, but as long as it continues, his point is valid - Facebook won't also ban your email for posting nudity. They can only smash one egg, not your entire internet basket.
Unless you do most of your communicating with family through Facebook, or use Facebook Connect to authenticate with external sites; then you're just as screwed if they ban you.
