But Google is at the forefront of it all…they can choose to be strict and grab Android by it’s horns for the consumers benefit or continue to give complete control to the vendors/carriers.
Negotiations with any carrier is always a delicate, political dance, especially when there are hundreds of millions or billions of dollars at stake. Throw handset vendors into the mix, and I’m surprised anything actually gets done. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and they all need each other to varying degrees.
Apple had a leg up on everyone with the original AT&T-only iPhone for two reasons: 1) Apple controlled both the hardware platform and the OS, 2) there wasn’t anything else on the market to compete. Apple held pretty much all the cards. Look at the onerous terms Sprint agreed to before they were allowed to sell the iPhone. In those negotiations, it’s clear that Sprint needed Apple more than Apple needed Sprint.
It’s not quite the same with Android. Google is doing the right thing by offering up AOSP. Unfortunately, “open source” is a double-edged sword: handset vendors and carriers are now also free to do what they want with it. It would be counter-productive and hypocritical to declare Android to be open source, but then license it in such a way that limits freedom. If teams like MIUI and CyanogenMod are free to make their own ports from AOSP, then you must also allow corporate interests to do the same.
HELL even when you get your device, let’s say it’s HTC, it should have an option setting up to ‘continue with stock experience’ or ‘download Sense experience’ and have it ‘reprogram’ whatever is on the device through the cloud.
Agreed, but again, we don’t have that not because of technical limitations, but political issues. Imagine if every handset from every carrier came with something akin to CWM already installed, and the vendor provided a downloadable, flashable ZIP with all the right drivers for that particular hardware model? 99% of users would not care or notice, and will run with Sense or TouchWiz, etc. But the remaining 1% would have the option to easily flash an alternate OS image, if they agree to waive all technical support and future warranty claims (which we pretty much do already).
Google isn’t stopping anyone from producing a phone like that, but so far, none of the big players are showing much desire to do that. Perhaps Google could try harder and spend more money lobbying the vendors and carriers? I don’t really see that as their prerogative. What I want is a return to the true Googlephone": unlocked, with the only hardware variants being the ones needed to support different network technologies. You go to your carrier and buy a SIM-only plan, pop it in, and away you go. OS updates are then distributed directly from Google to the end user through existing delivery mechanisms, bypassing handset vendors and the carriers. But the carriers aren’t going to like that, and will use it at the negotiating table against Google.
