The Android Bait And Switch - How Google Could Save The Cellphone : OHAdev.com


Nov

13

The Android Bait And Switch - How Google Could Save The Cellphone

Posted by Eric at 16:48 | Filed In Uncategorized

 
 
What are the two things we know about Android? Scratch that - if you’re anything like me, you already know a lot more than two things about it. So let me rephrase: what are the two things that your average casual but somewhat informed Digg or Slashdot reader knows about Android?

1) Android is open.

2) Android is business-friendly.

Google has assured us that both of these will come to pass, the first because “Hey, we’re Google!”, and the second because they’ve chosen a permissive Apache license. The pitch to businesses has been along the lines of “You know, if you guys want to lock down this platform, you’re free to do so - see, that’s why we didn’t GPL it, we’re looking out for you!”

But it’s easy to wonder how these two goals can possibly coexist - at least in the US, cellphone providers love having their platforms on lockdown, because it’s a very good arrangement for them, what with licensing fees, quality control and all that good stuff that businesses thrive on.

So the big question on everyone’s mind right now is, “What is Google doing to make sure that Android phones remain open?” And the answer is far more subtle and devious than it appears at first…

Publicly, Google tells us that they are protecting the platform by forcing Open Handset Alliance members to sign a Non-fragmentation Agreement, which supposedly will make sure that none of them alter code in ways that prevent interoperability. Sounds great, right?

Call me a skeptic. I love Google and all, but I just don’t buy it. We haven’t seen the actual agreement, but from the press coverage, the wording of what exactly Google has required from the OHA members sounds suspiciously vague. “Prevent interoperability?” Does requiring a developer to pay for a license or evaluation before allowing them to, for instance, access GPS functionality on a phone “prevent interoperability?” Methinks that with a good enough lawyer, it does not. Until Google tells us otherwise, I’m happy to work off of the assumption that “preventing interoperability” would only cover shady practices like forcing developers to call different functions for the same functionality on different handsets. Avoiding that is a good thing, since it will help to prevent fragmentation, but it’s hardly enough to keep the platform open.

Verdict: even the OHA members can probably weasel around this agreement and effectively close the platform, to say nothing at all of non-members, who are not constrained in any way by it. Is Google really naive enough to think this will work? They seem smart and all, but…

I don’t think Google is being foolish here - the back-room strategy is where it gets interesting (disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Google or actual knowledge of what they are thinking behind closed doors). Recall that Google is sinking $10 million into a development competition for Android apps. As of March 3, 2008, Google is pretty much guaranteed to have at least 50 high quality applications doing all sorts of interesting things with the Android OS. We’re talking about apps built on the full developers-dream version of the Android OS, with all the functionality that developers could ever dream of having, including some stuff that’s probably not currently feasible with today’s cellphone hardware. OpenGL, SMS, automatic calling, video recording, P2P persistent sockets, GPS - you can bet your hat that most of the winning applications will make damn good use of all of it, since there are no real-world constraints to work with and you get all the functionality that the emulator provides. And we’ll all gawk at the results, thinking “Ooh, how awesome would it be if I could do that on my phone? And it’s all so open that I’ll actually be able to, I just need to download that program once I buy the phone…mmm, Android.” All this hype, before a single real Android phone is even built.

Note well that in the Challenge FAQ Google states that “Developers retain all intellectual property and other rights to their applications while granting Google a license to evaluate and test the application for purposes of the Challenge as well as a license to display the application to promote the Android platform.”

See where I’m going now? What phone company in its right mind could possibly release an “Android” phone, yet strip out or lock down all of the highly publicized functionality that is marketed as being “Android?” They would have to be nuts. If a customer purchased a phone and obtained one of the 50 highly publicized apps that they bought the phone on the basis of having seen, it would be PR suicide for the phone company if the app didn’t work because the developer hadn’t paid the requisite extortion fee.

End result? As much as the involved companies might like to lock down their Android-phones, Google is going to make sure that months before a single physical phone is even out of the design phase, in the public’s mind Android means “Rich, fully functional, and slick cellphone applications.” This may even have the bonus effect of forcing the hardware manufacturers to pack a little more punch in the released phones than they would have otherwise, because a lot of those applications are likely to be fairly CPU intensive.

So now does it make a little more sense that they released the SDK a year before the first phones come out? There’s a very good reason the first phase of that competition is set to end before the phone manufacturers have a chance to do any damage - Google is making sure that they decide what Android is and is not, not the service providers or even their OHA partners. Let’s hope it plays out in practice as well as it reads in theory…

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