

Android On Lockdown: AT&T Removes Best Parts of Android from Backflip - bensummers
http://www.androidguys.com/2010/03/08/android-lockdown-att-removes-parts-android-backflip/

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esornoso
It should be renamed "Appldroid" and not Android. It's misleading.

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indy
Does Google place any restrictions on the changes that can be made to a phone
and still being able to market it as an Android?

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jackowayed
How hard and problematic is it to just install the normal Android OS on phones
that come with weird kinds? And does it end up not quite fitting the specific
handset as well?

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there
it varies by handset. my mytouch 3g took a lengthy process involving 2 microsd
cards, a hex editor, submitting some id numbers specific to my phone/microsd
cards to some random website and getting emailed a "gold" file, and reflashing
various files. my nexus one took all of going into the settings and unlocking
it, then reflashing a cyanogen firmware that had been downloaded to the phone.

i would imagine that if at&t is locking down this particular phone, they are
(or have instructed motorola to) lock down the firmware reflashing process.

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necrecious
Hmm, if the best part of Android is the free wheeling, beloved by geeks and
not anyone else store, then I am not sure if Android is the competitor I
thought it is.

A locked down store is totally what carriers want. They want the revenue
stream from selling the apps. That's how the market was _before_ iPhone. So
until Google force carriers to have a common store, I see more and more
carriers adopt this model.

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edwilliams612
I thought the best part of Android was that there is very little oversight as
to what you can put out on the Android Market, making secondary markets
unneeded.

Although I have had a hard time finding a decent tethering application in the
Android Market.. maybe AT&T is afraid that disobey the little rules there are
will be bandwidth intensive, threatening their already feeble network?

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greenlblue
I think it's a little misleading to judge carriers and phone manufacturers by
open source standards. Although open source standards often promote innovation
and bring value to the market because of the service oriented industries that
pop up based on them I don't see the same kind of thing happening for phones.
So tighter control is not necessarily a bad thing.

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shareme
It is a bad thing, any enterprise that wants to deploy their own android
software to device they paid for now has to choose a different carrier than AT
and T..

Its why Enterprises do not use iPhone in the first place..

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bensummers
Do you have some figures about iPhone and Android usage within 'Enterprises'?
Please share!

The iPhone can be turned into a boring and controlled device for soul
destroying enterprises. Have a read of this:

[http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Gu...](http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Enterprise_Deployment_Guide.pdf)

And despair that large organisations hire people who can't be trusted with a
web browser on their phone.

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cryptnoob
They should never have been allowed to sell an Android phone in the first
place. They're probably trying to promote their cash cow, the iPhone by
crippling Android in the court of public opinion.

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jsz0
Allowed by whom? Google went out of their way to give handset makers and
carriers almost total control over how they choose to package Android. I
suspect we'll see more of this simply because the carriers will want to create
a low end SmartPhone market to replace the dumb phones out there. They'll only
run a few carrier approved apps and may not have access to the regular Android
Market but instead a carrier run market instead.

I know in the on-going Internet race to judgement Android has been anointed
the White Knight role but Google's choice to give carriers/handset makers so
much control over how Android gets into consumer hands is nothing to be proud
of. We shouldn't be cheering on a solution that really isn't nearly as open as
people suggest. Even a more legitimate Android phone like the Droid or N1 is
crippled from doing wifi tethering unless you root/jailbreak it. Why? Because
carriers didn't like it. If we're really looking for a 100% open mobile
platform Android isn't really the solution. It's probably the best bet out
there today but that should not stop us from pointing out why it's also
restrictive.

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aschobel
Tethering app was only removed from the US T-Mobile store, it is available
everywhere else.

[http://androidcommunity.com/google-allowing-tethering-
apps-f...](http://androidcommunity.com/google-allowing-tethering-apps-for-non-
t-mobile-users-20090402/)

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jsz0
They still do not allow wifi tethering apps unfortunately -- or they are
blocked on Sprint (HTC Hero)

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aschobel
Yikes, that is quite unfortunate.

Do 3rd party markets apps like Wifi Tether from anda.pk work?

[http://discuss.gdgt.com/htc/hero/support/tethering-with-
the-...](http://discuss.gdgt.com/htc/hero/support/tethering-with-the-hero-is-
it-possible/)

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Batsu
It seems wrong to do this, but in a related thought, I imagine the people
savvy enough to know there are apps outside the market will realize they can
also install other ROMs.

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jrockway
Installing ROMs is not trivial unless the handset manufacturer wants it to be.
Look at the Archos device, for example.

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aschobel
It really depends on the carrier. I've had great luck rooting the G1, MyTouch,
and N1.

N1 is the easiest of the bunch.

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martey
Being that all three of those phones are made by HTC, I think jrockway's point
still stands.

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epochwolf
Great... they turned their Android phone into an iPhone. Might as well just
buy the real thing if you are going to AT&T for the network. (And why would
you do that?)

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shareme
It really sucks from a developer perspective in that one of the major
differences between iphone and android is that you could download an apk from
non market sources and now they remove that choice from users grasp.

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jsz0
It also sucks for developers that Motorola is still actively releasing new
Android devices with such dated hardware. This is basically a glorified G1
(~500Mhz CPU, 256MB RAM) I'm not sure how that's going to play when we're very
likely to see 1.5Ghz multi core CPUs with 4x+ as much RAM being released _this
year_ That's quite a big gap in specs between the low end and high end for
brand new devices that are going to be in use 2 years from now and beyond.

