My personal problem with this is that in Estonia MobileID (fancy way to authenticate yourself and authorize transactions in banks, public services and other web services - advertised as a more secure way comparing to username/passwords and one time tokens) works through Sim Toolkit.
It is a shame none of the modern smartphones support SIM Toolkit applications. They're used for example in the M-Pesa mobile payments system that is popular in Africa and elsewhere.
If you want Android to be relevant anywhere apart from the West, then start thinking about how we live day to day.
The point of Android is to sell search ads. So I don't think they want Android to be relevant anywhere but "the West". If you want to use Android and have it support your obscure legacy technology, bust out your IDE and start programming. If there is as much demand as you say, the money will flow right in.
This is an incredibly narrow view of the world. There are billions in China and India alone without even counting Africa. If you don't believe Google wants those eyes then you haven't been paying attention to how much effort they have been putting into Africa.
And no, you can't build this stuff in userland. Everybody could go install Cyanogen on their handset, but that's obviously not tenable for the general consumer.
> "If anyone in India and China needed this, they would have written it by now. "
This is a puzzling concept. If there's a need for a product, it would've already been created? By that definition, we should just shut down HN, since there is no more need for startups! Why waste our time here when every piece of software with significant demand has already been written by somebody else?
Goofing around aside, there is a lot of Ameri-centricity in both iOS and Android. For one thing, I cannot believe Apple is shipping the iPhone in Japan without a QR code reader.
The whole "translate it and ship it" attitude to globalizing products is a poor one, and explains why some scrappy locals can often take on big, cash-flush corporations.
My Samsung Android phone (running Froyo) has a SIM Toolkit application and it seems to work. If Google doesn't want to do it surely the handset manufacturers can?
Well I'm afraid you are wrong. To implement SIM toolkit you need to be able to communicate directly with the SIM card. Naturally due to security restrictions you don't have access to that in any mobile userland.
This is probably because operators in the West never figured out anything useful to do with STK. You had crappy horoscope apps and the sort, not online identification or banking like in the developing countries.
There was a report recently about one set of android handsets accepting a SIM styled based facebook set of apps which I believed enabled by SIM toolkit and so someone somewhere has done some new sim toolkit support in android. Anybody remember the article well enough to remember the firm name?
My personal problem with this is that in Estonia MobileID (fancy way to authenticate yourself and authorize transactions in banks, public services and other web services - advertised as a more secure way comparing to username/passwords and one time tokens) works through Sim Toolkit.