Saturday 26 September 2009

Have google f***ed up?

If you are using a regular google / android phone with an official google / android operating system then this whole issue doesn't affect you. If you've rooted your phone and installed a custom ROM then it does. If you've rooted your phone you'd know you did it.

I like google, I use google mail for all my email, I use google calendar to organise my life, I use google analytics for my websites and google maps for finding my way around. I like google.

I like touch-screen phones too, nice big screens, but I don't like on-screen keypads, too slow and still inaccurate.

I also like open-source software, from gadgets to entire operating systems and everything in between, written by people for people, not by corporations for profits.

When I saw T-mobile advertising the G1 phone I was intrigued, to say the least. Integrated google mail and calendar, touch screen phone but with a slide-out qwerty keypad, and it's a linux-based open-source operating system called android, I was a happy man, so happy I even found time for a damn blog!

The G1 out-of-the-box was a damn fine phone anyone could use, no geek credentials needed, but for the geeks, for the tweakers, for those who wanted a little more (in my case I wanted to make it look nicer, and a little more 'zing' please), this involved 'rooting' and 'flashing' a custom 'ROM' (installing a replacement operating system).

Out went googles official release (of an open-source operating system) and in went Cyanogen's tuned-up version, nothing lost, everything gained.

Until Now.

google have now prevented cyanogen (and effectively anyone else) from releasing android roms containing google's apps, this includes gmail, contacts, calendar, maps (which you can download for free from the market anyway) and any others not at the of my mind. Their justifiable reason is that the operating system, android, is open-source (it's a flavour of linux), but the individual apps are not. Google have every right to do this.

However.

By doing this they are locking-out non-official-google-android users out of the features and apps that make the G1 (and similar) great. The message is, use only our OS or we want nothing to do with you.

Many people chose the G1 over an Iphone because of the more liberal approach, because it's open-source, this is the primary strength of the G1 and the google-android system, without it we might as well go to Iphone, people are already doing so, and many others are threatening to, we're talking about tens of thousands of users leaving, thats significant folks.

I have the latest stable and experimental builds of cyanogens roms, as well as some themes and the themes I make myself. Until google release an OS that is better, I'll be sticking with these (they have all the google integration you'd expect).

Google, you gain nothing by doing this, you lose some respect and support from the open-source community, and you lose alot of customers. Thats just not playing nice.

If anyone wants a copy of the last stable or experimental cyanogen roms then they'd best not send me an email as it'd likely be considered illegal distribution if I uploaded them to a file server for you.

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