Android is the most closed system ever, or: the art of the open source facade
so, is Android evil? No, it isn’t. It has done no harm – quite the contrary, Android has boosted the level of innovation on mobile software. The point of the article is not to vilify Google or concoct visions of Darth Vader; but to balance the level of openness hysteria with a reality check on the commercial dynamics of mobile open source.
According to a long article by Andreas Constantinou:
“You thought Android was open? The Android governance model consists of an elaborate set of control points that allows Google to bundle its own services and control the exact software and hardware make-up on every handset. All this while touting the openness rhetoric that is founded on the Apache permissive license used in the Android SDK.
[updated in response to reader comments]: Whereas Android is completely open for the software developer ecosystem, it’s completely closed for the handset OEM (pre-load) ecosystem. There is no other platform which is so asymmetrical in terms of its governance structures.
Indeed, Google’s mobile platform is the smartest implementation of open source designed for driving commercial agendas. But before we dig into why, it’s worth discussing why Android’s success has very little to do with open source.”
After detailing 8 strategies of closure, he concludes:
Yet whatever the endgame, it’s worth realising that [from the manufacturer perspective] Android is no more open – and no less closed – than licensable operating systems like Windows Mobile, Apple OSX or PalmOS, Symbian and BREW; it’s the smartest implementation of open source aimed at driving commercial agendas. Android is much less about the do-no-evil rhetoric that the PR spinners in Mountain View would like us to think.
