OSNews

All very well till you get a virus, or worse. Only the other day my 7yo daughter downloaded a third party app from the Play Store that did some insanely scary things (installed a bunch of extra short cuts to the home screen, told the user the device had a virus when opening the app and then directed them to a site to install some random software to "remove" the virus.) The bootloader isn't even unlocked, the device just has the "install from other sources" on so that we can use the Amazon Appstore. If I hadn't been there to immediately delete the app and run through some safety checks (and re-run AVG - for all the good that did me initially) it could have been a lot worse.

I'm happy for you, but curated is the only safe option for anyone that hasn't got the skills to protect themselves (i.e. most regular people.)

Protection is always excuse #1 for oppression.

I understand your problem and a use-case of a locked-down device. However it should be the user who opts for the lock. As you said, it was your choice to allow installations from unverified sources. That you had to make the choice (to be able to use the other app store) is a technical detail to be solved.

The behavior of Apple and Microsoft with their platforms does not have a technical reason and therefore will not be solved. Apple is getting more insane every day. But I am very disappointed of Microsoft. They always had the philosophy of an open platform, although using other means of getting ahead of competition (e.g. undocumented API features...). At least they never got into the way of the user. But this changed already with Windows 7 (talking about DRM "features" here).

May I suggest something like Kids Place? It's a homescreen replacement that you can install from the Play Store to limit what can be run. You password protect the app, and it runs in whitelist mode until the password is entered. It's a pretty good solution when young children are using Android devices.

'Normal' users have lived in a Windows world for a fairly long time now, and while malware is a problem, it hasn't had much impact on adoption.

Your 7 y.o. daughter did something bad, so we should lock down our devices as if we were all 7 y.o.

Can't argue with your logic.

Let allow the government to ban unprotected sex, and install devices on our private parts to enforce it. The next time you plan to have a family, you will need to write a request to the government institution requesting for a special digital certificate you can sign your device in order to allow open intercourse with your partner. Or you can jailbreak the device too, but that will not be legal in the future

I am a bit confused by your point (if there was any to your post). Are you really attempting to use shitty parenting skills as the basis for an argument to authority for closed down software ecosystems?

This is probably for you:

http://www.androidcentral.com/hey-microsoft-you-really-wanna-see-dr...

Hopefully you at least left a negative review. WTF did your kid download anyway?

While Android is certainly more open than iOS, it’s still not anywhere near open the way for instance Ubuntu is. Development is closed and sometimes they release the source (and sometimes they release only binaries). How open your particular Android handset is often depends on carrier and manufacture.

Although Android is released under an open license I think they are more open in the sense windows was open (same platform, different PC manufacturers), not the way GNU/Linux systems are open.

Personally I don’t believe one open system will «save» us. I think monopoly is bad even if it’s by an relatively open platform, because it still makes people lazy and discourages innovation (at least for a while). Having any player dominate phones and tablets is really bad, regardless of who that player will be.

I think the console market is relatively healthy. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo is in constant competition and pushing each other to make better and better consoles. I’d love to have such a healthy market in phones/tablets, a repeat of the WinTel-era will be a pretty sad outcome IMHO.

I too see room for improvement. However I don't see Androids openness near the one of Windows, it is much closer to the one of Ubuntu.

The reason is that competition indeed can innovate and use the platform without Google's blessing! An example is Amazon, who use their fork of Android on the Kindle. They create their own competing platform, yet stay compatible (as far as they wish) to the Android ecosystem.

That's exactly what is not possible with Windows. You cannot fork Windows!

With Ubuntu, you also have a controlled platform, where Canonical decides to incorporate upstart, not systemd, and to create their own Desktop (Unity). It is not community driven. And as well as Unity can be used by other distributions, the Android software, after Google made the decisions, is available for everybody, e.g. Amazon.
And on the other side, while Ubuntu is very dominant in the Linux distro market, it did not create the situation where everybody would jump on Ubuntu's boat and stop innovating (stop developing Gnome 3, KDE4). As a matter of fact, you could argue that Android is to the phone OS market what Ubuntu is to the GNU/Linux world! And yes, it would be bad if Ubuntu would gain whole dominance, but a competing distro that is closed would not help at all.


Don't get me wrong, I am totally with you in that Google has more tight control, did not release Android 3 sources, and so on. I am also happy that there is competition in the market. But I would value open(!) competition, e.g. Firefox OS, much more. And whatever the market looks like, I would never support a closed system as in iOS, Windows Phone, with my own pocket money. I'd rather be able to innovate myself than be at the mercy of somebody else.

Edited 2012-12-05 16:42 UTC