If Android is ‘open’, it is in a very closed sort of way

“Come into my parlour,” said the spider to the fly. Or, indeed, as Google said to the smartphone business.

And just as the fly might have been tempted, since the spider’s light, thin web didn’t look at all like a parlour, a goodly chunk of the smartphone market jumped on Android. Because an open-source operating system that anyone could build their own smartphone around looked a lot nicer than the high-walled garden with iron gates that Apple had built.

They just couldn’t see the sticky bits. I hope you’ll forgive a short rant, but I’ve been involving myself yet again in discussions with people whose preference for Android over iOS is based almost entirely on its “openness”. I honestly don’t care much whether you like Android, or iOS, or Windows Phone or BlackBerry. If you still prefer Symbian, I might have to sit you down for a long talk, but aside from that your choices are yours. I get troubled when people tell me my choices are wrong for entirely fictitious reasons.

That’s right, fictitious. Let me put this to you in simple terms: Android isn’t open.

Sure, at its heart there is an open-source project upon which anyone can build their own OS and their own apps and their own ecosystem if they are so inclined. They don’t even have to call it Android if they don’t want. It’s terrific.

That’s quite a popular thing to do in China, where (ironically) much of what Google bundles with Android is banned by the totalitarian government. Outside of China, there’s really only Amazon doing it, with Kindle.

Why is that? Ask Acer, which tried to build handsets based on one of those “forked” versions of Android that are so popular in China. Google promptly stomped on that effort, threatening to kick Acer out of the Open Handset Alliance if it built handsets based on a fork.

You see how Orwellian this is? Acer could have quite happily built handsets based on a forked version of Android, but without being in the OHA, it would not have had access to Google’s apps. Google’s apps, of course, are the gateway to Google’s back-end services, and Google’s services are the best thing about Android. You want to build a version of Android that anyone’s going to want to use, you’re going to want those apps. So you’re going to have to join the Alliance. Come on in — it’s “Open”.

Open source... not

At first, there were open-source versions of the apps alongside proprietary ones. But, ever so gradually, one by one, Google has been abandoning the open-source versions as it adds more features to the proprietary versions.

Samsung – alone among handset manufacturers – has the wherewithal to build its own versions of Google’s apps. And it has done, along with its own app store. This has led to speculation that Samsung may abandon the OHA and Google and go its own way. You may have read articles to that effect. I’m betting they’re wrong.

Why? Because Google services, that’s why. How long do you think it would be between Samsung making its clean break and Google updating its APIs so that only apps developed for Google-approved versions of Android could use its services? The answer is “not very long at all,” in case you can’t guess.

None of which is really a problem. Honestly. Samsung is making a tidy profit building devices that make use of Google’s closed ecosystem, and not having to build all those data centres and services itself means it can focus on building nifty hardware. Likewise other manufacturers like HTC (which isn’t as profitable as it maybe deserves to be) can focus on building hardware and let Google worry about the rest. It’s all perfectly good.

Meanwhile, the existence of Android prevents Apple from having the smartphone business all to itself while Microsoft, BlackBerry and Nokia stumble around trying to figure out what hit them back in 2007. Monopoly is bad – whoever’s monopoly it is – and competition is good.

If you like your smartphone better than mine, I’m happy for you. That’s great. But don’t call me a “sheep” for being in a “walled garden” – it only makes me think you’re too blind to see that you’re in one too.

Who talks on the phone anymore?  Send me an email at mjcp@me.com