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IPFS News Link • Communications

Dear Google: AT&T Locked Down the Best Android Handset Ever, and It’s Your Fault

• http://www.wired.com, By Ryan Singel
But no, the AT&T Code Scanner, the AT&T Family Map, the AT&T Navigator and AT&T Ready2Go and more are pre-installed and unremovable, thanks to, well, AT&T — with a tacit assist from Google. AT&T also shipped the phone with a locked bootloader, meaning that the modder community has to expend days and weeks to find a way to load new custom Android versions on the device, despite the handset manufacturer HTC’s recent pledge to stop using locked bootloaders.
 
It’s time for this to stop and it’s Google’s job to do it.

Since Android is open source software, AT&T and HTC are free to install it on any handset they choose. But like any high-end Android phone, the HTC One X is Google-certified so it can ship with pre-installed Google software, including the Play App Store, Navigator, Gmail and others. It’s not that hard for handset makers and carriers to get that approval — in fact it’s too easy.

The whole promise of Android was that it was an open ecosystem — a contrast Google loves to draw with Apple’s closed system.

At the Google I/O conference in 2010, Google vice president Vic Gundotra intimated that Apple had become the Big Brother it promised to smash


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