Sunday, March 20, 2011

Addendum to the N900 Question, Re: Android

As to Android problems...Ah, well, that's a somewhat nebulous area.

In many ways, Android is quite alright. The problem is that also in many ways it's just a clone of iOS built with a Linux kernel instead. So it's not that it's untenable as an OS. Certainly, most of the phones are trivial to root or at least allow "sideloading" of apps (ie. installing them from anywhere other than the official Market), while on most of the decent phones you can outright install alternate ROMs. Although Android has had some noteworthy malware attacks against it they've been fairly trivial on the absolute scale, and Google has been far quicker to react than their immediate competition. Furthermore, they do have that much-touted "app ecosystem", which does mean there are many rather good applications out there for the platform. I have a cheap, spare Android phone that I'm sure would be really aggrevating to use as a primary device, but works wonderfully as, for example, a remote for XBMC (and unlike the XBMC remote for Apple's iOS, this app is officially sanctioned, free, and open source).

But, it's . . . well, it's just not Linux, really. It's a fair enough OS on its own, but once you zoom out to include the mainline kernel and associated userland, and Android's general disconnect from that side of things, it all starts looking less rosy. As far as links explaining the issues, GregKH made a rather definitive post back in December: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html

I had forgotten, but at the end of the post he mentions looking into getting an N900, heh.

As to issues not covered by GregKH's post:

It's strange, actually. People I know who are Apple fans seem to see huge differences between Android and iOS, and Android fans the same, but it's almost a Democrats and Republicans kind of thing; sure, when it was either Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin the choice was pretty stark, but that doesn't mean I was at all happy with the choice. Actually, the more I think about it, the more perfect that off-the-cuff analogy is.

So, you have Apple's draconian control of their App Store and manditory DRM for applications, which makes the Android Market a relative haven for open source apps and just generally people who prefer freedom. But that contrast masks how similar the models are; I may strongly prefer Google's version of a Store/Market, but far more than that I prefer actual repositories. Now, from a commercial standpoint repositories may not make much sense, it's true; that, I assume, is at least part of why Intel is pushing their "AppUp!" store, which is set to be an option for MeeGo and would work then for commercial developers and companies to target MeeGo. But I mean, 99% of the programs I use on my main computers are open source projects; I don't want to be using a system set up for the benefit of commercial apps.

There are definitely solutions to the problems of the Android Market. For one, there's FDroid, which is an alternative market only including OSS. It's fairly small in scope, but it saves a lot of lengthy searching sometimes to check in it first (the signal-to-noise ratio in the Android Market is at least 25 times worse than in the Maemo repos, no exaggeration). And Google has been improving things in terms of the functionality of the Market. But it seems unlikely that we're ever going to be able to go "apt-get upgrade" on the Android Market; so when I speak of Android having problems, that's the other kind I'm referring to, I guess.

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