3 ms·
This is going to probably become a branding nightmare for Google. I know many of the Android phones have "with Google" printed somewhere on the casing (on my E
by rit 17y ago
This is going to probably become a branding nightmare for Google.
I know many of the Android phones have "with Google" printed somewhere on the casing (on my Eris it's on the battery door), and the Android brand has been fairly well associated with the concept of "Google Phone".
AT&T is presumably free to switch the services out as they wish - but I have to wonder if their replacement apps will provide a user experience that is at all tolerable. If things break, don't work as expected, etc. the assumption from the average user is going to be that Google is broken. They don't know or care that AT&T has replaced their services with Bing/Yahoo/etc.
On top of which, users who hear the Android name may expect certain things such as Google Voice, support for GMail, Google Calendar, etc. and be mighty upset when they aren't there.
- kgrin 17y agoThere is a branding issue here - technically, there's a distinction between "Android" and "Android with Google"... but what users can tell the difference? On the other hand, most of my friends and acquaintances don't actually think of "Android" as a brand either - they know the Droid, the Nexus ("Google Phone") or the MyTouch.
- mortenjorck 17y ago"With Google" handsets such as the Motorola Droid or (obviously) the Nexus One are part of the "Google Experience" program where the handset maker and carrier have to agree to use Google's first-party version of Android bundled with the proprietary Google apps. Other handsets that aren't part of the Google Experience program, such as ones from HTC that run the Sense UI or from Motorola that run the Blur frontend, can do whatever they want within the terms of the open-source license.