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Android Developers Blog: It’s not “rooting”, it’s openness
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- mcritz 16y ago> Unfortunately, until carriers and manufacturers provide an easy method to legitimately unlock devices, there will be a natural tension between the rooting and security communities. We can only hope that carriers and manufacturers will recognize this, and not force users to choose between device openness and security. I don’t see that as likely. In fact, Android’s “openness” can lead to maliciousness on the part of carriers and phone makers against their users. I cite Android phones that come from carriers with unremovable junkware & phones that have hardware encryption that prevents user rooting.
- yanw 16y agoThat practice is being offset by the sheer number and variety of Android devices, consumers are buying the more ‘open’ handsets and thus signaling the demand for them.
- ugh 16y ago“Consumers are buying the more ‘open’ handsets and thus signaling the demand for them.” Are they? What is your source for that?
- yanw 16y agoOne would imagine buyers get influenced by reviews and those tend to favor the more consumer friendly choices. Also there was an incident with Vodafone where people complained about their bloatware on twitter and they soon pushed an update to remove it.
- guelo 16y agoI imagine the quantity is small but there is some percentage of buyers, such as myself, that make sure there is an root exploit available before I buy a phone.
- jrockway 16y agoAbsolutely. I wanted to buy an EVO 4G and because root was easily available, I had no trouble paying the ETF and switching to Sprint. If I had to use the phone as I bought it from them, I would not be a customer.
- CaptainZapp 16y agoI know it's not fashionable nowadays, but I, for my part stick to Nokia phones. "Rootability" is not an accident there, but part of the design. This, of course is unless your (subsidized) phone is locked down to hell and then some. This is much less a problem in Europe, since you can always buy the unlocked phone and as a matter of fact, with the exception of pre-paid phones, even subsidized phones are not SIM-locked (you sign a contract anyway) and I never had one loaded with un- removable crap-ware.
- barredo 16y agoI don't think that's the case, I would guess "Droids" outsold "Nexus", being the former more "open". But it will be nice to see some numbers.
- yanw 16y agoDon't have any sales numbers, just an assumption. And I don't think the Droids are good examples of un-tinkerable handsets.
- gcb 16y agocompare the nexus one with the closed version from htc... the nexus lost to any of them. to the point of google dropping sales. a company, that can dump money on every kind of crap, discontinued sales of something. how much worse do you want it to get until you accept it was a joke for sales? ..funny thing is that people are paying now in ebay MORE than the original price to have the device.
- kevindication 16y agoIt was perhaps a little ambitious for Google to expect to sell more Nexus Ones (with easy sign-up/subsidy by T-Mobile) versus Verizon selling Droids (with easy sign-up/subsidy by Verizon). It's a great device and I love mine, but that doesn't mean Google is equipped to be able to sell it. Actually, paying more on eBay for a device that is scarce is just called economics. Though, it would be surprising to learn that the price was much higher than the original unlocked price + $30 - since you can still purchase one if you have registered yourself as a developer with an Android Market account.
- cookiecaper 16y agoMost people just walk into a store and get a phone that they think is cool. The Nexus One was not available anywhere except Google's website. When I went in to the T-Mobile store, I came out with a G1 because the T-Mobile lady was explaining all of the hoops one must jump through to use a Nexus One. They don't carry them so you have to order online and wait 4-7 days for the phone to arrive (my old phone was broken, so this alone made it not an option for me), you can't use T-Mobile's normal plans on them, I wouldn't have been able to buy with subsidy because my previous contract had one month left and therefore manager override was necessary to grant the discount on the phone, and I didn't have $500-$600 cash sitting around to spend on a phone, and so on. If the N1 got the same kind of carrier marketing and buy-in that the other phones got, I'm sure it would have done well. Carriers, however, did not want to provide that marketing or support because doing so would minimize their death grip on the end-user and count as a success for something not loaded with carrier crapware, which they don't want either. The carriers know, of course, that nobody really _likes_ having a permanent, unremovable Blockbuster app on their phone. But since people will tolerate it, and the carrier gets a lot of money from Blockbuster (or NASCAR or whatever) for doing that, they want to keep phones that are free from this crapware as far away as possible; if they didn't, people would prefer phones that are without crapware, and this would impede the carrier's ability to sell contracts to include crapware.
- CountSessine 16y agoSignalling to whom? The telephone companies? They don't care - they don't want open. And they control the sales channel. Signalling to the telephone manufacturers? They're powerless - if they anger Verizon they'll lose all of their customers. Until that changes, Android, and wireless in general, will continue to be a lot less open than it should be.
- barredo 16y agoI really didn't understand the article. Can someone explain it?
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- azernik 16y agoWell, he was more directly annoyed by commenters then more or less claiming "Android is easily rooted; ergo Android's security is bad; ergo (by implication) you shouldn't use it" - a bit more there than pure semantics.
- brown9-2 16y agoAn engineer on the Android Security Team objects to people claiming they've "rooted the Nexus S" by installing a custom ROM on it when all they've done is taken advantage of a feature named "fastboot_oem_unlock" which allows you to install a custom ROM.
- jrockway 16y agoActually "fastboot oem unlock" is the command you type into your computer to unlock the phone. "unlock" is the feature name :)
- cwlq 16y agoEngadget Commenter: OMG! You easily installed a new OS on your unlocked Nexus S?? Android security suxorz! Android Dev: OMG! You easily installed a new OS on your Dell desktop?! Windows Security must suck!
- gcb 16y agogiven the lengths microsoft work with hardware manufacturers and computer assemblers such as Dell, being able to install anything and have the drivers working is indeed a breach of microsoft market security :)
- mmastrac 16y agoThis article nails it. Myself and the other folks who make up the Unrevoked team are basically searching for security exploits on the devices we support. We can't reveal these to the carriers, the phone manufacturers or the Android team because they'll be fixed in the next release and we'll invest the time to find another one.* Each additional exploit is marginally more difficult than the last to find. We'd much prefer to abandon our rooting efforts entirely and have the market flooded with phones that have the equivalent of "fastboot oem unlock", or have easy ways to flash custom ROMs like the Dell Streak (no signature required), the original Droid and some of Samsung's devices. The energy we spend working on root could be better applied in finding and fixing the security holes that exist on the Android platform. Until then we'll keep poking holes in the security of HTC devices (our focus) and make them work as hard as possible to figure out which holes we've exploited to keep the rooting window open as long as possible. We'll also keep recommending that people put their money on open devices like the Nexus One and the Nexus S. * The exception to this was the skyagent hole, where HTC and Sprint shipped a suid-root program that would give any program you installed full control of your device. We notified them of the problem, then shipped a root based on it shortly after: http://www.scribd.com/doc/34024714/Skyagent-Protocol-Description http://www.scribd.com/doc/34024714/Skyagent-Protocol-Descrip... http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.php/public/unrevoked1_disclosure http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.php/public/unrevoked1_dis...
- leif 16y agoIn a more perfect world, the general public would understand the important distinction between malicious "hackers" and you guys. Keep up the good work. What do you tell your laymen friends and family that you do? Do you call it hacking? Security analysis? Something else?
- zmmmmm 16y agoNice to see a clear statement from Google that they believe all manufacturers should ship a way to unlock their phones. It's largely symbolic since it is out of Google's hands but at least Google is making their view heard for what it is worth.
- brisance 16y agoWhat is Google's position on phones being rooted for the sole purpose of acquiring pirated apps? From where I'm sitting it seems Google is not doing anything to discourage this and is implicitly saying that the ad-driven revenue model is the way to go, natch.
- orangecat 16y agoProbably the same as my position on buying a wrench for the sole purpose of assaulting people with it.
- CountSessine 16y agoI wonder how many Home Depot customers go on to kill people with wrenches compared to how many iPhone & Android rooters/jailbreakers go on to pirate apps? And no, I'm not talking about the average HN'er - rather every Uncle Dick in my family who doesn't know sh*t about tech but is only too happy to tell me about all the 'free' apps he's downloaded now that he jailbreaked his crummy iPhone. Sorry - it's a question that's worth asking. If everyone was assaulting each other with wrenches, we'd declare martial law - the constitution isn't a suicide pact. If Android is the hottest smartphone OS in the US right now (and it is), why are the app attachment rates so low? As a console game developer whose friends have developed iOS and Android apps that have seen huge download and play numbers (as measured by leaderboard submissions) but have seen almost no purchases, I have zero interest in developing for either platform.
- orangecat 16y agoI'm a developer with a paid app in the Android Market. If my only choices were to accept rampant piracy or to prohibit users from having control over their own hardware, I'd take the first without hesitation. Of course that's a false dilemma; my app is earning several hundred dollars a month with zero marketing and zero copy protection. The vast majority of apps are not going to be Angry Birds-scale hits, and that's true with or without piracy.
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- elblanco 16y agoIt'd feel more open if they actively designed the OS to make it hard to lock down, thus requiring rooting.
- yuhong 16y agoWhy don't Google just make Android GPLv3?