Legal challenges and royalties aside, Google’s official stance on Android has long been that it’s open and free. And yes, by some definitions of the words “open” and “free,” that’s true. Anyone — any individual or company — can simply point their browser to the Android Open Source Project, download the source code, and use it however they please. They’re very upfront about it: “Here you can find the information and source code you need to build an Android-compatible device,” AOSP’s home page reads.
The practice of successfully building and selling an “Android-compatible device” is much different than the theory, however. First off, there’s the fact that Honeycomb has never been open-sourced. Android’s public repositories cap off with Gingerbread, which puts independent tablet makers in a bind. Secondly, as I alluded to before, royalties on Android devices are essentially taking the place of licensing fees at this point — you can’t actually use Android for “free” on a commercial device without attracting attention from Microsoft’s lawyers.
But third — and this is key — Android is significantly devalued as a consumer platform if you don’t have Google’s blessing to ship your product. You lose the suite of Google services that users are automatically expecting when they take your device out of the box, including Gmail, Maps and the official Android Market. It’s been said a thousand times before that a vibrant, easily-accessible ecosystem of third-party apps is central to a successful mobile product — and if you lose the Market, you lose that ecosystem. Independently-launched devices (particularly tablets) have tried to make up the difference with their own aftermarket app stores, but when “success” is measured in hundreds of thousands of available titles, there’s simply no substitute for the real thing.
Source: thisismynext
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