I'm familiar with the needs of the user, carrier and developers and have written code for devices ranging from set top boxes through to some J2ME stuff for other phones, but my point here is the functionality blocks don't offer the user any real advantage, all it does is get in the way of developers offering users the customisations they want to have.
In the case of the emergency services dialling, this shouldn't be an outright block on apps dialling the number, the OS should limit the behaviour (e.g. The OS pops up a system dialogue asking the user for confirmation if the emergency service number is dialled). In the case of Marketplace, it should be the same thing. Marketplace shouldn't be able to have a different UI flow, it should be restricted to the same functionality sandbox as any other third party application manager. Users love customisation. There are companies that survive purely on selling ring tones and wallpapers to phone users. And most phone users don't want to get involved in technical issues, so they aren't going to install a James Bond dialler and say "OK, if I need emergency services I'll switch my dialler app", they're just going to say "The built in dialler lets me dial 911, this dialler must be shoddy if it doesn't". Similarly they aren't going to go "The SlideME app is doing the best it can with it's limited UI flow", they're going to say "Market place is far slicker than SlideME, so I'm going to stick with that?" Yes, there are security issues, Yes they need to be dealt with, but only allowing functionality to a select few approved applications is definitely not an "open platform" approach to it. Al. hackbod wrote: > On Oct 22, 11:14 am, tomgibara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Android requires three (extrinsic) things: users, carriers and >> developers. Any particular feature/restriction may be independently >> regarded as good or bad by the members of these three groups. >> >> Seeing particular security related restrictions only within the narrow >> context of what suits developers and some users, ignores the >> importance of carriers in cementing Android as a widely deployed >> mobile platform. >> > > Also it is very important to keep in mind that it ignores the > importance of -most- users as well. All through the design of > Android, we have had to ask over and over again how open we can make > things for developers while at the same time protecting users who > can't and shouldn't need to care much about how to keep their phone > secure. For example, this is the incentive behind requiring that the > user explicitly enable side-loading of applications before they can > download things directly from a web page. > > We have ideas for how to improve many of these things in the future, > but what is in 1.0 is what we had time to do and what we though were > the best overall choices for all involved. > > > > -- Al Sutton W: www.alsutton.com B: alsutton.wordpress.com T: twitter.com/alsutton --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
