If the rumors are true, Friday will see the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon – the long-awaited LTE-capable Google reference phone, running Ice Cream Sandwich on the most potent hardware ever.
Sort of.
See, Verizon has asked Google not to include Google Checkout on their Verizon-edition Galaxy Nexus, and Google is complying. The jury seems to be out on how big an obstacle this is technically -and honestly, it should be pretty easy to circumvent – but the fact that it’s happening at all is the clincher: Android is no longer “open” in a way that is meaningful for the end-user.
The Nexus line is suppose to be the reference phone, the pure unadulterated Android experience. No carrier interference, no custom UI overlay, no un-removable apps, no screwing around with the prospects for upgrades. If you get a Nexus, you get raw Android uninhibited by whatever provider you roll with.
Except that doesn’t work for Verizon, or any CDMA carrier for that matter. With AT&T and T-Mobile (and smaller GSM providers, if any are left), you can always pull out an unlocked phone and pop your SIM in there, and boom, off to the races. You may be limited depending on who the carrier is – if you’re on AT&T, you won’t be getting 3G service on the 1700 Mhz band on the Nexus S, for instance – but if you bought the phone, you can fire it up. Not so with CDMA, where you have to call the carrier, provide the ESN and other codes, and hope they’ll allow it to be activated on their network.
Apple was able to work around this, because they could point to the success of the existing iPhone – with no carrier customization at all, with updates and software controlled by Apple rather than by AT&T – and tell Verizon, “Our way or the highway, and the highway is closed.” Verizon got their custom apps – downloadable from the iTunes App Store if you wanted them, eminently delete-able if you decided they suck, and nowhere to be found when first taking the phone out of the box. Every Verizon iPhone was able to update to iOS 5 on the day it shipped. With the possible exception of folks just now buying the iPhone 3GS, nobody who buys an iPhone from a carrier has to wonder “will I be able to update this phone’s software in twelve months?”
Apple cut the carriers out of the loop. The signature achievement of the “openness” of Android is to put the carrier back in control, and the fact that Verizon can dictate app placement on Google’s flagship device for 2012 is the final nail in the coffin.
The stink around “carrierIQ” is of a piece with this – carrierIQ being a Mountain View-based company who implements software at the most basic level of the phone for gathering metrics on usage. Officially. In practice, the carrierIQ layer is capable of everything up to and including keystroke monitoring, depending on how it’s implemented. Its most basic form was used for the iPhone until recently. It appears on almost every Sprint phone. And all the hardware manufacturers are racing to point fingers and say “this is something the carrier installed, we have no idea what it is or how it got there, we swear!”
Nothing has changed. Thanks to consolidation of carriers and the lack of a single standard, we now have a situation where there are four national carriers split between two incompatible technologies, and each technology has one carrier with two frequency bands and a carrier with only the one. And only the interference of the FCC prevented GSM from all being consolidated as AT&T, eliminating the last option to move between two national carriers at will. This might be affected when LTE is more widely deployed – but when the number of national carriers was a lawsuit away from being halved in the last six years, relying on a technological fix is a fool’s errand.
The carriers are running a tar pit. Now, more than ever, you as a mobile technology user are at the mercy of what the cellular company is willing to allow, and your ability to move between them is more constrained than ever. The result is essentially a monopoly effect – lock-in effect, increased costs, and less consumer choice. How else did we get to a point where text messages went to 20 cents each – that is, until everyone locked in on unlimited text only for $20? As late as 2005, incoming texts on AT&T wireless were free. Now free incoming text is something wacky you only get in Europe. Hell, if you don’t like your iPhone plan in England, you can go from Vodaphone to T-Mobile to 3 to Orange to O2 to God only knows who else in the MVNO field. If you don’t like your service in the US, well, the unlocked iPhone only works with GSM – Verizon and Sprint won’t activate it, and T-Mobile can’t use the 3G bands, so you may as well just suck it up and go with a carrier-locked model.
Welcome to the tar pit. it’s only getting deeper.