Simon Walker, developer program head at Sony Ericsson, has made an interesting series of tweets suggesting the manufacturer may be about to change its stance on rooting and custom ROM development. Just as Motorola is looking at compromises on the issue of locked bootloaders, Sony Ericsson's developer boss says he's "actually in favor" of rooting "if we do it right."
One possible example of this might be the introduction of Xoom/Nexus S-style unlockable/relockable bootloaders, though Walker didn't mention any specifics, instead saying he needs to take the discussion inside Sony Ericsson before anything is decided. Still, it's promising that someone at a senior position at SE has come out in support of rooting. Hopefully he'll be able to convince his colleagues to see the light. [@simon_a_walker]
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Sony Ericsson head developer 'in favor of rooting if we do it right'
Lol "anyhow I here u", good job!
There should be an open discussion on this. It looks like they (device manufacturers) are at least willing to look at what the community has to say. Which is better than this time last year.
Looks like device manufacturers are finally noticing that the dev/hacking/enthusiast community is what drives excitement for their device and for the android platform. Now if only the carriers would realize this same thing
Like At&t who doesn't even allow sideloading apps... ridiculous.
Hopefully the "Openness" side of this debate can win over the manufacturers.I know the carriers have their own agendas and concerns like bloatware and returns. I see the Atrix allows you to delete most of AT&T's pre-loaded apps.Hopefully that's a good sign. As for returns, how about adding a Droid Restore Disc included with each device like they do(or at least used to) with PCs?
I'm in favor of spelling "hear" correctly.
Hear here, hearhe. :)
A person buys an android device if they want the option to customize the device software or if they just like that said device. If they don't want any options to customize they buy an iPhone. What is so hard to understand about that. Verizion and Motorola etc need to stop with God complex and just give the consumer what they paid for.
What is so hard to understand about that.
The part that is hard to understand about that is it is basically YOUR world view, and not at all based in reality.
Android is outselling iPhone. The point in time where you could come here and claim that android is for hackers is long past. Its gone mainstream while you weren't paying attention. Mom and Pop are using Android. Grade school kids are using Android.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of android users have never bothered to root their phone, run stock roms, install apps only from the market, and are STILL glad to be out of the clutches of Apple.
Yes, I agree that carriers have to stop blocking root access, but again, this is only something that a tiny fraction of Android users care about.
Walk into any Sprint store and, if they are honest, the techs and sales reps will admit that at least one of them has a rooted phone. I come from the Palm Pre and the HomeBrew community is embraced. HP recently donated a ProLiant DL385 server to WebOS Internals, who is at the center of that homebrew community.
I haven't rooted my EVO yet but I will in the near future. Seriously, what good is a gadget if you can't play with it! LOL
Walk into any Sprint store and, if they are honest, the techs and sales reps will admit that at least one of them has a rooted phone.
Same is true at just about any phone store. Fact of the matter is that geeky types are drawn to that job, and they know there are 6 different ways they can get the phone replaced for zero dollars if something goes wrong.
Its hardly representative of the general user population.
Walk into any phone store and, if they are honest, (your phrase), they will tell you that the vast majority of warranty exchanges are due to bricked phones by wanna-be rooters without enough skills.
If THEY (handset manufacturers) would do it right then WE could do it right.
If radio drivers (as well as other drivers) and a recovery image (back to stock) was stored on a safe place on the device, you could ALWAYS be assured of being able to revert the phone via some magical button sequence.
That way you could load any rom you wanted, root your device at will and still have a fool proof way to revert when things went bad without having to remember to save your original rom, or brick your phone. It would be the equivalent of the Factory Restore CD shipped with your computer.
Fraudulent Warranty claims would be greatly reduced.
Nook (original) does this. Six reboots in a row sends it back to a hidden stock install from a read-only partition, regardless of how much you've hacked it or upgraded it.
As it stands, the protections manufacturers have put in are the cause of more problems than they solve.