Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

How A Bad Idea Becomes the Only Idea

There is, in this middle of this spittle-flecked and mostly incoherent anti-Android screed, a deeply troubling complaint about the Android market:

Seriously Google, you take no responsibility for the actual “experience” of this phone, yet you tout it as your tag line. Applications in Android Market don’t work for all devices. They have to be updated, they might not work with a new resolution, or all touch screen display — try using one of those NES/SNES emulators on the Nexus One — the comments and “reviews” on apps are worse than Sidekick user’s AIM screen names, there’s no authority and no accountability in Market … Why does the VNC application I bought and paid for crash on the Nexus One with a Java.IO error? Because your entire OS is fragmented, poorly driven, poorly policed, and because in typical Google fashion, you’re already on to the next thing before making this an absolutely flawless experience for users.

Implicit in all of this is the notion that the absence of an “authority” watching over the Market — something equivalent to the reviewers who police the iPhone App Store — is (1) a fundamental flaw, and (2) responsible for the shoddy quality of some of its applications. To put it another way: the responsibility for the bad apps lies with the Google for not aggressively rejecting everything that doesn’t meet some arbitrary set of standards, and not with the application developers themselves.

Which is to say: the author has internalized, wholesale, the single-gatekeeper paradigm of software distribution that Apple is attempting to foist on the industry.

It grieves me to have to point this out, because it should be obvious: but this is a new development. Software has always — always — existed in a vibrant, chaotic, rough-and-tumble free market, in which the only bar to its success is the quality of the product, the marketing behind it, the dedication of its authors — and, usually, lots and lots of luck. Yes, this allows a lot of poor-quality — and, occasionally, dangerous — crap to make its way onto your platform. Yes, the decentralized nature of software distribution is infinitely less convenient than what an App Store has to offer. Yes, it’s more or less impossible to enforce basic uniformity in look and feel, or to force developers to stay away from private APIs. And so on.

But look: any time you have a single entity controlling what software is distributed on a platform, you have problems. And we’ve seen all those problems, over and over again, with the App Store: software rejected for no good reason, bug fixes stifled, products perceived to conflict with a business plan banned. None of this is bad for Apple, of course, with takes a 30% cut of every sale and gets to indulge its fanatical need for control. But it’s bad for developers, and it’s bad, ultimately, for consumers.

Again — all of this is so obvious that I feel silly pointing it out. But I think there’s a real danger that Apple, having produced a genuine revolution in mobile phones/mobile computing with the iPhone, will succeed in changing the terms of the conversation: so that the notion of a dictatorial, single-source software gatekeeper becomes the norm, and everything else a dangerous aberration.

While I agree with the idea that openness is good, as the new owner of the Droid, I have to say, the experience is much better with the Apple Appstore. Not only is the experience better, but the fact that I dont have to worry if something published may be “Spam” or “Malware” is infinitely more comforting.

If Google made Market such that the Apps were reviewed & certified by “Someone”, it would be good, not to mention, be better for consumers. I’m not saying openness is bad, I’m just saying, the current model will lead to unintended consequences, such as people abandoning the market.

Yeah, don’t disagree. A certification process is a good idea, as long as it’s voluntary. A centralized market is a good idea, as long as it isn’t exclusive.

The problem is that people often frame the issue as if it’s binary — wild-west everything-goes, or total lockdown — when really there’s lots of middle ground.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/android-malware-fears/

Malware in the Android Market! Really do need to get some kind of “Certification” process.

The problem you describe in the Android Market sounds like what Clay Shirky calls filter failure. He suggests that the traditional problem of “information overload” can be more productively analyzed as the sudden failure of filters we didn’t realize were operating.

http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460/

Apple’s approach has been to reestablish the old-world model of producer-publisher-editor all wrapped up in one entity that owns/invests the capital. For now at least, that model is out-competing other approaches to filtering.

As always, Shirky is smart and articulate.