On Wednesday, May 25, 2011 6:14:55 PM UTC-4, Dianne Hackborn wrote: I'm still wondering what these "limiting decisions" are.
I find that surprising, considering the amount of time you spend explaining to people that the things they want to do are not possible, some because they are not yet supported and others because your team intentionally chose to preclude any means for a user to authorize an application to do that. Frankly I would agree some of the things people want to do are really bad ideas; but others a quite good ideas - the point is that this is a subjective decision. Your team made its choices, but a lot of people disagree with you about what should or shouldn't be allowed or supported, and Android has not in the past been readily suitable for doing things outside of it's architects' vision. Fortunately, the theoretical possibility of producing one's own build is increasingly becoming a well-organized reality of alternative distributions - changing "one little thing" no longer means going it alone. Projects that weren't worth doing when there was no base of devices capable of using them become worth doing when the installed base of alternative builds grows. The only thing I have heard is limits on what applications are allowed to > do, but that actually gives us more flexibility in maintaining Android -- it > is far easier to remove such limits on apps than it is to introduce new > limits that you find you need to improve security, stability, etc. > I think we are coming out of the most limiting period as official builds are enhanced and alternative builds gain a following on a wide variety of devices, but a lot of things that we expected would be possible with a "pocket linux box" have historically not been possible with android devices, for reasons ranging from the java-apis-first decision to the inability of a user to alter the security model. It probably is worth looking at that subject of security for a minute. By not giving the user any real ability to customize or exert fine grained control, a given user cannot make their device less secure than the default, but neither can they make it any more secure than a default they may find quite inadequate. In an official build, I cannot for example decide that it's okay for an application to know if I am on the phone, but not okay for it to be able to discover my phone number. -- 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
