RDBinns

I've been wondering recently about 'naked' handsets. It's possible to buy 'naked' PCs, which come without an operating system pre-installed. This is cool because it means as a customer you should (in theory) be able to avoid paying that little bit extra for the Windows licensing. In the case of Android smartphones / tablets, that shouldn't be an issue - because manufacturers don't have to pay Google licensing fees. So you might think there would never be demand among Android users for naked smartphones.

However, as we've seen in recent patent disputes, manufacturers are now having to pay royalties to the likes of Microsoft and Oracle for each Android handset they sell. Perhaps one way that we as android users could get around this would be if manufacturers began selling popular handsets without Android pre-installed, thus avoiding the patent royalties. Then customers could install their favourite Android distro themselves. What do people think? Not being a technical expert, I'm not sure whether this would be feasible. Would it be hard to do? Would it require too much effort on the part of the manufacturers for too small a segment of customers?

jerofld

Unfortunately it isn't that easy. A kernel needs to be developed for each piece of hardware. It's not like PCs and their OSes where they have generic drivers that can utilize hardware and you can install more specific drivers later.

This is why when Google releases Ice Cream Sandwich that I, a S-OFF Evo 3D user, can't just download ICS to my SD card and flash it onto my phone. This is what the device manufacturers do. They take the operating system and make it compatible with their devices. I may have butchered the actual process, but I believe it's accurate enough to give a picture as to why this isn't done. Because if it could be done, it would have been done already.

RDBinns

Thanks for your response - I thought that might be the case. I guess I thought that if people can figure out how to run Android on a jailbroken iPhone, then it might be possible to install it on a blank phone that handset manufacturers had specifically designed for that purpose. Because doesn't that involve, as you say, taking the Android OS and making it compatible with another device? If a handset manufacturer worked with, say, the CyanogenMod community, couldn't they come up with a solution whereby none of the supposedly infringing bits of code are pre-installed on the phone, leaving it up to customers to install them themselves? Or, they could provide a phone which has a bare-bones OS which can then easily be switched over to Android?

Sorry to be annoying, I'm sure what you're saying is true - just wondering whether this would ever be possible!

takeshi

Depends on the patent. There are hardware patents. There are software patents.

Again, forum users tend to overestimate the percentage of the overall market that they represent. That might work for Android enthusiasts but not for the average consumers who definitely make up the majority of the market. The overall viability of Android can't rely on just the enthusiasts.

And, as mentioned above, Android isn't a hardware abstracted OS like Windows. Think about how ROM's are so closely tied to specific hardware.

Not feasible either. It's not as if just a specific part of the OS is patentable. Patents can apply anywhere.

Last edited by takeshi; August 26th, 2011 at 07:47 AM.