Open Source or just Google Big Brother?

[porquepine]

Ok, so here is what is in the fine print for the Terms of Service:

 

[dballz]

I think the big brother feature is to not allow programs and apps that would do harm to the phone or the OS

 

[eli]

This has nothing to do with "open source." You can still develop whatever you want, but Google isn't going to keep applications in the official store if, for example, they try to dial 1-900 numbers or steal your email password. This is entirely reasonable.

The big difference between the Apple store's kill switch and Google's is that if you have an iPhone you can *only* gets apps from the official store (without voiding your warranty). Google is considerably more open in this regard.

 

[Cryptic79]

I'm just fine with it. They don't want to have security breaches on their OS. Makes sense to me.

In addition, they will attempt to recover funds. See the article about the "kill switch" on phandroid.com.

 

[ram100987]

I don't see anything wrong with this. They are just keeping you safe from threatening apps. With an open source app market, someone could easily create an app to screw up your phone or steal personal info. If google finds apps like this they will remove them and do their best to recover any money you paid dor it. They are not doing this for proprietary control like apple

 

[sleebus.jones]

What gives here?!

"what gives" is that you are freaking out over standard boilerplate verbiage. Personally, I'm damn glad to see they have a way of terminating malicious apps. Google et al know that if they want their platform to succeed, they can't go shooting themselves in the foot and nuking apps willy nilly. The market (i.e. the users) won't put up with that, and will leave the platform in droves.

Relax, take off the tinfoil hat and breathe easy, man. It'll be fine.

 

[porquepine]

"what gives" is that you are freaking out over standard boilerplate verbiage. Personally, I'm damn glad to see they have a way of terminating malicious apps. Google et al know that if they want their platform to succeed, they can't go shooting themselves in the foot and nuking apps willy nilly. The market (i.e. the users) won't put up with that, and will leave the platform in droves.

Relax, take off the tinfoil hat and breathe easy, man. It'll be fine.

Ok I will admit, I am a bit relieved and now that I fully understand what the fine print means, I do not mind Google having this feature, now that I understand it's true purpose. I have been wondering how Google was going to protect their phones.

 

[Rob]

Yeah... Google may not be able to foresee what ridiculous problem arises but suppose some malicious app starts crawling phone to phone to phone and stealing all your personal information?

THEN withOUT this in the terms of service google would say, "sorry we can't do anything about it... its against the law and we didn't have it in our terms of service."

I'd rather have this line in there. It makes me more comfortable and feel "safe" as long as they don't use it for the wrong purposes.