if google gives privileged access to android to motorola (earlier access to os builds for testing, for example), that's just going to motivate samsung, htc, sony etc to differentiate further, as they will have a disadvantage in time to market
Nobody is advocating that Motorola get early access, just that they don't waste time building custom UIs on top of stock Android.
If Google ships the OS code to all partners (including Motorola) at the same time and Motorola just worries about getting the OS running on their hardware while everyone else worries about that plus porting their own custom UI toolkits over, that's a win for Motorola, but not because they got the code any sooner.
The win is due to the other partners wasting time competing on something that most users don't care about or if they do, actually prefer stock Android, at least IME and at least since 2.2. Earlier versions of Android than 2.2 actually had some UI warts worth fixing but now the custom UIs are generally inferior to stock and exist pretty much solely due to inertia against abandoning them and company politics, IMO.
If the hardware manufacturers really want to differentiate themselves they should do so via hardware, form-factors, novel input methods (like the Galaxy Note) and add-ons (like Playstation compatibility in Sony's case), not by messing with the core UI.
georgemcbay|14 years ago
If Google ships the OS code to all partners (including Motorola) at the same time and Motorola just worries about getting the OS running on their hardware while everyone else worries about that plus porting their own custom UI toolkits over, that's a win for Motorola, but not because they got the code any sooner.
The win is due to the other partners wasting time competing on something that most users don't care about or if they do, actually prefer stock Android, at least IME and at least since 2.2. Earlier versions of Android than 2.2 actually had some UI warts worth fixing but now the custom UIs are generally inferior to stock and exist pretty much solely due to inertia against abandoning them and company politics, IMO.
If the hardware manufacturers really want to differentiate themselves they should do so via hardware, form-factors, novel input methods (like the Galaxy Note) and add-ons (like Playstation compatibility in Sony's case), not by messing with the core UI.