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I think that the point is that you want open for the user but closed for the mobile providers.

Apple is closer than Android for sure, but it's also off-limits from the providers (well, mostly: they can still veto some apps). Android is open, but since before reaching the user it goes through the providers, the users get a much closed system.

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This strikes me as a pretty contradictory position: why users but not mobile providers? The Apache license doesn't make that distinction, and as such, I fail to see why Google should.

They don't need to write it like that in the licence for it to be so in practice. A big help for example would have been to say that nobody can remove any rights that he has himself experience. So if it started open, it has to stay open. Mobile providers can modify it all they want but they can't actually control it then.

Sure, you can get root privileges and do it anyway, but they've tried to make it very hard and they'll probably continue. For geeks maybe that's not a problem, for the average person it is.

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