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Comment by MattBearman | Hacker News Reader

In the thread he says he's got a Nexus One. Unless I'm mistaken, Google Nexus phones come with a raw version of Android installed, with none of the bloatware that the manufacturers of carriers like to bake in.

This means that Android itself is not allowing him to remove Facebook (or Twitter), and I'm inclined to agree that it goes against the 'open' label that Google like to put on android.

Having said that, I completely agree that if you want a truly open phone, you can't expect a warranty as well, that would be having your cake and eating it.

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Having said that, I completely agree that if you want a truly open phone, you can't expect a warranty as well, that would be having your cake and eating it.

Why not? I can order a server from Dell/HP/Lenovo with or without an OS and it's fully warrantied. The TSR won't say, "you installed OpenBSD and now one of your RAM chips is defective? Tough luck!"

Exactly what is in the software that a wipe and restore won't be able to rule out a software problem?

The OP states further down that the issue they have is with the carrier:

"I have to agree that my carrier is more to blame than Google or Android. After all, the facebook app isn't in the android source tree. It was introduced and locked in by my carrier.

My grippe is more about Android being touted left and right as a the first Open mobile platform while when it reaches the end user it's been locked by the carrier.

But indeed, my diatribe should have been more targeted to my carrier."

Fair enough, didn't realise you could get Nexus phones from a carrier, I though Google only sold them direct.

I'm pretty sure the OP is wrong, Nexus One is built to Google's spec and if the carrier added an undeleteable Facebook app it is because Google gave it the go-ahead.

If not, what is the point of buying the Nexus phones? It's Google's flagship stock Android, isn't it?

Right, but this is just a symptom of how the platform was designed. If you want "Facebook" and "Twitter" to come with the phone, it has to go in /system/app... and by virtue of again, Android's design, APKs are not removable from /system/app. If they were removable, bad things would be able to happen with low ability to recover without requiring a user download a 100MB file, name it specially and reboot their phone holding certain buttons down.

I have no problem with addressing this as a design flaw, but it seems beyond unreasonable to use this as a way to attack Android's openness.

The point remains, he can fork CM's repo right now, make /system/app user read/write-able and go on his marry way deleating whatever he likes.

It's like attacking Ubuntu as being not open, because Gnome-screensaver doesn't let you tweak the screensaver settings (it was among the other dozen features simply removed in the last 3+ years)

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