Beginners Guide For Rooting Your Android G1 To Install Cupcake

androidandme.com

6 points·habs··5 comments

The new release has a camcorder application, which is awesome.

I thought the idea of the Android phone platform was that it was supposed to be open and hackable?

If you need to root/jailbreak it anyhow, what makes it better than an iPhone?

The phone platform is open and hackable. But specific phones are only as hackable as the carrier allows; in this case T-Mobile does not allow you to modify the G1's system software. You can get a developer phone from Google that does not have this restriction.

And, unlike the iPhone, on an Android phone you can install any app that runs within the phone's sandbox -- you are not limited to the apps available through the Android Market.

Thanks for the reply and the explanation.

As far as I can see, that makes the Android about as open as Windows Mobile (with the exception of building it) and really nothing to get overly excited about.

But really, I'm the kind of guy who runs stock, distro-supplied, Linux kernels and don't mind hacking around in user-space only.

Android is certainly more open than Windows Mobile. Do you have have access to source code for Windows? Is Windows source code licensed under a copyleft license, allowing anyone the freedom to modify and redistribute Windows as they please?

In this case, really the only thing "preventing" Android from being truly open and free/libre is the mobile carriers and their handset manufacturers. It's just a matter of an open operating system being distributed on closed devices, a la TiVo. The fact that I can build and install Android on my Openmoko FreeRunner, but not on my T-Mobile G1, proves that fact.

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