The trouble with Android

Or as I’ve started calling it, Spamdroid. Too little sense of open source culture among Android devs. The overall tone one senses at Google Play is reminiscent of the DOS shareware community circa 1990. There is every imaginable combination of beggarware, crippleware [sic], adware, demowarez, etc., but added to all this, data mining, behavioral profiling, black hat SEO and all the newer black arts. One gets the impression that people are grasping at every imaginable straw in pursuit of “monetization.” Part of it is the Google cut on sales of paid app revenues, part is the opening of the dev market to emerging markets where people are unlikely to have the luxury of not “being in it for the money,” but mostly it is network operators absolutely insistent on assigning their retail customers a passive role in the network.