[This post is part of a series on my initial Android impressions.]
Just to be clear, my Android criticism is because I want this shit fixed in the last promising mobile platform standing, not because I hate it. Platform specific comments are based on the default MT4GS Android 2.3.4 with Sense 3.0 ROM, rooted and largely de-bloated. And now for the hate.
Android’s developer community is poison. With Maemo and WebOS, the objective was making and sharing software you wanted to use. With Android, the idea seems to be to extract as much money as possible from suckers. More infuriating, on the other platforms, Free software was available for free as a matter of course. With Android, there are at least three assholes trying to charge $1-5 for dalvik-wrappered versions of every useful bit of F/OSS and other noncommercial licence code (ex. Look how many pay apps are based on the “anything but commercial use” licensed SNES9X codebase). I may not be concerned about casual piracy, but it pisses me off when money changes hands for other people’s work.
Finding a suitable sub-community hasn’t been terribly successful either; XDA-Developers is the best I’ve found, but is full of [l]users, and NookDevs, while promising, seems to be both nook specific and mostly defunct. Furthermore, the native code build system is so broken I’m having trouble DIYing binaries (as opposed to “apps”) more complicated than hello world on my own. Is there an intact community of people who just want to hack that I haven’t found?
