Why open source could kill Androids chances [Video]

In very Orwellian logic, a couple readers have told me that the lack of gesture support in the Android OS’s UI and stock apps was a good thing, because it would let the open source community innovate in individual apps for the Google mobile platform. By leaving such basic functionality as gestures nonstandardized, they argued, the platform would be fertile ground for the open source community to develop untold wonders that would render the controlled platforms such as the iPhone as dinosaurs.

This is precisely why I fear for Android’s future. The open source community is much more likely, based on its history, to screw around with umpteen hundred variations that are piled willy-nilly on top of umpteen OS variants, creating a mess that only a few nerds will want to play with.  In other words, we’ll end up with a replay of desktop Linux, which in 10 years is still a mess …