Looking at the title, I make a pretty big assumption. From the get go I’m basically calling out Motorola for whippin’ up a nice in-house fail whale of their own. But a fail whale to what? Android. The Motorola DROID was and still is the best Android device (hell, the best phone period) to come from Moto in a long, long time. So how are they failing?
The US variant of the Moto Sholes is the Verizon DROID. For the last several months, I’ve been monitoring AllDroid, the DROID forums in particular, as it has begun filling up with some truly amazing stuff that will make you say “Android 2.1 what?” The whole beauty of Android is it’s open nature that allows devs and 3rd parties to tweak the OS ’til their hearts content.
The Eurpean Sholes (Milestone) is a very different story. Quoting Steve Jobs: “It’s a bag of hurt”. You see, the US Moto Droid doesn’t check for signed packages (in this case, ROMs) which is why it’s so easy to play around with the DROID’s digital code book. The European Milestone does check for authentic signatures however. The biggest hurdle is the bootimage on the Milestone being not all that eager to 3rd parties tampering with it’s code.
In reality, the Milestone isn’t completely void of any after market baking. There’s some program and slight performance tweaks here and there. But taking a quick trip through the dev forums for both the DROID and Milestone show two very different stories. The DROID dev forums are full of no less than 5 different custom ROM’s currently being developed. The Milestone — zero.
Why the cold shoulder for European Motorola Sholes/Milestone users? Your guess is as good as mine. According to the Motorola copy/paste PR/CS response on an official Facebook topic featuring this very same problem seems to point to Motorola basically not caring about dev channels. I mean, when you get a reponse as cookie cutter as:
Hi, everyone!
Thanks for your feedback on customs ROMs – here is where we stand:
It is Motorola’s policy that customised ROMS are not supported on our products, as it may void the warranty on a consumer device or violate the copyright on the applications that we and or others have created. If you are a developer interested in manually updating the device with custom system images, please refer to the official Android developer guidelines at http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/device.html. If you’d like access to other tools and resources for Android development, or would like to apply to be a part of our MOTODEV App Accelerator Program, please visit http://developer.motorola.com.
We hope this addresses the questions and comments you’ve raised – post here if you have any additional feedback and we’ll do our best to respond to you all!
Thanks,
Motorola Europe
….you know you’re pretty much the least of their cares.
Pretty disappointing. Looking at the responses on that Facebook topic, while not too lengthy yet, has users sharing the same basic feelings — disgust and disappointment with numerous “my Milestone’s going on eBay” talk. I hope Motorola reverses course quick. Alienating the people that due the messy clean up work for you isn’t the smartest of ideas to choose from.
It just goes to show you — the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Sure they (European Milestone users) received multi-touch and pinch-to-zoom functionality out of the box, but they also got a digitally signed hot mess. Which would you choose? Me? I’m perfectly happy with my rooted DROID running the Milestone factory apps. You?
