… is that every carrier will customize it slightly differently.
Not only does this lead to potential differences in app compatibility, it also (and worse!) can lead to horrible security as companies who have no clue how to create and ship a secure mobile OS start tinkering with things they don’t know anything about.
As you might know, I’ve been poking around in the guts of the HTC EVO with some other developers during the last few weeks of early EVO ownership looking to get access to root. It turned out to be fairly easy – a few hours into the investigation and we had access to root.
It turns out that this is a really, really bad thing for users. The Sprint customizations of Android are so bad that an Android application could get access to all of your data with very little work. It’s so bad that I would not recommend purchasing the Sprint EVO or Hero.
This is not good news for the Android world …
via HTC EVO 4G: Nice Hardware, Horrible Sprint Software « grack.com: Matt Mastracci’s blog.