[elithrar]

> Not sure if that's the case. The company makes the most money from online ads, so is it better to foster long-term technology growth or to convince more people to use Android?

Getting more Android devices into the hands of users now is important to Google: it increases developer appeal (growing the platform), which draws even more users (increasing advertising revenue). Having competitive, consumer-orientated features like this—that stack up against Apple (and Amazon)—are far more important to these goals than things like whether a device is rootable, themeable and/or side-loadable.

[chopsueyar]

Consumers will become very discouraged quickly when they try to add a skin, or theme, or any customization, and all of a sudden certain applications will no longer work.

I feel this is akin to having a Windows PC that would disable Netflix streaming if you wanted to dual-boot your PC.

Android devices are the current generation of the previous Windows-era ecosystem. A bunch of clone hardware running slightly tweaked OEM versions of an OS.

The biggest difference, which consumers will really start to have issues with, is tying a software OS update to a hardware revision (If Dell prevented you from upgrading a Windows 98 machine to a Windows 2000 machine, not because of hardware limitations, but simply to generate more device sales).

[daeken]

> I feel this is akin to having a Windows PC that would disable Netflix streaming if you wanted to dual-boot your PC.

It's more akin to having a Windows PC that would disable Windows Media DRM files if you had unsigned drivers loaded into the kernel. Which it does. This isn't without precedent, by any means.