Today we learned that the Motorola Backflip (AT&T’s first Android OS based phone) has a restriction built in preventing you from installing 3rd party apps on to it. Instead, users are forced now to install apps through the Android Market.
For some this might not be a problem, but for others, the reason for getting an Android based phone is to give you the flexibility to do what you want with the device in terms of installing apps sometimes not through the Android Market.
As well as blocking access to this feature we also mentioned last week that AT&T had removed Google [GOOG] as the primary search function on the phone replacing it with Yahoo! instead.
A user on XDA-Developers says…
“There is NO option to install applications from untrusted sources. This means anything on your SD card, downloaded from the web or over your wifi at home WILL NOT WORK. Naturally, you also cannot use the “su” command in terminal. Motoblur is nice I guess, but the uninstallable AT&T paid apps, the limitations of 1.5 firmware (ie: no google navigator, no voice search) and the locked-to-yahoo-search-bar are enough to get me to say NO to any further AT&T abuse.”
Via: Android and Me
wow, this sucks. no wonder motorola isnt popular
What people don’t realize is that, even though this is true, that you are not allowed to install from no market downloads. This is in fact exactly like the iPhone. Which you can not install anything unless it is from Apple’s iTunes. (This is speaking straight out of the box of course you can Jail Break it and continue to download from other parties.)
So why complain?