It's a difficult question.

Can you side-load on an iPhone? Yes, you can. There are three ways:

(1) Jailbreak the device; some people are willing to do this. The preeminent reason is to work around carrier limitations on tethering/hotspotting to get around the fact that the carrier has unlimited data on some phone plans, but either does not permit, or has capped charges for, tethering/hotspotting through the phone, or through mobile hotspots. Other than a few applications to work around Apple/carrier agreements, or add functionality Apple doesn't/won't approve, this is not so big these days.

(2) Enroll the device as a developer device using a developer certificate. This allows you a limited number of devices, however, and isn't useful for wide scale distribution. It's a dead end.

(3) Enroll the device as an enterprise device. There are already Chinese "app stores" which do this; you enroll voluntarily, or the phone comes already enrolled when you purchase it from the vendor, and they install an enterprise cert, signed by Apple, which allows them to run their own distribution system. Typically, they pirate U.S. Apps, rewrap them, resign them, and then sell them on the cheap, giving no money back to the authors. In addition, there's often malware included with the applications sold this way. Apple hates it, and I have no doubt, there's active work on enterprise support to prevent this, going forward.

So side-loading isn't the biggest issue, since if there's a will, there's a way, and Android would also end up with methods similar to these thre to increase the difficult of, but not eliminate, side-loading.

The flip side of this is that, unless they do something, the pure *volume* of malware for Android will almost certainly kill their viability as an app platform eventually, even if it's not going to happen today or tomorrow.

The biggest problem with Android, with regard to apps, is that there are are too many targets.

Apple is in the process of screwing themselves over this way, for short term monetary gains that will likely not have long term value for them. At a minimum, a developer has to target 7 iOS platforms at this point in time - even if that ends up being wrapped up in a single distribution package, so it looks like a single thing in the App store. In addition, video content is split between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Apple eats the transcoding costs and the duplicate CDN costs for these, but the decision to change the device means twice as much content has to be carried around.

But 7 is manageable, if you are targeting the same OS version, or an earlier but forward compatible OS version for all devices.

The Android ecosystem is the wild west, in comparison. And automatic updating of Android versions on older devices won't gloss over hardware differences in input methods, sensors, and so on.

So...

(1) Yes, there's room. If Samsung wanted to own this, they probably could, just by standardizing minimal feature set on their entire product line, and then forcing version updates on the carrier, or making sufficiently compelling new devices that the carrier doesn't think the version updates will impact their 18 month subscriber contractual lock-in model for doing business.

(2) The side-loading thing is not that big an issue. The Android App market isn't that big these days, and it's balkanized enough through device specifications and other capabilities that, everything else being equal, it's possible to create an 800lb Gorilla in the App store space, and have it stick. If Samsung wanted to do this themselves, they surely could do that too.

The problem with Samsung doing this, however, is that their laptop, tablet, and mobile phone divisions are -- in fact -- separate but affiliated companies, all with their own engineering teams, design teams, supplier contracts, and so on. So Samsung would have to change *themselves* to do this.

OK... the Amazon problem...

It's not a problem. Although they've certainly go a more or less portal-play going with their application and content for their Android devices -- all they had to do was default it to pointing at their servers, and most people don't change defaults, as we've seen by the search engine lawsuits against device vendors and against Chrome.

I think that this could be handled by having a master store signing signing certificate, and Google - or come consortium, including Samsung -- controlling the signing certificate. That may end up with, say, 5 "trusted stores", and the members of the consortium would all agree on some minimal feature set on the devices so developers could target a single base model, and they could agree to lockstep their version updates, etc., etc..

Or Google could do it for them, and swallow the bitter medicine on their behalf. Part of that would be the fact that the Google Android App store takes a 30% transaction fee, and they'd have to let the vendors whose certs were signed for them by Google, take all or most of that percentage. And that would lead to competition, which would have to happen in the consortium, for fees. Which could lead to RICO violations, unless they legally structured their price fixing agreement to be an emergent property, rather than an explicit agreement (i.e. it's a "natural" saddle point for the rules under which anyone can agree to operate, rather than an explicit agreement to price fix).

To get back to the original question now...

If all that were done -- and it'd cost Google considerably to do it -- then no, there's not a room for a third party.

If, on the other hand, the question really was...

"Does Microsoft have any hope in hell of breaking into this market at any point in the next 3-5 years, or are they going to be stuck at a 5% market share for Windows Phones?"

Microsoft could break into the market. And they could wield the App Store model that Apple currently wields, rather effectively.

But, as they do not build their own hardware, as Apple does, they'd need to do something similar to what I've described above. And for them, it'd be even more galling. But probably not as galling as it would end up being if either they or Google attaced the problem full wold (long term) be fore the carriers. 8-)

You mean change these things?

Carrier business model:

(1) Contractually obligate you for 2 years
(2) Entice you with "upgraded phone" every 18 months
(3) Prevent them upgrading their own phone and escaping carrier lock-in after 2 years
(4) Benefit from customer lock in
(5) Goto 2

Cell phone vendor business model:

(1) Bring a new phone to market
(2) Contract with a carrier/seller who considers it enough of an upgrade to entice an early re-up on a customer contract
(3) Start work on the next phone to sell more hardware
(4) Goto 1

Phone OS vendor business model:

(1) Continuously work on the OS
(2) Convince cell phone vendor to use OS
(3) Cell phone vendor takes snapshot of tree
(3)(a) Cell phone vendor productizes snapshot, because OS vendor could not produce a finished product to save their mother
(4) Goto 1

Admittedly, Google would *like* to change things, but at this point, it's really kind of too late; they should have started with lock-in to their own App store.

Apple doesn't have this problem because the next iPhone only has to compete with the previous iPhone, and Apple *actually* tends to improve the iPhone hardware in a less-than 18 month cycle (which keeps the carriers happy), and it doesn't have to fight with all the other cell phone vendors for mind share because, hey, where else are you going to run all those apps/listen to all that music/watch all those movies, that you've already paid for.

Apple has App-based lock-in, and 18 month upgrade cycle carrier satisfaction, and they sell both the hardware and the software, so there's no hardware company to push-back on software updates, and there's no PITA continuous development cycle that prevents software updates from being polished products to push back the other direction.

Google could *probably*, *eventually* fix things, if they were willing to swallow some incredibly bitter pills, and if they were to do profit-sharing of App revenue with the hardware vendors so that the hardware vendors for Android device were willing to be commoditized, but ... it would be an incredibly bitter pill, to have to change their development model away from waterfall, and it would be an incredibly bitter pill to lock down Apps and side-loading.

When Google originally offered the code, they offered to host it on Google's hosted infrastructure service for a year, at no charge, until the project got up on its feet. There were no takers.

This will probably be moderated down as well... however, yes, "providing the service" is *exactly* the problem, and it's *exactly* why Google cancelled the thing when the back end hosting infrastructure APIs changed out from under the (unmaintained) Reader codebase. The maintainers had moved onto other projects.

And while Google could have either brought them back (the ones who wanted to revisit their old code), or they could have put new hires on the porting problem, and gotten Reader back on its feet on the new hosting infrastructure, it wouldn't have solved the basic problem.

The basic problem is that there was no sustainable revenue model for the service. Google's Reader service allowed the use of any client that someone cared to write, and a heck of a lot of people wanted to write clients that excluded advertising as a means of supporting the costs of running the service. Which would be fine, if there were any way to charge for it, *other* than advertising, which didn't break the client/back-end-service model, which is what people *liked most* about Reader in the first place.

So Google didn't throw good money after bad, and no one else stepped up to throw good money after bad, and (possibly) figure out some other way to monetize the service, such as changing the over the wire representation such that advertising was indistinguishable from content. Which wouldn't have worked, since that would just trigger an arms race for clever advertising exclusionary filtering in the display services, instead of at the protocol level.

So you're right: "it is a problem of providing the service", and the specific problem is "no one wanted to pay to do that".

Perhaps this is fixable...

Could you maybe write:

"'Articles': What It Takes To Write an Article Not Light On Details"

?

Those aren't "new devices", those are "old devices, still being manufactured by vendors who are unable to come up with new devices in a timely fashion", or they are "old devices that used to live in a warehouse, and which are now being sold at a discount, because no one would buy them otherwise".

Too bad you didn't step up to the plate and become the maintainer, when Google offered to give the source code away to anyone who wanted to run their own "Google Reader" service.

I guess you maybe couldn't figure out a revenue model for the damn thing, either?

You have the Part 15 and ISM services for that. You really can buy a microwave link that's metropolitan-distance and legal to use.

We lost much of our 440 capability to PAVE PAWS in California. Remember, Amateur Radio is not the primary service on many bands. The military is on 440.

If you want that nearly infinite microwave spectrum, you have the Part 15 and ISM services. Absolutely nothing is stopping you. Power is not the issue with those frequencies, it's line of sight and Fresnel zones.

No, I absolutely do not have to prefix my words with anything. You do that by posting as an anonymous coward. I use my real name to indicate that I stand behind my words.

Yes. The usual mechanism here would be WiFi security, with HTTPS or SSL inside of it.

If you see any bill with "freedom", "family", "patriot" or "protection" on it, your first inclination should be to think that there's something evil hidden in the bill. And more often than not you'd be right.

How to totally screw up my ability to code:

(1) Play music
(2) There is no step 2

I find that code is processed through the same part of my brain that processes music. If you play music, my code will go to crap, since I'm trying to do two things with the same set of neurons.

I totally can not understand how people can produce code while listening to music.

OK, I lied; what I can't understand is how people can produce GOOD code while listening to music.

Apple has been talking about this for a long time.

You really don't want your security people to be contract workers; they have access, at least at the supervisory level, to all sorts of sensitive areas of your building, including Jony Ive's office in the design wing, where they could happily use their phones to photograph prototypes.

Google began talking about doing this about three years ago, when they switched to the same contract security firm Apple used, and the Apple/Google relationship started to become more and more adversarial on top of that (I knew the supervisory staff, and many of the individual contractors at Apple, and recognized them when they came to work for Google.

I think this is being done more to prevent industrial espionage, than anything else.

At both Apple and Google, we moved our trash outside explicitly sensitive secure areas at night, so that the janitorial staff avoided entry. For a lot of it, it was honor system (if you count being on camera but not having a lurking linebacker ready to take you out if you make a wrong move, as "honor system"), where the secure offices without physical electronic security locks has a red sticky dot placed above the room doorknob to prevent people trying to go in.

This also has dick-all to do with any kind of "gentrification" issues that the article claims, since most of the people I know who worked security lived East Bay, and many of them owned their own houses.

You have no idea of what you talk about. I am citizen of Colombia, Spain, Panama, and the United States. When I am in any other country of the US, I lose all support of US consular services, because I am beholden to the laws of those countries. I cannot commit a crime in Colombia and scream for US help... Please stop giving bad advice on the internet.

Why do you want him to get trapped on a bus with Sandra Bullock, and be unable to slow down below 50 MPH?!?!?

A dazed and confused Harrison Ford staggered from the wreckage, grabbed a golf bag, and started walking away with it.

When challeneged by the golf bag's owner, he repeatedly yelled "It belongs in a museum!", until paramedics arrived.