Google Cripples Android Developer Phones to Prevent Piracy

Owners of the $400 G1 developer phone will no longer be able to download paid applications from the Android Market, for fear they might disable copy protection.

You might expect that the developer edition of the Android-powered G1 would pull even more tricks than the normal version to give programmers more flexibility and reward those who plunked down $400 for it. But the situation is quite the opposite. Google recently changed its Android Market policies to bar developer phones from downloading or running any paid apps.

The company’s fear: piracy. Because users of the Android dev phone can tinker with the phone and view more than users with the retail version, Google believes that allowing access might enable those with the knowhow to disable copy protection on programs meant to be sold.

“These phones give developers full permissions to all aspects of the device, including the ability to install a modified version of the Android Open Source Project,” Google said in a statement. “We aren’t distributing copy protected applications to these phones in order to minimize unauthorized copy of the applications.”

Paid applications only recently came to Android Market, and free software (which the developer phone can still run) remains the bulk of Android offerings.

Though the move was made in part to protect the intellectual property of programmers, there has still been a backlash from developers who bought the $400 phone to use as an honest test platform, and now see it as crippled due to Google’s lack of trust. One user even contemplated holding a “revolt,” getting developers to withdraw their products from the Market in an effort to show Google their distaste for the new policies