Google Responds To G1 Tethering

A few days ago, Tyler wrote an article about Google pulling the Wifi Tethering for Root Users application from the Android Market. Obviously Android has been praised for being more open and transparent in regards to how they handle applications so this was a disappointing turn of events. And even though the news isn’t great, we have to praise Google for trying to explain exactly what is going on.

Google sent an e-mail to the developer stating the following:

We inadvertently unpublished your application for all mobile providers; if you like, we can restore your app so that all Android Market users outside the T-Mobile US network will have access to your application.

That pretty much makes it official. The Android Market now has Carrier specific targeting. While this may not be an option for developers themselves, Google certainly has the capability to do so and has just excercised the right. This is heading somewhere… we’re just not sure where. This could be a real irritation for developers who want to launch their application world wide but don’t know which carriers have what rules about what different things yada yada yada

How will Google handle this growing concern? The more carriers that get on board with Android the more priorities and rules each carrier will make and more fragmentation and difficulties will arise. We’ll keep our eyes on this as it has the potential to set precedent for future scenarios.

And by the way, we stole the picture directly from Crunchgear after reading their write-up off the article. We had to. It was so damn funny I nearly peed my pants when the image loaded. Which reminds us – parents who keep their kids on a leash who are also subscribed to this website  – please unsubscribe now. The AndroidGuys did a nice writeup on this as well.

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