> I'd rather have no movies and no music than to have our technology become increasingly hobbled by the entertainment industry.

Unfortunately, whilst you're not alone in your sentiment, the majority of users to whom Android devices are sold don't care either way, and those are the same users that make Google the most money.

Note that you are always free to avoid this feature.

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?

> 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.

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).

> 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.

You can have that. Root your device, and then you have no movies, and a non-hobbled device.

How is that progress? There are plenty of apps to play movies without DRM.

I don't see "our technology" becoming "increasingly hobbled" just because there's one Android app out there that doesn't want to cooperate with a rooted phone. If anything this is positive since it probably acknowledges that anyone with a rooted phone is going to be able to capture the contents of the movie in an unencrypted format.