Funky Android Ltd.

We read with great interest Google’s announcement of a new licensing system for Android which was released yesterday and were surprised to find a number of similarities between the “new” Google system and the licensing system developed by us for use at AndAppStore which we offered to Google as a starting point for a cross-market licensing system in March 2009.

In early 2009 we developed an RSA secured licensing system for Android and made details of it available to the android community (one of the earliest posts about it can be found here). We could tell that it addressed an issue Android developers were facing and in late March 2009 we offered it to Google as a starting point for a cross-platform licensing solution which would allow developers to have write-once, use-anywhere licensing for their Android applications.

In early April 2009 we were told, by a member of the Android team, in a private email, that the Market team were “looking at a slightly different route”. We were disappointed, but we had hoped that the route would be open for use by third party Android application directories.

During the rest of 2009 the AndAppStore licensing system was used by developers and we saw some very positive public comments indicating the AndAppStore licensing system was considered a robust solution. During this time we also made it clear that the offer was still on the table for Google to work with us on developing the AndAppStore solution further.

Given this history it was with great sadness that we read the Google announcement yesterday that they chose to use the same RSA secured licensing design we developed a year and a half ago (and offered to them 16 months ago), provide some extra client-side functionality via a library (the LVL), make it a closed solution which is only available to apps distributed via their Market, and added a requirement that their Market client to be installed in the device in order to operate.

We would have hoped that a company such as Google, who like to promote “openness”, would, when working on solutions which could benefit all Andriod developers, would have worked with, and created something usable by, any group, such as AndAppStore, who are trying to promote Androids’ use, but alas it would appear this is not the case.