Until your carrier decides you don't need the ability to install non-market apps and disables the option. Oh, and the phone in question is not yet rooted. This is a matter of time if it isn't already happening. Google can do the open and free dance all it wants but with the carriers standing between you and Google...
I read all those horror stories about US carriers. Here in Poland my gf bought an Android and:
+ alternative markets option was on
+ no google apps at all (umm, maybe youtube was there), no gmail account setup, etc.
- some map/satnav crapware but nothing standing in the way
So... not everywhere in the world carriers are monopolized by GOOG. (and I'm not saying that maybe we dont' have some carriers who put google setup by default, I don't know)
If a carrier is being evil I can switch to another carrier though. And if enough people avoid carriers because they lock you in, they will take notice.
There is nothing like this for iPhone. You can't go to a different company than Apple to buy your iPhone on different terms.
I'm rather skeptical of this. Perhaps because I live somewhere where there's only 3 different carriers and they all started capping mobile internet in the same month. And they all dramatically raised prices in the same month. Etc. For now, you're able to buy a vanilla Android phone from a third party, but what happens when carriers start to only allow IMEIs sold through them or their subsidiaries on their networks? Carriers have way too much power right now, partly because Google caved in and allowed them to butcher Android phones.
We need to be vigilant as a lot of consumers don't really care about these kinds of things.
I'm not the most knowledgeable within mobile geekery, but couldn't you in buy an android phone with no contract over the net and get a sim card for it?
The point regarding IMEIs was that if carriers get antagonistic enough, it would be possible to change the blacklist that (some) carriers use for stolen phones into a whitelist that disallows any third party phones.
Outside the US, governments take the promise of being able to take a SIM and put it into an unlocked phone very seriously, so I'd say this is a strictly local problem. In fact, I'd wonder how Deutsche Telekom's regulators would react if T-Mobile (DT's US subsidiary, at least for now) started doing something like this (that they probably wouldn't permit in Germany).
Well, carriers' policy regarding apps in US held mobile market back for years comparing with Europe. For example, here in Russia once there was enormous number of free and paid J2ME apps (usually paid by sending sms to short number). My friends at university read ebooks on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_S55>Siemens S55</a> (I used Palm).
I know of several companies that were started at this market and later moved to Win Mobile/Android/iPhone etc.
It is worth noting that AT&T quit restricting non-Market applications (back when it was the Android Market) because of the Amazon Appstore. People kept asking how they could get it (because they wanted the Free App of the Day and the like) and AT&T eventually gave in.
