Motorola: What Apps do users want? Gets Over 10k Votes 4 Unlocked Bootloader instead

[Maverick0984]

you're not getting the point. i'm not saying that verizon is on the brink of bankruptcy because people are making false warranty returns, but again...it's costing them money...not sure why you dont get that. theyre not gonna just stand there and lose money regardless of how small it is when there is something they can do about it...

I didn't say you were saying they were going to go bankrupt. I also said several times already that stealing is bad, false warranty claims falls under that umbrella. I don't think you are fully understanding what I'm saying.

You can't concretely say they are losing money that they actually notice. If HTC provides unlocked bootloaders and Motorola does not, people will go to HTC. That will cause them to also lose money. If you tell me that that amount of people doesn't matter, then you can't turn around and tell me that the people using unlocked bootloaders does matter. It is the same group of people.

My argument is about the inconsistency of two arguments used often. Not about whether they want or don't want to loose money. Of course they don't want to loose money. Once again, I am not arguing that or for that matter the actions they take. It is the inconsistency of *our* arguments in the community that I am taking exception with. Please understand this.

You cannot be a minority in case A and a majority in case B, with no other variables changing. It isn't logical.

haha...i dont understand how you can say "money that they'll actually notice". do you think in their fiscal plan they've set aside money that doesn't matter, the loss of which of they will ignore?

There is no inconsistency. rooters are the minority in case A because case A is "how many of verizon's customer's root", and they may be (I don't have numbers to prove it either way) the majority in case B because case B is "how many rooters commit warranty/insurance fraud". you're looking at two different demographics. they're not a 1:1 comparison, and not a 1:1 base.

The number of people in the world who have one hand may not be the majority compared to the rest of the world, but the number of people who have one hand who also don't commit crimes may be a majority in that one handed person demographic. extremely stupid example, i know, but that's what's going on here. you can't compare to different demographics and try to apply the same logic to both.

you also can't just say losing money doesn't affect them enough to notice. of course it does. if they can prevent revenue loss with no investment on their part even if it's 1 dollar of loss why would they just ignore it? that's not a sound business plan.

To be honest, i don't even see how it's relevant if or not the rooters are a majority. Even though they're clearly not, it wouldnt matter if they were. If they're committing warranty/insurance fraud, someone somewhere is losing money, and it's not a "meh, thats a barely noticeable loss, let's ignore it" situation.

I see what you're saying. The discussion has kind of morphed into a slightly different direction though from my original post.

Your stated Case A is what I meant, but my Case B was a bit different. I'm not interested in the amount of rooters that commit fraud in relation to the amount of rooters. I'm concerned with the general case of fraud from rooters amongst their entire userbase. Seems as though that is where we're having the different opinions. If 1% of users root, and 50% of those people file false claims, there is still only .5% of a userbase. Very tiny.

Just a quick example though. I don't really know VZW's customer base, but let's say for math's sake, they have 100 million customers. If 10 customers out of 100 million have false insurance claims, that isn't going to warrant a policy change that will effect everyone. If 50 million customers file false insurance claims, that WILL warrant policy change. So somewhere in between 10 customers and 50 million customers, there is a magic number where they will start to care. In business, there is a certain cost of doing business to keep customers happy, any good businessman will tell you that. You may not see direct proceeds from it, but indirect proceeds from happy customers happen and are not directly measurable. Because of this, there absolutely is a "low number" that they will not address until it becomes an issue. Chances are that low number has been steadily rising since the OG Droid debut, wasn't large enough then, and is starting to become large enough now, and that is precisely why we are seeing the backlash.

Will they go after a single person for a false claim? Absolutely. What I'm talking about is broad policy change like locking bootloaders.

So by that definition, we're saying that enough people are filing these false claims. Okay, I can stomach that, makes sense. In the Case A argument though, for enough people to be effecting their bottom line, there has to be enough people rooting in general to not be some miniscule minority they don't care about keeping happy.

I guess all I'm saying is, rooters are a minority, obviously, but technically, 49% is a minority. I think enough people root, that Moto/VZW does care about trying to keep them happy. I took issue in people saying that Moto/VZW doesn't care about them, but at the same time is losing enough money to institute broad policy change. They either care or they don't :-/. It's a difficult situation to be for manufacturers and carriers to be honest. They want to keep a decent size group of people happy while still not losing money themselves. At this particular juncture, it appears they are more concerned about losing money now, instead of losing money in the future.

It is what it is at the end of the day and I'm not trying to start anything. This is just a discussion on things that I've noticed.

 

[dfuser312553]

^lawlz, it's second to the throttle mod only

Being ceaselessly argumentative is childish & a pox on this forum but I'm sure you know that.

 

[Maverick0984]

I will say in my posts I have done a poor job of distinguishing the difference between phone manufacturer and carrier. :-/

They have different interests that don't always overlap.

 

[czerdrill]

^lawlz, it's second to the throttle mod only

Being ceaselessly argumentative is childish & a pox on this forum but I'm sure you know that.

^lawlz +1.

 

[czerdrill]

I didn't say you were saying they were going to go bankrupt. I also said several times already that stealing is bad, false warranty claims falls under that umbrella. I don't think you are fully understanding what I'm saying.

You can't concretely say they are losing money that they actually notice. If HTC provides unlocked bootloaders and Motorola does not, people will go to HTC. That will cause them to also lose money. If you tell me that that amount of people doesn't matter, then you can't turn around and tell me that the people using unlocked bootloaders does matter. It is the same group of people.

My argument is about the inconsistency of two arguments used often. Not about whether they want or don't want to loose money. Of course they don't want to loose money. Once again, I am not arguing that or for that matter the actions they take. It is the inconsistency of *our* arguments in the community that I am taking exception with. Please understand this.

You cannot be a minority in case A and a majority in case B, with no other variables changing. It isn't logical.

haha...i dont understand how you can say "money that they'll actually notice". do you think in their fiscal plan they've set aside money that doesn't matter, the loss of which of they will ignore?

There is no inconsistency. rooters are the minority in case A because case A is "how many of verizon's customer's root", and they may be (I don't have numbers to prove it either way) the majority in case B because case B is "how many rooters commit warranty/insurance fraud". you're looking at two different demographics. they're not a 1:1 comparison, and not a 1:1 base.

The number of people in the world who have one hand may not be the majority compared to the rest of the world, but the number of people who have one hand who also don't commit crimes may be a majority in that one handed person demographic. extremely stupid example, i know, but that's what's going on here. you can't compare to different demographics and try to apply the same logic to both.

you also can't just say losing money doesn't affect them enough to notice. of course it does. if they can prevent revenue loss with no investment on their part even if it's 1 dollar of loss why would they just ignore it? that's not a sound business plan.

To be honest, i don't even see how it's relevant if or not the rooters are a majority. Even though they're clearly not, it wouldnt matter if they were. If they're committing warranty/insurance fraud, someone somewhere is losing money, and it's not a "meh, thats a barely noticeable loss, let's ignore it" situation.

I see what you're saying. The discussion has kind of morphed into a slightly different direction though from my original post.

Your stated Case A is what I meant, but my Case B was a bit different. I'm not interested in the amount of rooters that commit fraud in relation to the amount of rooters. I'm concerned with the general case of fraud from rooters amongst their entire userbase. Seems as though that is where we're having the different opinions. If 1% of users root, and 50% of those people file false claims, there is still only .5% of a userbase. Very tiny.

Just a quick example though. I don't really know VZW's customer base, but let's say for math's sake, they have 100 million customers. If 10 customers out of 100 million have false insurance claims, that isn't going to warrant a policy change that will effect everyone. If 50 million customers file false insurance claims, that WILL warrant policy change. So somewhere in between 10 customers and 50 million customers, there is a magic number where they will start to care. In business, there is a certain cost of doing business to keep customers happy, any good businessman will tell you that. You may not see direct proceeds from it, but indirect proceeds from happy customers happen and are not directly measurable. Because of this, there absolutely is a "low number" that they will not address until it becomes an issue. Chances are that low number has been steadily rising since the OG Droid debut, wasn't large enough then, and is starting to become large enough now, and that is precisely why we are seeing the backlash.

Will they go after a single person for a false claim? Absolutely. What I'm talking about is broad policy change like locking bootloaders.

So by that definition, we're saying that enough people are filing these false claims. Okay, I can stomach that, makes sense. In the Case A argument though, for enough people to be effecting their bottom line, there has to be enough people rooting in general to not be some miniscule minority they don't care about keeping happy.

I guess all I'm saying is, rooters are a minority, obviously, but technically, 49% is a minority. I think enough people root, that Moto/VZW does care about trying to keep them happy. I took issue in people saying that Moto/VZW doesn't care about them, but at the same time is losing enough money to institute broad policy change. They either care or they don't :-/. It's a difficult situation to be for manufacturers and carriers to be honest. They want to keep a decent size group of people happy while still not losing money themselves. At this particular juncture, it appears they are more concerned about losing money now, instead of losing money in the future.

It is what it is at the end of the day and I'm not trying to start anything. This is just a discussion on things that I've noticed.

I get what you're saying now, and yes I agree. But, preventing loss of revenue will always trump anything else to any company. And like you said, there is zero chance that they're going to institute company-wide policy changes because .5% of their base is doing something wrong, even though they would have no problem going after that .5% individually if they wanted to.

The reason why I would argue that they do care about warranty claims even if it's such a small amount doing it, is simply because it's money lost.

The reason why they wouldn't "care" about keeping that small minority happy is because the way to keep them happy will end up costing the company money. I know people have stated that they can just say "We will not support this no matter what if you root your phone" and just be done with it. But it's not that easy. If you're allowing people to root and you're giving people unlocked bootloaders, people are going to call you when something is wrong, even if you say "we will not provide any support for this". people are going to call and demand a new phone, or complain and not accept responsibility for bricking their phones and expect the carrier to provide them with a new one. that's just how people are. the android community is not mature enough, unfortunately, to just say "awesome, we don't need verizon, if we brick our phones we know it's our fault, and we'll get another phone at full price". Now what happens is VZW (or any other carrier) has to spend money to provide support (even if that support consists of "sorry we don't support rooted phones"), they need to train and possibly hire more employees to deal with calls relating to rooting, and unlocked bootloaders and they end up spending money that they didn't have to spend in the first place by just locking it up...

I don't see any incentive for the companies to allow the user to have that much control. They would be trying to fix something that's not broken, and in the process break it irreparably.

 

[MoeDaddy]

Enough with the tethering already, you don't even have to root to tether just use a pdanet type app and you can tether without paying VZW so locking the phone means nothing to those that want to tether. Plus locked bootloader itself DOESN'T stop you from rooting and replacing the stock tethering app with a hacked version. So spare me with the tethering argument it cannot be stopped by locking the bootloader down.

The reason moto wants to lock u down to to gain control and give phone a lifespan that you can not extend. They want the bloatware to stay there, They make money off it. They want you to buy a new phone when you can no longer get updates, they make money off that. The long life of the Driod just makes them that much more determined, because it was unlocked. However, we have the option to speak with our wallets and let moto know what we want. Many say we are small and don't matter but CM7 had over 100k registrations in like the first week it was released. That is just ONE rom in one week of the many out there. When I see articles like "Root, ROM, restore: How to hack your Android OS" on CNET and other mainstream tech sites I know that it is much bigger than we all think. I have a rooted phone, my girlfriend, my daughter, multiple coworkers, and even 2 employees at the local VZW have theirs done and 1 at the radioshack. If it wasn't a big deal why would Sony have a site to unlock theirs? If nobody cared why would they go thru the expense? The problem is that so many defeatists will let moto do as they please and just live with it. I'm sure many here will not and they will make their wants known. So while it may not be a big deal to some it is to those of us that want the option to do what WE WANT with the phone that WE PAID for!

 

[Drosul]

There are options here, that aren't really being explored by Moto/VZW

- Locking down devices, especially with encryption, costs money in software development, and also in potentially lost customer revenue/sales.

- Bloatware, is likely the biggest culprit for why companies bother. The advertising revenues are likely huge, especially when compared to the costs of development, and the potentially lost sales of a very small portion of the market. The advertisers are paying Moto to have their apps on the phones

-Verizon, doesn't want to lose money on bricked phone returns from rooters.

-Customers, don't want all this bloatware on their phones, many don't even want crap like Blur.

---The solution----
To make everyone happy, here's what verizon should do:

Allow people to pay a small fee ($5-$25), to gain root access to their phone. Verizon now has a record that allows them to tell you to piss off, when you bring the phone in for repairs, and gets a chunk of the fee for the trouble of managing the database. It doesn't have to be an advertised service, and 90% of the users won't even know it's there.

The companies like Moto, can get a small taste of the fee, and get the extra advertising power/sales for a phone that can be unlocked, if requested.

The other chunk of the fee that VZW doesn't get, goes directly to the advertisers who paid for the ads/apps that aren't getting seen, reimbursing them for their costs, so they are happy.

Customers are happy, as they now have the options to pay their fee, and get their root access/features.

Everyone wins

 

[WugFresh]

I certainly hope something like that is adopted. I would happily pay a little money to gain full control over the device. Issues still in our way:
Tethering... but it looks like they are cooking something up right now that might prevent this problem.
The relatively small amount of users that want this for them to even care enough to do it. I am hoping that this Facebook thing and other articles will make the issue pressing enough to address.

{{ WugFresh }}