In an interview with PC Mag yesterday, AT&T talked about their future smartphone plans on their network. One of the most interesting points AT&T’s senior vice president of mobile devices, Jeff Bradley mentioned that AT&T will no longer block non-Android Market apps from being installed onto the device. He was quoted as saying:“I think we’ll go more open. First and foremost we were genuinely concerned from a network bandwidth standpoint and a customer experience standpoint for not having any mechanism to take down a bad app. And the only way we could do it at the time was relying on Google to leverage what [security] they had in [the] Android Marketplace. We took a lot of negative publicity for doing it, but it was 100 percent driven by a desire to be able to have the ability to support our network and be able to help our customers. It really was.”
This explains a lot about why the upcoming Samsung Infuse 4G has the ability to load apps from unknown sources. It looks like users will finally be able to install the Amazon App Store for Android, and even games from Gameloft and EA who don’t put their games up on the Android Market. Good news for future Android owners on the carrier. Now let’s hope AT&T releases a fix for their current devices as well…unless it’s part of AT&T’s plan to get users to purchase new Android phones. How many of you have rooted your AT&T phone just for this feature?