Google Says "No App For You!" with Remote Kill Switch

Just yesterday I posted about Matt Miller’s G1 Android phone review (you really should read it if you haven’t already) and was pretty surprised to see Bryan’s comment about the inclusion of an application kill switch by Google.

An application kill switch isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. I spend a lot of time helping people manage their fleet of mobile devices, and one of the features that people are looking for is the ability to remotely kill and block applications on the device. Why? Simple, if the company pays for the device, they ma y not want you spending all day in some Facebook application, or installing Google Maps. As a company device, it’s their choice. As a consumer device, is it really Google’s place to prevent you from running an application on the device?

The article over at ComputerWorld indicates that Google “may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement” and based on that, they “retain the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion”. This worries me. It’s one thing for a company to control the devices they provide to their employees. It’s something entirely different for a software company to tell me what programs I can and cannot install on my phone. I realize that this could be used for good, for example – a virus, trojan, or what have you. But it can also be used for not so nice things, like forcing third party developers to only distribute their applications using your application store, or preventing applications from developers that don’t meet your guidelines. There’s so many questionable circumstances where this could be used.

I guess it’s a matter of time before we know exactly how it will be used by Google. But I’m pretty concerned and cautious about this move by Google.