Here it comes... a mountain of pre-installed crapware on Android devices! Motorola have announced a range of "signature" applications for their first Android devices.

Motorola, and all the other device manufacturers, are excluded from any control over, or profits from, the Android Market which puts them in a very precarious position at the bottom of a very competitive hardware food chain. To overcome this lack of control the manufactures are adding a software user interface layer on top of the underlying Android OS (Motorola's Blur, HTC's Sense, Samsung's TouchWiz and Sony Ericsson's Rachael).

We're told this is to benefit the consumer with a better user experience than competing products (software differentiation). That may certainly be part of the consideration for doing it but it's not their primary raison d'être. None of these companies want to be 'just another hardware company' because they know that's ultimately a very dangerous place to be (hardware commodification) so they are building these user interface layers in an attempt to move themselves into more of a service delivery role.

I can completely understand why the device manufactures would want to do this but I have a sneaking suspicion that ultimately this strategy isn't going to work for them. On pre-installed desktop computers with proprietary operating systems the manufacture can supply customised installation disks so that even if the user re-installs the OS they still get their craplets installed along with the vanilla OS. Android, on the other hand, is an open source operating system and we already see modders like Cyanogen offering easy to install high performance vanilla builds of the latest Android OS. The next few years is going to be a hard time for device manufactures as they try to find a place for themselves in the new food chain and ultimately it may be the consumer who suffers.