Motorola shows no love for custom ROM users

Motorola has basically just given the finger to developers working on their Android devices with an unprofessional comment that they posted on their YouTube page. Someone named tdcrooks basically posted a comment on the Atrix ad video saying: “Even though this phone seems to have the best hardware specs yet, no sale if the bootloader is locked like the Motorola Milestone I have. It’s really upsetting to not be able to put custom roms on MY device…Please Moto, do the right thing. [For your customers, that is]”Motorola promptly responded with:

@tdcrooks if you want to do custom roms, then buy elsewhere, we’ll continue with our strategy that is working thanks.

Talk about a way to kill off potential sales – the comment might as well have been “if you don’t like the way we work, go elsewhere!” Obviously the comment has since been removed from the YouTube page, along with tdcrooks’ comment. But people have seen the response and the damage has already been done. The Android hacker/developer community has been a big reason to why Android is this successful in the first place. Granted, the phone hacking community only makes up a small percentage of all Android phone users, but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter and Motorola’s response was way out of line. In fact, the suggestion to “buy elsewhere” could possibly lead to some repercussions. How many of you care about whether your device is locked or not?

UPDATE (8:03 pm): Motorola has posted an update on their Facebook page apologizing for the PR’s rude response, and they announced that they will be coming up with a better bootloader solution to make everyone happy. Whether the company will follow through with their words is another story, but it’s nice of them to admit that they were wrong instead of ignoring the whole issue – something they could have easily done.