In practice, what “open” means for Android is that each phone manufacturer will take the base OS, then try to customize it as much as possible for their devices, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from other Android handset manufacturers. As far as I know, it’s impossible to remove these customizations and revert back to Google’s “vanilla” Android UI without significant hacking. The annoying thing here is that I would want to use a phone with no tacked-on cruft, but HTC, Motorola, etc. don’t provide that option.

The other problem with Android phones is that you can’t get official OS updates without going through the carrier/manufacturer. With iOS, this isn’t a big deal; Apple releases a new version, and everyone can download and upgrade at the same time. With Android, Google releases a new version, and then the manufacturers have to tailor the upgrade to fit each of their devices. Of course, this takes time, and in some cases a manufacturer won’t want to keep supporting their device, which means you are crap out of luck.

Both of these problems don’t exist if you buy one of the “official” Android phones, the Nexus One or Nexus S. But bizarrely, the Nexus phones are only supported by T-Mobile in the US (you can run one on AT&T, sans 3G data connection). Of course, that means they don’t work on Verizon’s CMDA network at all. The unfortunate conclusion is that Google doesn’t feel like giving people using carriers other than T-Mobile a choice on whether or not to user their official phone.

These three problems have prevented me from using Android, and since it looks like Verizon is going to start carrying the iPhone very soon, I don’t think there’s much hope for Android in my future.

For those of you who’ve been following along at home, late last year I made the first version of Nonogram Madness in Flash using the Flixel framework. Since I knew I would have to learn both a new language and a new programming framework to create anything on iOS, I decided to re-work a previous creation. I thought since the core logic had already been programmed, porting would be relatively straightforward.

Obviously, in the end it was a bit more complicated than that. There were lots of unexpected challenges, such as dealing with touch-based controls, as well as creating all-new puzzles. It’s been the most ambitious project I’ve done in my spare time to date, and I’m actually pretty proud of it.

In fact, I enjoyed the process so much that I created an LLC to publish the game under. The company is called Ganbaru Games, and while right now it’s not profitable at all, I’m hoping that perhaps if I get enough decent games out there, I can take advantage of the “long tail.” The word “ganbaru” means “to try ones’ best” or “to work hard” in Japanese, and that’s the philosophy I’d like to bring with me in game creation.

If you’d like to show your support for my game-making efforts, why not follow @ganbarugames on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook?