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Google’s recent decision to lock down Android is many things. It’s a betrayal of the open source concept. It’s a dagger in the back of every company that’s put its weight behind the Android platform. It’s also about damn time.

Android’s open nature has done more to promote it than anything else, with enough manufacturers jumping on board to give it a 31 per cent share of the market. If you’re in the business, that’s great. If you’re a customer though, things are nowhere near as pleasant.

The additional freedom Android offers over iOS on a day-to-day basis is relatively small. Yes, you can download apps from multiple stores. You can run apps that dig deeper into the system, like Swype, which rips out the default keyboard in favour of something swankier. In terms of practical differences though, unless you want apps that run external code (like emulators) or some boob-jiggling/armpit-farting app that Apple gave the thumbs down to, there’s really not much difference as far as the user experience goes.

Except for the bad bits. Android’s fragmentation means that simply having Android means nothing. HTC Sense makes it look different. Gimmick phones like the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play (which plays some PlayStation games) add various features. Application compatibility is a gamble – and that’ll only get worse if iOS stops drawing all the good games. Worse, you’re constantly at the mercy of at least one third party for updates. If you buy Apple, an update is released, you download it and you move on.

On Android… well, let’s look at my phone. I’m on O2, with an HTC Desire. The last big Android update, Froyo, was released on 23 June last year. This then had to go through HTC to implement the Sense interface and any other tweaks, and again through O2 itself before being rolled out. I got my hands on it in October, after a failed rollout in September. Other platforms had to wait even longer – the most memorable being the Dell Streak, which took until November for unlocked units to be upgradable, and December for carriers to deliver the updates. These aren’t short waits, especially when you’re paying for a contract every month.

And this is when everything is going well. When it isn’t, you’re reminded that openness still puts you at your carrier’s mercy, as seen when Vodafone decided to splash its customers’ phones with unwanted branding, undeletable programs, and links to things like dating sites.

Being open is a double-edged sword – and that’s on handsets, where most people agree that Android is a fine OS. On tablets, things have been disastrous. So many companies that should know better have pounced on it for their iPad non-killers, despite even Google admitting that the current version isn’t up to the job. I’d go a step further. I see the inclusion of Android on a tablet as an admission of failure.

Of course, that can change. I have nothing against Android as a platform, but right now, most tablets that use it are only fit for downloading a picture of a plate and eating a burger off it. Not even a nice burger. One of the cheap ones you can find in the high street.

In an ideal world, the solution to this would be for Google to use Honeycomb – the first version of Android that’s actually geared around the tablet user experience – to produce its own amazing offering. This isn’t likely though, for the same reason that nobody much cared about the Nexus phone. Google does great engineering, but its product development rarely makes waves. Android’s breakout moment on phones was when HTC got its hands on it and made phones like the Desire.

By restricting access to its partners – at least for now – Google is in a position to exercise some quality control and, more importantly, embrace the iPad’s greatest strength: the way it combines hardware and software into a great user experience. That can never happen if the two sides are built in isolation and hastily glued together, whether it’s Android, Windows, or some lesser-known OS in charge of pushing pixels around.

In short, this is the right decision for Android, for Google, and for the tech industry as a whole. Open is great, but quality has to come first, and ‘good enough’ very rarely is. It’s just a shame that Google’s arrived at this point too late to make a smooth transition from ‘fully open’ to ‘sensibly protected’.

Its critics may be willing to forgive the betrayal of trust if it gets us a great iPad competitor, but there’s no chance they’re going to forget it next time Google needs friends or favours to get something up and running.