[General Questions and Answers] McMick:
I've used an Android tablet for about a year now, and although I've put in a lot of time to make it useful and controllable, it still has a lot of troubling mysteries. I have a few questions for developer types that hopefully will help shed some light on things:

1. Why don't applications feature a "Close" button? In both Windows and GNU/Linux with a GUI, you get a neat little "X" at the top right of the window. Usually, when you click this, the application terminates. Is that so much to ask for on Android? The means of closing apps on Android seem to be entirely up to the devs and there doesn't appear to be a standard way at all. Some of the apps I've used on Android don't have any way to close them whatsoever, with the exception of killing them from a task manager or the "Manage Apps" section of settings.

2. Why do many of these programs suddenly and mysteriously start running entirely on their own? It's terribly frustrating for me to kill an app and in a half an hour find it there on the task manager list again, running without my having asked for it to do so. Where is this controlled? If there is some sort of task scheduler making this happen, why can't I easily see a list of scheduled tasks and choose which ones to run or not to run?

3. For programs that *are* running in the background (the ones I *want* to have running), why is it that they usually don't have some sort of taskbar icon to indicate at a glance that they are still running?

4. Why can't I see everything that's loading when the tablet starts? I guess I'm asking to see a logcat screen instead of a splash screen. GNU/Linux distros don't usually hide everything from the end user, so why isn't it optional on an Android tablet? Even in custom ROMS all I get are neat looking splash screens, not a terminal interface on boot.

5. Why doesn't a decent firewall application yet exist for Android? All I seem to be able to find are really coarse ones like Droidwall, where it's an all or nothing proposition (allow/block). I'd like to be able to control protocols, ports, zones and individual IP addresses and ranges like a good firewall on Windows or GNU/Linux allows. I am constantly under suspicion that someone is doing something on my tablet without my even being aware of it.

6. Why are permissions for applications so difficult to control? Maybe I don't want some stupid game getting a look at my contacts list. I realize I can just uninstall the game, but so many apps seem to tap into stuff that they shouldn't be allowed to, I feel like some sort of permissions control should be a default standard thing in Android. Instead all there seems to be are a couple of apps on the market that may or may not work.

7. Do any of you developers feel dissatisfied about the state of Android, and does Google take your feedback seriously?

8. Are there any forks of the Android OS that don't rely on Google for anything? I'm not 100 percent sure about the difference between a GNU and an Apache license. How much of the OS is closed-source? Is it enough to prevent a true, fully open-sourced Android-based OS from being made?

Sorry if any of these questions sound stupid, but even though Android is supposed to be more open than iOS, it's still not open enough for my tastes. I actually feel safer using Windows than Android, and that's just not how it should be. Am I alone in this feeling?