My mobile phone contract has well and truly hit the “18-month itch” stage – although I still have six months until an upgrade is due, I can’t help but look at adverts and scan gadget blogs and think “ooh, I want one of those”.

I could go for an iPhone, and have a vast library of apps to choose from – far more than Android has ever offered.  I could go for a Windows Phone device and enjoy a user interface that is genuinely refreshing compared to the rest of the mobile OS options.

But much as it annoys me with its weird bugs, poor battery life, fragmentation, weird manufacturer-specific skins and inconsistent interface, there’s one important advantage to Android that sways my decision back to it every time I consider the alternatives. It is simply this:

I want to be in charge of my device.

The seeds of the war on general-purpose computation are already taking root in the mobile OS space. Phones and tablets are quickly gaining ground as the primary means of getting things done in our online worlds, and implicit in that is that users of these devices are putting the manufacturers and the mobile networks in charge of what they can and cannot do with them.

I reject this trend. I want root.

I want to be able to uninstall the apps HTC and Vodafone think I should use. I want to firewall apps off from “phoning home”. I want to back up a complete partition image of my phone. I want to run any script I can think of. I want to tunnel my network access over SSH.

By and large, mobile software and hardware manufacturers are hostile to this kind of activity. It’s impossible on a Windows Phone device. iPhones can be jailbroken but OS updates – including important security updates – undo the jailbreaking until some enterprising hacker can find another exploit.  Of the current crowd of mobile operating systems, only Android, with its open-source releases of the core OS, allows said enterprising hackers to create their own distributions of the operating system and maintain “root” whilst applying Google’s own OS updates.

So although I am bored of Android, though I crave a new and interesting user interface to play with, I crave freedom more. If I can’t make a device mine; if I can’t choose to be master of all that goes into it, out of it and through it, it’s not a general purpose computer – and I refuse to base a good proportion of my future computing needs on it.