Summer 2011 kicked off with the release of Hulu Plus for Android smartphones, giving users who subscribe to the premium service the chance to access those videos from their mobile devices. While official support only handled a limited number of Androids at first, that list has been growing since. With more users trying out the app, though, some cracks are starting to show in its veneer, including one that’s becoming all-too-common for premium Android streaming video, a check that blocks the app from running on rooted smartphones.

We’ve seen it from Google, we’ve seen it from Blockbuster, so it should be no surprise that the same restriction has wormed its way into Hulu Plus. Users who discovered problems with playback turned to Hulu for answers, only then learning about this prohibition; apparently, it’s never clearly revealed during the sign-up process, if at all.

We’re not sure if this is good or bad, since even if Hulu wanted to block all rooted phones, it would be nice to have some consistency, but it looks like a subset of rooted Androids are still able to run the app successfully. This may be related to just what version of Android you’re running, but it really highlights just how totally arbitrary this limitation is.

Source: Droid-life