Andy Rubin on Android’s “open-ness”

Back in the days of dumb phones firmware updates were never really an issue, in fact I think most people did not even know about them. Everyone just used their phones for pretty much the same reason; to make phones calls and to send text messages and the occasional Snake II.

Now with the onslaught of smartphones entering the market, consumers are making their decisions on which smartphone to purchase based on what operating system it is running on and more importantly which version. Some have chosen to wait for the latest smartphone because it runs Android’s latest Gingerbread 2.3 operating system but no matter how up-to-date your phone may be, give it a couple of months and you will see at least 5 new smartphones in the market with an even newer version of the operating system while you have to wait for your manufacturer to send the latest version to your carrier, who in turn has to test it before releasing it to you. Android fragmentation has always been one of the big issues of the Android operating system.

Andy Rubin, SVP of mobile at Google was quoted as saying “Open source is different than a community-driven project. Everything that we do ends up in an open source repository. We’re building a platform, we’re not building an app. When we add new APIs, typically in my opinion community processes don’t work because you need to know when you’re done. If it’s a community process someone could take an early version before locked down, and those devices would be incompatible. So as the shepherds of this ecosystem, we’re going to make sure the same APIs are on all devices that adopt that platform.”

Could these delays be because of Android being more like an open source code as opposed to being a community project? And with so many different manufacturers working on different versions and different handsets can they really be blamed for taking so long to provide updates?