Andy Rubin -- the father of Android -- has taken to the Android Developer blog to shed a little light on what's happening regarding Honeycomb, any changes in Google's open-source policy, and fragmentation. The post is titled "I think I'm having a Gene Amdahl moment," referring to the former IBM exec who coined the phrase "fear, uncertainty and doubt" -- aka FUD. You'll definitely want to read the entire post, but we'll break it down here:
"We don’t believe in a 'one size fits all' solution. ... Quality and consistency continue to be top priorities.""As always, device makers are free to modify Android to customize any range of features for Android devices.""Our approach remains unchanged: there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs. There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture.""We continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready."
Again, those are just bullet points cherry picked by us. Read the entire post. And then take a deep breath and read it again. And while you might not like the answers -- or maybe you don't think really Rubin answered anything at all -- Rubin, and by extension Android and Google, did one thing we called for in last week's Android Central Podcast: cast a little transparency on what's been a bit of a murky period for Android's "open" nature. [Android Developer Blog]
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