If you’ve heard some unpleasant rumors about Google controlling device manufacturers and making Android less open, don’t swallow them just yet. Google’s Andy Rubin told the company’s side of things yesterday, referring to the other tales as FUD.
Rubin wrote in a post on the Android Developers Blog, “As always, device makers are free to modify Android to customize any range of features for Android devices. This enables device makers to support the unique and differentiating functionality of their products. If someone wishes to market a device as Android-compatible or include Google applications on the device, we do require the device to conform with some basic compatibility requirements.”
Later, Rubin – who’s a vice president of engineering – added, “[W]e continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready. As I write this the Android team is still hard at work to bring all the new Honeycomb features to phones. As soon as this work is completed, we’ll publish the code. This temporary delay does not represent a change in strategy.”
That should comfort developers who were worried about Google cracking down in some crazy new way. Perhaps the search giant’s becoming a little less flexible and starting to enforce some old rules, but there shouldn’t be much fresh stuff to be careful of.
