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Nov. 5, 2009

In defending its recent decision to allow unlimited Android tweaking, Google said that although this may fragment the GooglePhone market, it's what is in the best interest for mobile application developers and the open source community as a whole.

Eric Chu, Google's group manager for the Android mobile platform says "people talk about fragmentation as a bad thing, but I think you need to look at it from the perspective of the mobile apps developer. How much work does any given developer have to do to address fragmentation? If there are a million mobile devices and they're in three different fragments, they simply don't care."

Chu also acknowledged that wireless equipment manufacturers and mobile handset makers may opt for different versions of the available operating systems, but he then pointed out that the OS is designed for backwards compatibility.

"What this simply means is that if you build an application for Android 1.5 and you use the published API and you don't go off the trail and start using native code you're not supposed to, your application will work on a 1.6 device or a 2.0 device as well," said Chu.

He added that although HTC and Motorola have tweaked the Android user interface on the Hero and Cliq devices respectively, the underlying Android platform remains exactly the same.

He went on to say "there are clear opportunities for manufacturers and wireless carriers to differentiate in terms of the look and feel of the user interface, while still keeping the underlying platform consistent so that mobile apps developers don't have to do anything different everytime they need to change something."

As Limo Foundation executive director Morgan Gillis pointed out, a very small bit of fragmentation is unavoidable-- it will always happen, even in the best of circumstances. "You can't have differentiation without fragmentation," he explained. "But you have to realize that whatever you put out there people will innovate on top of it. You have to do whatever you can to make that rational for developers."

Applications coded specifically for Android 2.0 may not work on devices using older versions. And there's no guarantee that manufacturers won't tweak the platform in such a way that they break compatibility. "If Motorola brings an innovation to the platform, will it show up on an HTC device or a Sony Ericsson device, or will these be little pools of innovation?" Symbian Foundation marketing head Ted Shelton recently asked the open source community.

The problem, Shelton said, is that Google still lacks a governance model, and probably will for at least another year, given the speed at which Android is being deployed these days.

But Google's Chu doesn't see Shelton's problem. He went on to boast that the Android Marketplace filters applications so that the end user will only see devices that work on their particular device.

For its part, Symbian boasts that unlike Google and Limo, it's completely open. And it insists that since Symbian is already on millions of mobile handsets, it's poised to create a much larger developer community.

"There's no one who has the breadth we do to be able to pull people in," Shelton said. "At this stage of the game, it's easy to see how Symbian will be the biggest community around an open operating system."

As could be expected, Chu disagreed with that statement.

Shelton even took a swipe at Chu and Google by saying "but the governance structure that supports the platform has to be transparent and it has to be commercially impartial so that you can trust it."

Not everyone likes the way Limo does things either. "Limo is what some observers have called a member source organization as opposed to an open source community," Shelton said.

He added "you can become a member, and under their membership rules you can contribute and make use of their code, but it's not completely open source."

It will be interesting to see various responses from the rest of the mobile open source community to this story.

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Source: Google.