Google Refuses to Release Android Honeycomb Source For Now

From DailyTech: Google's Android operating system has been tremendously successful. It's become the top selling phone platform in the world and its app store is stocked with close to 200,000 apps. But for all that success, a perpetual criticism is a perception that Android's environment is too heterogeneous across various handsets -- part of this is due to carriers/hardware partners failing to roll out the latest versions, but part of it is due to customizations such as Motorola's Motoblur and HTC's Sense UI.

Perhaps that's part of why Google has decided why not to release the source code for Android 3.0 "Honeycomb", yet.

The company states that the code isn't ready yet for external modification, despite the fact that products are being sold with it installed, today.

Aside from preventing unwanted third-party user interfaces, the chief goal of the delay is ostensibly from preventing Honeycomb (Android 3.0) from being put on smartphones. Google is pressuring smartphone makers to instead use Android 2.3 "Gingerbread". Google is also less-than-enthusiastic about Honeycomb entering other devices, like set-top boxes and automobiles, without further modification.

Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group essentially admits that the move is being made to prevent the platform from heading, in its current state, to places Google didn't intend. In a BusinessWeek interview, he states, "To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs. We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."

He adds, "Android is an open-source project. We have not changed our strategy."

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