Yes, you can buy a Motorola Xoom with Android Honeycomb on it. But according to BusinessWeek, Google isn’t releasing the tablet variant of Android to developers publicly, because they’re worried people will try and shoehorn it into phones.
[Andy]Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn’t prevent developers from putting the software on phones “and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones.”
“Android is an open-source project,” he adds. “We have not changed our strategy.”
Rubin says that the reason for this closed approach is due to the limited timeframe they had to develop Honeycomb. They didn’t have time to consider all the possible ways the OS would be used.
But this also raises a good question of what open source really means. For Google, it seems like open source is building the tools and OS privately, then releasing it at their convenience to the public to do as they please with it. But naysayers believe that if Android was truly open-source, the development process of each build would be transparent and accessible at every juncture.
Despite being anApple-esque move for Google, who have generally operated on the other side of the spectrum, maybe this shouldn’t be so shocking. Android is primed to become the most widely used mobile operating system, which means there’s a lot of money at stake for a lot of people. Could this be Android’s first step away from their overarching, open-source approach? [BusinessWeek]