“For a long time, Google has led a largely blissful existence, fostering a widespread perception — sometimes in direct contradiction to the facts — that it can do no wrong. Yet the company’s controversial Android mobile platform venture threatens to seriously dent this notion, at least with some of the people it needs most,” John Edwards reports for Computerworld.
“As it readies its long-anticipated open mobile OS for public release, Google is behaving in a way that threatens to permanently taint its relationship with many Android developers. The company’s actions — including restricting access to key development tools and allegedly treading on open source principles — have created, if not a full-fledged revolt, at least a sense of disappointment and disillusionment among many in the tightly knit Android development community, which numbers perhaps 2,000, according to an estimate by AndroidGuys, an independent Android blog site. Some developers have threatened to shift their attention to other mobile platforms,” Edwards reports.
“Jack Gold, an independent technology analyst based in Northborough, Mass., believes that Google’s mobile game plan is “strategically flawed.” He notes that the company’s goals are contradictory: to create an open mobile platform, yet still be able to exercise control over the quality of Android applications. Gold believes that Google’s fundamental problem is that it has managed to put the cart before the horse,” Edwards reports.
“Whether or not Google made the right decision with its SDK release, the company could have hardly selected a worse time to tick off developers. With Apple’s iPhone 3G grabbing sales records and headlines, the recent news that Symbian is going open source, and the fact that Android remains months away from release, Google is facing the possibility that its platform may become nothing more than a follow-up act, lost in a sea of mobile OSes,” Edwards reports.
Full article here.