This week’s CrankyGeeks episode features, among other guests, Google Open source boss, Chris DiBona. The guests discuss some new phone that’s just been released which you may not have heard about, called the Nexus One, but more importantly, the journos present also took the opportunity to press DiBona about two of the more talked about issues surrounding Android at the moment: how must Motorola feel following the release of the Android 2.1-powered Nexus One? And, what are Google’s thoughts on Android OS version fragmentation and it’s affects on attracting developers to code for Android devices? Google apparently gave Motorola an early heads up on the Nexus One coming out and DiBona re-iterated that Android 2.1 is very similar to Android 2.0 in all but a handful of ways, but that doesn’t give any indication as to whether or not Motorola took this news well. In fact, rumours abound that neither Verizon nor Motorola are particularly happy about the whole Nexus One scenario, but then, this is Google’s ball, so I guess they can choose the game rules.
It seems Google are also quite bullish on the whole fragmentation issue. When pressed as to whether Google agreed that fragmentation could be a large turn-off for would-be developers, the accusation was shrugged off, with DiBona claiming that this isn’t the main concern for developers. He conceded that it can be difficult, but that they will learn to adapt and that the more important thing to a developer was the number of potential customers out there running the OS they plan to develop in:-
“…the only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship – how many Android phones. There is a linear relationship between the number of phones you ship and the number of developers…”
It’s an interesting show that is well worth watching. See the full video here.