You may have noticed that the iPad 2 became available outside the US recently. Apparently there were one or two people milling around outside Apple retail stores waiting for it to go on sale at 5pm one Friday afternoon.
Despite the huge, pent-up demand for Apple’s latest tablet, however, it enters a world very different from the one that welcomed its predecessor a year ago. The original iPad had no competition. It created a market all of its own, and manufacturers and developers took months to come up with anything that could be described, without sniggering, as an alternative. This time around, with Motorola’s Xoom already shipping, HP’s TouchPad somewhere just around the corner, RIM’s PlayBook generating lots of publicity and the likes of Samsung looking like they might finally get their act together, there’s genuine competition. It should make the next few months interesting.
Even more interesting, though, is the mess Google seems to be getting itself into over whether its Android OS is as open as it claims. This is important, if only because one of the sticks Apple-haters use to beat the company is that its products are closed and that the company exerts too much control over how its customers use its products. And Google is the company usually held up as an example of how it should be done. Android, say supporters, is an open-source OS that allows anyone to download the source code, modify it and make it do whatever they want it to do. And owners of Android phones and tablets have a far greater choice of apps, thanks to the unregulated Android market.
Those supporters, however, might need to rethink their arguments. Google announced at the end of last month that the next version of Android, codenamed Honeycomb, the OS on which many potential iPad competitors are pinning their hopes, won’t be open source. At least not yet. ‘We’re committed to providing Android as an open platform across many device types and will publish the source as soon as it’s ready,’ said Google in a statement. The reason? ‘It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut,’ explained Andy Rubin, Google’s vice-president of engineering, to Business Week. So while partners such as Samsung, LG and Motorola already have access to Honeycomb and are using it in their tablets, smaller manufacturers and the open-source community will have to wait indefinitely. Not exactly the spirit of openness Google supporters like to present.
This isn’t the first time Google has been criticised for playing fast and loose with its definition of ‘open’. As far back as 2008, Ars Technica reported Google had secretly made an updated Android software development kit available, under a non-disclosure agreement, to 50 selected developers. The rest of the Android developer community wasn’t amused. ‘Google embraced the development community and touted how they were going to build this platform with the help of the development community. Somewhere along the line, this “seemed” to change,’ complained one developer at the time.
Late last year, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs was taking aim at Android over the ’100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets’ developers had to contend with, Google was again being called to account over its definition of ‘open’.
This time, a lack of transparency in the Android update process and lack of community development were to blame. Joe Hewitt, one of the founders of Firefox, tweeted in October: ‘Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me.’
The problem for Android, according to the man who coined the phrase ‘open source’, is the networks. ‘Google enables the carriers to close the Android platform from the user’s perspective,’ Bruce Perens explained to Wired.
So while you or I could download the Android source code and create our own version of Android, when it comes to putting it on a phone or modifying the version of Android that ships with the phone, forget it. From the user’s perspective, Android is every bit as closed as iOS. Sure, the Android market isn’t tightly controlled in the same way as the App Store, but whether this benefits users is moot. Amazon, which launched its own Android apps download service recently, has followed the Apple model and runs a curated store.
It turns out Jobs wasn’t so far from the truth when he explained that iOS had to be tightly controlled in order to satisfy network carriers, as Google has discovered.
The only real difference is that while Apple makes no pretence that iOS is anything other than a carefully controlled, closed OS, Google is still trying to maintain the illusion that Android is open. While it may satisfy the strict legal definition of open source, however, it’s a long way from fulfilling the spirit.
Kenny Hemphill
