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Unlike Android, the iPhone can’t scale, says Google

July 10, 2009 10:14pm
by Chris Nuttall

All the talk this week has been about Google’s forthcoming Chrome PC operating system, but that doesn’t mean its other operating system, Android, is going away, according to its chief engineer.

Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of  mobile engineering, said today that Android, aimed at smartphones and netbooks, was even likely to outstrip the success of Apple’s mobile operating system, which is now in more than 40m iPhone and iPod touch devices.

“The press was like ‘Oh, Android’s doomed,’ but we don’t do lockups in innovation at Google,” he told a San Francisco press conference on Android and its newest device - the T-Mobile myTouch 3G phone, available in August.

“You need different technologies for different solutions, I really look forward to seeing Chrome run on a lot of consumer products.”

Asked if Android could ever match or surpass Apple’s installed base, Mr Rubin described it as a numbers game.

“History has shown that a single product has limitations on how much it can scale. You start thinking: let’s add another product, now we’ve doubled it. But it’s still just two products.

“With Android, there can be 1,000s of different products built, and the magic here is that all those products can be compatible and all of them can be hosted by the same [application] marketplace.”

Apple has more than 50,000 applications available in its AppStore, compared to only around 5,000 in Google’s version, but Mr Rubin said Android was at an earlier stage of adoption.

“We’ve been in the market for eight months, it’s shown its capabilities and now the business is to scale. Certainly all the technology, the open source, the adoption we’ve seen so far indicates that it’s on a path to scale very broadly.”

He told an anecdote of a manufacturer coming into his office last week and putting 18 different devices on his desk that were running Android.

“I’d never met or talked to the company before, so… the way Android is distributed will continue to delight us over time, and Android will be put in things we never even imagined possible.”

Meanwhile, development of the operating system continues apace – the current version is codenamed Cupcake and the alphabetical baking roadmap is laid out through Donut, Éclair and as far as Flan.

Mr Rubin said making the operating system more social was the subject of a big push at the moment.

“We want to push social down into every experience on the phone,” he said, giving the example of receiving a phone call and seeing a friend’s picture and their latest status update on Facebook on the screen as the phone rings.

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July 10, 2009 10:14pm in Internet, Mobile, Software | Comment

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