Google Android: Open OS odyssey, or overreach?
Several people asked me about the implications of Google’s launch of Android this week. Here’s my take on it.
- Google is finding it hard to replicate its successful desktop search model in the mobile world.
- One of the big barriers, as Google see it, is the continued presence of walled gardens erected by the mobile operators which interfere with Google’s ability to reach out to consumers directly with an optimised search experience.
- Another key barrier Google sees is a lack of understanding by handset manufacturers of what it takes to truly turn the handset into a useful mobile internet device.
- Google see a more capable mobile browser across the widest possible range of handsets as a key enabler for better mobile search. Not just on high end devices like the iPhone and N95, but right across the handset market.
- Android is an initiative that if successful would break down a number of these barriers in one fell swoop.
Will Android be successful? I wouldn’t completely rule it out, but I remain cautious…
Not very much has been said about exactly what Android contains and what it doesn’t contain. Does it have a complete user interface layer? Does it integrate a full set of phone applications (SMS, MMS, IM etc)? Does it include a 3G protocol stack? The lack of a complete solution would make it very expensive to bring an Android handset to market compared to Symbian and Microsoft.
From a technical perspective Google’s platform reminds me of Savaje (US-based mobile OS startup, now defunct) and the operator-led Open Mobile Terminal Platform Alliance (Java-based OS, initially implemented on HTC devices).
With the OMTP Alliance, the operators wanted to weaken the grip of Nokia and Microsoft on the phone OS, and get control over the user experience. Google’s Open Handset Alliance is an attempt to build similar industry support, but has notably fewer operators participating.
Getting a new OS into significant volume i.e. 10s of millions of new handsets is a massive engineering undertaking. Are Google resourced to deliver this? They have plenty of software engineers, but not too many mobile software engineers.
Android is an initiative without a business model. In my experience, these kinds of strategic initiatives don’t get sustained unless the business model is clearly defined.
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November 13th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
I watched the intro video and it appears that the gphone prototype does do 3G, uses webkit based web browser (gee, thanks, Apple!); it talks about telephony apps, but doesn’t really go into them, only really demonstrating an SMS function. If Google had more to show, they would have done, so I think so far it’s a mobile web browser with suite of libraries that run on linux.
I predict that the $10M bounty will stir up a lot of amateur developers to get some apps out there in the hope of winning a share.
The community opensource mobile phone has already been tried, in the form of OpenMoko, and though it’s achieving some success, results have been much slower than hoped for. The alternative, to port Linux to an existing hardware platform has also not been particularly quick: the much lusted after HTC Universal has taken a long time to reverse engineer in order to get linux working well enough.
The handheld/mobile linux space is quite fragmented, there are perhaps too many variations of user interface software toolkits (Qt/Qtopia in various forms, Opie - a Qtopia derivative, GPE, Hildon/Maemo from Nokia Tablet, OpenMoko, and others) which have caused development efforts perhaps to be spread too thinly?
I welcome the Google initiative. Palm have floundered badly, Symbian/S60/UIQ has too many issues on high end smartphones, and pocketPC/windowsMobile/winCE is locked down preventing fair use of media files by the user and rendering older devices quickly obsolete.
November 19th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
[...] the component nature of the new mobile OS from Google. On the other hand Steve Ives of Taptology discusses the implications of Android on the mobile market. James Pearce of Tripleodeon provides his coverage of [...]