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By Rob Garretson
Google plans to slow down its Android development cycle and release just one major upgrade to the platform every year, according to Andy Rubin, the executive who spearheads the mobile operating system for Google.
Rubin, VP of mobile platforms, acknowledged in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News that Google was playing catch up when it released the first version of Android 18 months ago -- to relatively lackluster reviews -- and that its rapid pace of enhancements and new versions has created challenges for carriers and phone manufacturers.
"Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end up being once a year when things start settling down," Rubin said. "Because a platform that's moving – it's hard for developers to keep up. I want developers to basically leverage the innovation. I don't want developers to have to predict the innovation."
Initially, Google needed its rapid Android development cycle to gain on Apple's iPhone OS and RIM's Blackberry. But despite the struggle of application developers and device manufacturers to keep pace, the platform has recently hit its stride and is making solid inroads into both the smartphone and the awakening tablet PC market.
According to Google, there are now more than 60 different Android devices on the market, with roughly 100,000 Android-based phones activated each day. And the latest devices that do incorporate the most recent Android OS 2.1 OS release, such as the HTC Droid Incredible sold by Verizon and Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G, are getting solid reviews and have closed the gap on Apple's popular iPhone.
“We've gone through a lot of product iterations because we had to bring the product up to market spec,” Rubin acknowledged. “Quite honestly, the product … didn't really feel like a 1.0; it felt like kind of an 0.8, but it was a window of opportunity and the market needed an entrant at the holiday season.”
Google has released six major iterations of the Android platform, including the 2.2 version Google introduced at last week at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco.
In a recent post to its Web site, Sony Ericsson said four models of its Xperia touch-screen smartphone won't be upgraded to Android 2.1 until the fourth quarter of this year and gave no indication that the devices will be upgraded to the current 2.2 release.
The newest Android OS version includes a slew of enhancements geared toward the enterprise, such as support for Microsoft Exchange, APIs for developers that support cloud-based data backup and a messaging service that allows applications to more easily share information.
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