Andy Rubin is no longer working on the Android project at Google but, at least for now, is still part of the organization — see his parting email here courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. The good news is that Sundar Pichai is going to be in charge of Android, but the bad news is that he is the head of Chrome / Chrome OS (referring to Chrome and Chrome OS by simply Chrome going forward) and the departments seem to be doing something of a merge; or at the very least the distinct positions of Android head and Chrome head have been merged into one. The question is what does this mean for Android and, more importantly, what does this mean for Android developers and Chrome developers?
First off, let’s face the hard truth about Android it. It is quickly spinning out of Google’s control; one one end Samsung basically has a monopoly on the high end Android device market and on the other there are tons of Asian manufacturers taking Android and slapping it on sub-par devices, further diluting the brand. Chrome, however, is 100% Google. Sure, there is the Chromium open-source project, but guess who sponsors and, for all intents and purposes, controls that? That’s right, Google. Open might be a great marketing term, but let’s be real, it’s a lot easier to monetize an operating system that you control.
Many of you may not necessary agree that Google would be interested in maintaining control of Android, but it is hard to argue that Chrome isn’t more in line with Google’s goal of a web based world built in HTML and related technologies. It’s called synergy, baby! You don’t need an MBA to see that Android (aka glorified Java) is not exactly in line with an HTML future. If only Google had a web based operating system it could focus on…. As web development technologies continue to evolve and become more capable for developing full featured applications with rich experiences, Android will become increasingly less important to Google.
My guess is that the conversion will start slow. Perhaps Google will start to push Chrome apps for the Android version of Chrome. Maybe in a year, when those rumored Google stores start to show, we’ll see a Chrome for Mobile “developer phone.” Regardless of the conversion starts, my bet is that within the next five years Google will start publically pushing Chrome as its next generation operating system. In fact, I think it would move faster, and probably had plans to, but is being thwarted but regions with little or poor connectivity — this is a particular issue in large portions of the United States.
The good news is that, overall, developers stand to do well in this scenario. Android developers have little to fear from Google, since Android is largely beyond Google’s control at this point; if Google ever stopped supporting it, hardware manufacturers, chiefly Samsung, have enough riding on the OS to keep some sort maintenance and development effort going. Google’s focus on Chrome will be a boon for web developers. Sure there was WebOS, a good and severely underrated web focused mobile OS from HP, and there will be FireFox OS, but it’s going to take a bit of muscle that HP and Mozilla didn’t have, in the case of HP, and will never have, in the case of Mozilla.
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