????I used to think that, as with Linux and web services in the early part of last decade, Android was going to be the mortar for the Internet of post-PC devices— an essential ingredient to put stuff together. And unlike Linux which puttered away quietly in the background doing the heavy lifting for services like Amazon and Google, Android was largely user-facing and would therefore benefit from massive platform scale (and the resulting de-facto standard it would create) in a way no piece of software since Microsoft Windows had. To to see the early onslaught of CES announcements, one would think so.
????What all of the talk of Android momentum and inevitability obscures, however, is that the dream of a common Android is dying. Three events in 2011 burned it and we're now holding onto a charred corpse that is quite different:
????The three events:
????1. Google buying Motorola and alienating all of the tier one handset makers (none of which to this day have the spine to state it publicly but all of which have now come up with their "plan B"),
????2. Microsoft extracting licensing fees from these same handset makers in the form of IP indemnification and
????3. Amazon shipping a wildly successful, yet unidentifiable, version of an old Android build over the holiday... and making it a wild success.
????Of the the three, #1 was completely avoidable but the other two may just have been the name of the game when there is so much at stake in the fight of who paints the interface for the next generation of computing.
????The result of this elephant dance? Well it depends on who you are:
????Web heads: All of the HTML5 folks should be ecstatic as it means that we're going to see a resurgence in startups that target the emerging Android splinters with interfaces which leave the heavy lifting on the deployment side to the the web (see the bit about how the Kindle Fire blocked the Google Market and vice versa for why) and on the runtime side to the mobile browser. It won't be as nice -- and in the short-term and it will lack access to key device sensors (though it may accelerate our getting those as API extensions of the DOM) -- but it is just not feasible to support iOS, Googlorola Android, HTC Sensedroid, Amazon Fire Droid, etc. if you are a startup. Big win for this emerging standard.
????Users: Remember the olden days when the carriers were in charge and you got whatever they were serving for dinner? Well we aren't ever going back to that but I can't help remember a conversation I had with the head of product for a U.S. carrier last year at Mobile World Congress where he told me that their ideal world was "5-10 platforms with 10-20% each." Why? Because in that mess someone has to help the user figure it all out and they are back to being in a pole position. I'm not sure they'll pull it off, but device OS fragmentation definitely gives them another at-bat and if there is one thing these guys have proven it is that preloads work magic to overcome totally busted user experiences.
