Android 3.0.1 aka Honeycomb has been one of the most awaited operating system and will be launched in upcoming tablets, and soon in smart phones. The anticipation for developers is the source code availability so that they can experiment with the OS. However, this might not happen at all. According to Bloomberg, the source code will not be out any time soon. Google’s reasoning behind this is that they don’t want smaller development teams ruining the Honeycomb experience.
An article on Bloomberg said:
It’s the throngs of smaller hardware makers and software developers that will now have to wait for the software. The delay will probably be several months. “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs,” says Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group. “We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.”
It’s the throngs of smaller hardware makers and software developers that will now have to wait for the software. The delay will probably be several months. “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs,” says Andy Rubin, vice-president for engineering at Google and head of its Android group. “We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.”
Rubin says that if Google were to open-source the Honeycomb code now, as it has with other versions of Android at similar periods in their development, it couldn’t prevent developers from putting the software on phones “and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones.”
Oh and this doesn’t end here, they also said that Google has told their manufacturing partners that Google will not release the source code and instead the next open-source version of Android will be the “I” version. Meaning, that it will put an end to all third-party development for tablets running Honeycomb.