Hasta La Gadget!

Two prominent Android enthusiasts aren’t taking Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ tirade against the Android mobile operating system lying down.

Iain Dodsworth, the CEO of TweetDeck, and Andy Rubin, the brains leading the Android OS development, have both refuted Jobs’ claims about the effect of fragmentation on users and developers because of Android’s open source philosophy.

“Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t,” tweeted Dodsworth Monday evening after hearing Jobs say that “Twitter Deck” faced a major problem with fragmentation.

“A Twitter client, Twitter Deck recently launched their App for Android,” Job told analysts on the conference call. “They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets.”

Dodsworth is not the only one rebutting Jobs’ strange trash-talking of Android. Android creator Rubin took to twitter to post his first tweet, a coded message to Jobs:

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”

Those are the commands needed to compile Android on a home Linux machin–a way for Rubin to emphasize that anyone can take Android and play with it.

Since it debut in 2008, Android has grown into a major operating system, gathering support from phone manufacturers and wireless carriers. Android is now the most popular operating system among people who bought a smartphone in the past six months, while Blackberry RIM and Apple iOS are in a statistical dead heat for second place among recent acquirers, according to August data from The Nielsen Company.

With its rapid growth, Android could eclipse Apple’s iOS and iPhone. It may be one reason why Jobs seemed to launch in to what seems like a long rant against Android.

“We think Android is very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day, and as you know, Apple strives for the integrated model so that the user isn’t forced to be the systems integrator,” told Jobs. (You can listen to the entire conference call here.)

But data shows Android fragmentation, caused by the different versions of the Android operating system on devices, is on the decline. The Android OS is coalescing around three major flavors: Android 1.5, aka Cupcake; Android 1.6, or Donut; and Android 2.1, nicknamed Eclair. As of June, almost half of all Android devices ran on Eclair.

Still Jobs tried to convince listeners of the superiority of iPhone’s walled garden, tight control approach over Android’s open philosophy.

We also think our developers can be more innovative if they can target a singular platform rather than 100 variants. They can put their time into innovative new features rather than testing on hundreds of different handsets, so we are very committed to the integrated approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as closed. And we are confident that it will triumph over Google’s fragmented approach, no matter how many times Google tries to characterize it as open.

Developers such as Dodsworth disagree. Dodsworth tweeted his company has just two developers working on the Android app.

“That shows how small an issue fragmentation is,” he says.

See Also:

• Why Windows Phone 7 Will Make Android Look Chaotic
• Bloatware Creeps Into Android Phones
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• Everything We Know So Far About Amazon’s Android App Store

It’s almost Halloween, kiddies. Do you have your spooky stories ready for telling around the campfire? If you need a little help, take inspiration from this doozy told by Grant Castle, a Director at T-Mobile USA. It was submitted to the FCC way back in January and as a sort of written protest against “risky and unnecessary” net neutrality rules. He tells the tale of an undisclosed IM app that caused the network of an undisclosed city to go offline due to its too-frequent polling to check for updates. T-Mo engineers had to reach out to that app’s developer and get him to change its code, saving the company’s towers from the program’s thousands of users. There’s no telling which of the company’s many outages were caused by the app that wouldn’t die (shriek), but we’d sure hate to think that any members of the FCC are losing sleep over this saga of corporate woe.

T-Mobile director scares the FCC with a chilling tale: ‘The IM App that Killed Our Network’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, we’re maybe jumping the gun here–there’s no little blue and white checkmark next to his name, but TechCrunch seems pretty confident that @arubin is, in fact, Andy Rubin, Google’s VP of Engineering and the head of Android, having “confirmed with a couple of people in the know” that it is indeed him.

The fascinating thing, however, isn’t the fact that Rubin is on Twitter–there are plenty of execs and other prominent folk on the micro-blogging site. Rather, it’s the fact that the former Danger CEO used his first tweet to take a jab at Steve Jobs, who, as mentioned before, crashed an Apple earnings meeting to say some mean things about Google’s Android and all of this talk of software openness.

Rubin’s tweet is as follows,

the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make

Our lead mobile analyst Sascha Segan has graciously agreed to translate the above geek speak for the rest of us,

Rubin’s tweet lists the commands needed to start compiling a copy of Android on your home Linux machine. He’s emphasizing that anyone can develop for, hack, and even create their own version of Android. The irony, of course, is that Jobs would probably consider that a negative – Apple likes the uniformity of iOS. Rubin’s declaration of openness also overlooks that some consumers don’t have the freedom to hack their retail devices because of choices made by their wireless carriers and mobile-phone manufacturers.

Rubin hasn’t added anything since that first tweet posted about seven hours ago. We don’t mind. So far he’s battling 1,000.

There’s something about the idea of Steve Jobs just “dropping by” on an Apple earnings call that I really appreciate. As though the multi-billionaire world-famous executive just sort of crashed the party because he had a few things that he really wanted to get off his chest.

What makes the whole Jobs’s appearance on last night’s Apple call really strange is the fact that the Apple chief is notorious for not really do doing a heck of a lot of talking outside of choreographed keynotes and the occasional ill-advised e-mail to an Apple customer or irate journalist.

“Hi, everybody,” Jobs told the press, apparently just sort of crashing the event. “As most of you know, I usually don’t participate in Apple earnings calls, since you’re in such capable hands with Peter [Oppenheimer] and Tim [Cook]. But I just couldn’t help dropping by for our first $20 billion quarter. I would like to chat about a few things, and stay for the rest of the Q&A, if that’s all right.”

I mean, um, I guess it’s all right, if you think it’s all right, Steve.

It’s common knowledge that the first words uttered by any nerd are “hello world.” That is, unless some CEO starts bad-mouthing your open-source motivations. Google’s Andy Rubin — the father of Android, as it were — just uttered his first words on Twitter with the tweet you see above. From the looks of it, Andy (assuming this is him, the account is not “verified”) is demonstrating how easy it is for anyone to download and compile the latest build of Android. Presumably Jobs will now join Twitter with a response like, “The definition of closed: shut up.”

Andy Rubin responds to Steve Jobs with a coded tweet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 05:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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