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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

Steve Jobs’ amateur sleuthing last night brought up that gorgeous TweetDeck chart showing the vast variety of Android handsets out there, which the Apple CEO used to illustrate the “daunting challenge” he perceives developers have to face when creating apps that work across all devices and OS builds for the platform. Only problem with his assertion (aside from Steve calling the company TwitterDeck)? His opposite number on the TweetDeck team thinks nothing could be further from the truth: “we only have 2 guys developing on Android TweetDeck so that shows how small an issue fragmentation is.” So that’s Andy Rubin and Iain Dodsworth, any other company chief interested in taking Jobs down a notch?

Continue reading TweetDeck CEO continues backlash against Jobs

TweetDeck CEO continues backlash against Jobs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The last time Steve Jobs got on an earnings call, it was to reassure investors that he was in good health. So what made him spend an hour taking questions today? Here’s what Jobs said, and what it means. More »

Steve Jobs hit today’s earnings call with the power of words. In a tone that could be described as “righteous anger” or perhaps just “reppin,” Steve launched into a five minute rant that hit hard against RIM’s entire business model, Android sales numbers and software fragmentation, and the impending wave of Android tablets. With the iPhone surpassing RIM, Steve says that he “[doesn’t] see them catching up in the foreseeable future.” As for Android sales, Steve takes issues with the market share figures that are currently floating around, saying that 275k iOS devices were activated on average per day last month, compared to Android’s most recent estimate of 250k per day — though he does admit that Android outshipped iPhone in the June quarter, during the “transition” to iPhone 4. That wasn’t Steve’s only problem with Android, he takes major issue with the fragmentation and the onus he believes it puts on the user: “we believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

Oh, and 7-inch tablets? You’re in for a bag of hurt. Steve pretty much outright killed any potential for 7-inch iPad rumors, saying that the software just isn’t right for that size (“This size is useless unless you include sandpaper so users can sand their fingers down to a quarter of their size.”), and that users have no need for a pocket sized tablet when they already have a smartphone. He called the iPad’s upcoming competition in the space “DOA.” After he calmed down a bit, the call entered a Q&A period, where Steve was happy to point out that the iPad has already surpassed Macintosh in sales, and that it’s going to affect laptop computers: “it’s not if, it’s when.” We’ll get a copy of the audio and put it up as soon as possible… like most CEO outbursts, this is not one to be missed. Hit up our liveblog of the call for a bit more context, and you can try the source link for Apple’s stream of the entire earnings shindig.

Update: We just ripped the first part of the call, which featured Steve’s prepared remarks — we’ll have an edited version of the Q&A session in just a bit.

Update 2: And here’s an edited version of the Q&A with just Jobs’s answers — hit the source link for Apple’s archive of the whole thing with Peter and Tim’s answers as well.

Update 3: And just for the completists out there, here’s an MP3 of both segments combined.

Steve Jobs drops knowledge on earnings call: calls out Google and RIM, says 7-inch tablets are ‘DOA’ (Update: complete Jobs audio!) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Oct 2010 18:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg best friends forever? I might be jumping the gun a bit here, but let’s face it, when two of the highest profile Silicon Valley start having dinner and taking walks together, people are going to start talking–it’s only natural.

Whatever the case, it’s nice to see the duo put aside petty fights like the battle to the top of Forbes’s richest person list.

Jobs reportedly invited to his home in Palo Alto a few weeks back, in order to discuss Apple’s new iTunes-based social networking service, Ping. A bystander reported caught the two men taking a walk around Jobs’s home.

Introduced early last month, the response to Ping thus far has been fairly lukewarm, in spite of the app’s integration into Apple’s wildly popular music service. The absence of a partnership with a site like Facebook was fairly conspicuous at the music social network’s launch during Apple’s iPod event.

Zuckerberg, consider yourself poked.