[Android] Google Locking Down On Openness?

Recently, people are complaining about the Honeycomb Source Code not released. According to Andy Rubin, the reason of not releasing the source code is to prevent devs from putting it on phones, which could possibly lead to really bad user experience. Well if you ask me, this is a really good reason.

I have been using Android (the Nexus One) for over a year now. I love the phone, the OS. But to be honest, sometimes I just feel that there seems to be some rough edges in the whole user experience. I believe this is mainly caused by rogue apps, unoptimized codes in apps, apps that might not work well with the latest version of Android OS, and possibly lots of other reasons in the OS itself. From my point of view, this is a good move from Andy Rubin, not releasing something that they think would not be a smooth and optimized experience for users that might flash Honeycomb from community devs. I do hope that one day, Android would reach the stage that the Hardware and Software integration would be near perfect as seen on Iphones. (don't hate me, but this is true in my books)


In a related news, there's a “non-fragmentation clause” to be adhered by Android phone manufacturers. This really means a lot to the Android World! Fantastic! I'm not really a fan of custom manufacturer UIs like Sense, Blur, etc. One, they slow the whole darn phone down, second, it just adds to the fragmentation!! I mean I love some parts of Sense, but overall its just not worth it if this "skin" overlay UI hogs your phone's memory. The problem with Android is there's no real GPU acceleration, up till Honeycomb. I'm not sure even with Honeycomb, these manufacturers are able to integrate it properly with the UIs. 


So yeah, Google isn't really giving up on Openness in my opinion, they're just trying to make things better by having a bit more "quality control" on what should be the standards.