Android Honeycomb – Not Open sourced

Android latest Operating System which is Android 3.0.1 which is more popularly known as Honeycomb would not be open source. Honeycomb is one of the most awaited Operating System from Google. It is exclusively designed by Google for tablets.

According to Bloomberg, the source code will not be out in any time soon. If the source code is available then the developer of applications can play and experiment with the Operating System. But Google’s reasoning behind not giving out the source code is to prevent ruining of experience of Honeycomb Operating System to its consumers.

google honeycomb android opensource illustration review specification

According to Andy Rubin, who is vice president for engineering at Google and head of Android Group, – “To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs. 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 said that if they did give out the source code for Honeycomb like all other versions of Android, then it would enable smaller hardware makers and software developers to put theair software on phones and creating a really bad user experience. We have no idea if it will even work on phones.”

The story doesn’t end there itself. Google told their manufacturing partners that Google would also not release any source code and the next version of Android would be “I” version. This means that it would put an end to all tablet third party development running Honeycomb.

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