Andy Rubin on Android

If you don’t know the name Andy Rubin, you should.  Currently Vice President of Engineering at Google, he’s also a former CEO of Android as well as one of the co-founders. Needless to say, if he’s talking about Android, you want to listen.  As our luck would have it,  Mr. Rubin did some talking with the New York Times tech blog Bits last week.  While the article is light on juicy tidbits coming down the pipe, it’s still an interesting read on the philosophies of the our Android creator.

We already know Flash is coming to Android, we just don’t know when. It is clear however Flash will be standard in the upcoming version 2.2, nicknamed Froyo, as Andy was quoted as saying it will be “built-in.”

Mr. Rubin also spoke a bit on Android and Google being open-source:

Mr. Rubin also addressed many other topics — like whether consumers actually care if their mobile phone software is “open” or not. He insisted that they would, comparing closed computing platforms to totalitarian governments that deprived their citizens of choice. “When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea,” he said….“We use the same tools we expect our third-party developers to,” Mr. Rubin said. “We have an SDK we give to developers. and when we write our Gmail app, we use the same SDK. A lot of guys have private APIs. We don’t. That’s on policy and on technology. If there’s a secret API to hook into billing system we open up that billing system to third parties. If there’s a secret API to allow application multitasking, we open it up. There are no secret APIs. That is important to highlight for Android sake. Open is open and we live by our own implementations.”

There are also the unavoidable questions about Apple and Android, a subject which provokes much discussions from everyone of not only their differences, but similarities as well. Rest assured though, there is nothing to fear should you ever stumble on an Android prototype:

At the end of the hourlong chat, I joked with Mr. Rubin that his press relations colleague, who was in the room, wanted to confess that he had left a prototype Android phone at a local bar.

“I’d be happy if that happened and someone wrote about it,” Mr. Rubin said. “With openness comes less secrets.”

You can read the full article at the New York Times blog Bits.

[Source New York Times]