Google Android boss Andy Rubin just let the world know that more than half a million Android devices are activated every day. That number includes smartphones and tablets and comes just about 2 months after Google announced that more than 100 million devices have been activated over the last few years.

The activation number is a little tricky, because it doesn’t tell you how many devices are actually in use. But if you wanted to pretend that nobody ever discarded or replaced an Android device, at the current rate about 6.7 billion Android devices would be activated in another 37 years — that would be enough devices for every single person on earth today. Of course that number is also kind of meaningless, both because the population will be larger in 37 years and because the Android growth rate is actually continuing to accelerate. Oh yeah, and because I doubt we’ll ever reach a point where every person on earth actually has an Android device.

Still, half a million per day is a pretty big number for a mobile platform that first hit the streets in late 2008.

via The Next Web

Google Android boss Andy Rubin has finally made it clear: Google Android 3.x Honeycomb source code will not be released to the public. The company has been making the source code available to some tablet manufacturers, but while source code for all earlier versions of Android were eventually added to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), Google has no plans to the same with Honeycomb.

Instead, we’ll have to wait until the 4th quarter of the year when Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich is released. That will be the first version of Android designed to run on tablets, Google TV devices, and phones.

The problem is that Google doesn’t think Honeycomb is well suited for smartphones and rather than trust that device makers and hackers will figure that out for themselves or write code to make up for any problems, Google is only making the code available to companies developing tablets which meet Google’s specifications.

That hasn’t stopped hackers from grabbing code from the Android Software Developer Kit for Honeycomb and porting a version of the operating system to run on existing products. But since the source code hasn’t been publicly released, hackers and independent developers don’t have the kind of deep system access required to really do things right.

Just to be clear — Google isn’t required to released the source code for Android. The operating system is based on open source code, but it doesn’t bear the type of license that requires all code to be shared with the public, and as Andy Rubin points out, there’s a difference between open source projects and community-driven projects. Android has always been one of the former.

If it seems like every few months Google launches a new version of Android, thus rendering your 6-month old phone at least partially obsolete, that’s because that’s exactly what’s been happening since Android first hit the scene in late 2008. In less than 2 years, we’ve gone from Android 1.5 to 1.6 to 2.1, and Android 2.2 is just around the corner.

Of course, we’ve seen some pretty stellar improvements in that time. The newer versions of Android are prettier, faster, and more stable. New features like USB tethering and portable WiFi hotspot are coming in Android 2.2, and I wouldn’t really recommend we go backward. But it’s a bit tough to be happy with your purchase when you buy an Android handset only to find out that it will be months before it can run the latest updates — if your mobile phone company or hardware maker ever offers them.

Eventually Google hopes to do away with that pain. Andy Rubin is the Google vice president in charge of Android, and he recently told the folks at the Silicon Valley Mercury News that instead of releasing 2 major updates per year, Google eventually hopes to move to one major release per year.

That should cut back on the fragmented nature of the Android platform a bit. Right now you can walk into a store and buy a device running Android 1.5, 1.6, or 2.1 Hopefully moving updates to an annual schedule will result in older devices fading gracefully away and giving new ones time to shine in the spotlight without too many agitated users complaining that the latest software won’t run on the device they bought just this year.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll only get new features and apps from Google once a year. Google has already described plans to separate some core apps from the operating system so that you’ll be able to download updates to apps like the contact manager or gallery app from the Android Market as soon as they’re available.

via TechCrunch

Google Vice President Andy Rubin sat down with Brad Stone from the New York Times recently for an in-depth talk about Google Android. There’s not a lot of news in the resulting article, but it does make for an interesting read if you want to know how Rubin responds to Apple boss Steve Jobs’ comments that if you want porn on your phone, you should get an Android phone.

But Rubin does confirm one thing: Adobe Flash will be available in Google Android 2.2 Froyo when it’s released later this year. It’s not entirely clear if phones running earlier versions of Android will get Flash, but we’ve at least seen a few developer previews of phones running Flash without Froyo.

Unfortunately, the one question I most want answered doesn’t appear to have come up: Why can’t you access the Android Market on non-phone tablets? We’ve seen some tablets such as the Archos 5 Internet Tablet hacked to include access to the market, but out of the box, the Android Market is only available on phones, which limits the utility of Android tablets.