One of the things that sets Google Android apart from other mobile operating systems is the fact that dozens of phone and tablet makers can load the open source OS on their devices. And Google doesn’t stop them from customizing the look and feel of the operating system, which is why phones with Samsung TouchWiz, Motorola Motoblur, and HTC Sense can look so different from one another even if they’re all running Android 2.3.

Google has no plans to stop companies from developing custom skins — but with Android 4.0 Google is trying to give developers the tools to make sure their apps look the same across all devices no matter what skins they’re running.

Right now if an app relies on a device’s default skin it could look very different on a Samsung device than an HTC device. That leads to an inconsisten user experience and makes it much harder for developers to extensively test their apps before releasing them.

Google is insisting that all devices that ship with Android 4.0 and the Google Android Market should also include the Holo themes.

That’s not to say that you’ll necessarily see the Holo themes all the time. Your phone could still have a TouchWiz or Sense user interface. But under the hood the Holo elements will be there — and that will allow developers to call on Holo widget styles so that their apps will look the same no matter what device you’re running them on.

Basically if you buy a device Android 4.0 and up that has the Android Market installed, you can be certain that Holo is also installed. Theoretically that means that apps you download from the Android Market should support these design elements.

But it will be up to developers to decide if and how to use the new Holo theme, which means that it could take a while before all apps really do look the same across all Android devices. In fact, it may never happen.

There are currently 400,000 apps in the Android Market, and it’s likely that some will never be updated. Some developers may also prefer to skip the Holo theme and use other tools to design the look and feel of their apps.

In other words, Android’s so-called fragmentation problem isn’t going away anytime soon. Your Android experience on one device could be very different from another person’s if they’re using a different device. But Google is taking at least one step to make it possible for developers to at least provide a consistent experience for their users.

Google has rolled out an update to the Android Market which allows developers to upload multiple APK files for a single app listing. That means instead of creating separate listings for multiple versions of an app designed to run on different devices, developers can create a single listing.

In other words, when you go to download the latest version of Dungeon Defenders, Fruit Ninja, or any other app, the Market will be able to determine what kind of phone or tablet you’re using and send you the correct version.

Up until now, if you wanted to download a game, for instance, that was optimized for devices with NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual core processors you had to download the THD version of the app. Then if you went to get the same game for another device you’d have to search the Android Market for the non-Tegra version of the app.

For free apps, that’s not a big problem. But if it’s a paid app that could mean you would have to pay for the same app twice if you wanted to use it on your phone and tablet. Support for multiple APK files could eliminate that problem… once developers start to make use of the new Market feature.

This also means developers that had been trying to code a single app that would work across a wide range of devices an instead create multiple versions and upload them all to the Android Market. In some cases that might be easier than writing an app that’s designed to work on devices with a wide range of screen sizes or processor types.

There are currently only a few hundred Android apps designed specifically for tablets running Google Android 3.0 or higher. But there are hundreds of thousands of apps for Android smartphones and most of them actually look halfway decent on tablets with higher resolution screens. Some don’t though.

I’ve run across a few apps that simply refuse to stretch to fit the 1280 x 800 pixel screens on tablet such as the Motorola XOOM or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, instead hanging out in tiny windows.

Soon Google is going to offer users a tool to force those apps to fill your tablet display. Basically you’ll see a button on the bottom of your screen whenever you’re running an app that isn’t designed for Honeycomb tablets. It will allow you to either “stretch” or “zoom” to fill the screen. Stretch mode is the default, but if that doesn’t work, the new zoom option will run the app in an emulated mode and scale it up to fit the screen.

Apps will look a little more pixelated when you use this mode, but it sure beats running them in a tiny window on your 10 inch tablet.

Google appears to be rolling out a new Android Market feature which lets you know whether an app is compatible with your hardware. This feature kind of seems like a no-brainer, since there are so many different Android devices on the market with different hardware and different versions of the Android operating system. But up until now the quickest way to find out for certain whether an app would work on your device was to download it and try it.

Some Android apps require a certain version of Android. Others work best on phones or tablets with certain CPU or graphics capabilities. There are also a number of apps in the Android Market which only work on rooted devices — but I’d be kind of surprised if Google checks to see if your device is rooted before letting you know whether you can run apps such as ROM Manager, ShootMe, or Titanium Backup Pro.

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Google’s Android operating system has long been portrayed as the “open” alternative to Apple iOS and most other mobile operating systems. While Google typically works on new versions of Android behind closed doors, the company also typically releases the source code to device makers and the public at some point, allowing anyone to customize the operating system and use it how they see fit, free of charge. But according to DigiTimes and Business Week that may be changing.

We’ve already seen Google delay the release of the source code for Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb, in part to prevent device makers from porting the tablet-friendly operating systems to smartphones since it’s not really designed for that platform. But the company has been working with some hardware makers including Motorola to grant early access to Honeycomb in order to bring tablets to market. The new reports suggest that if companies want early access to Honeycomb and other new versions of Android, they’ll need to agree to “non-fragmentation” stipulations that allow Google to decide whether to allow proposed modifications.

That could mean that device makers will either have to run all of their design decisions by Google or delay the launch of their products by several months or more. That doesn’t sound very “open,” does it?

Meanwhile, the DigiTimes report suggests that Google may be working with chip designer ARM on a standard platform for Android tablets. In other words, if you don’t have supported hardware, you may not be able to run Android. Of course, once the source code is released, there’s little stopping anyone from recompiling it to run on officially unsupported hardware. But there’s no telling at this point when the Honeycomb source code will be available to the public.

It’s worth noting that both the Business Week and DigiTimes articles are based on interviews with unnamed sources, so you might want to take everything with a grain of salt. It’s also worth noting that if everything stated in the articles it’s certainly a slap in the face to the open source community — but not necessarily to the average user.

The move would represent Google’s attempt to provide a more standardized Android experience across devices, which could make it easier to market Android tablets and phones as true alternatives to Apple’s iPad and iPhone models. Right now, it’s not really enough to compare operating systems — you also have to compare the hardware. A $200 Archos Arnova 10 isn’t going to provide the same kind of user experience as a $600 Motorola XOOM. In the future though, the performance gap might not be as big.

via SlashGear

Google Android is the fastest growing operating system for smartphones. Dozens of phones are available with the free and open source operating system preloaded, and Google says more than 60,000 Android handsets are shipping each day. But there’s a bit of a problem for some consumers: There are four different versions of Android, and while some are obviously newer than others, you can buy a brand new phone today with Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, or 2.1.

What that means is that some features which are available on a phone like the Google Nexus One from HTC aren’t available on the Motorola Droid. And some Droid features aren’t available on the T-Mobile MyTouch. And so on.

What’s more, some applications from the Android Market will only run on phones with the latest version of the operating system — and that can cause a frustrating experience for anyone that goes out and buys a new Android phone and then wonders why it can’t do everything that their friends’ phone can.

Google is aware of this problem, and according to Engadget, the company has a solution. Clearly, Google can’t demand that all smartphone makers and wireless carriers drop older versions of Android in favor of new ones — this is what happens when you don’t build your own equipment the way Apple does. But Google does build many of the best apps for Android. And that’s where the company still has some control.

Engadget reports that Google is going to separate some of the core functions of the operating system into downloadable apps. That way users will be able to get the latest goodies from Google from the Android Market without waiting for their wireless provider to offer an operating system update.

For instance, Google recently launched a utility called Gesture Search that lets you search your phone by drawing letters with your finger. This is the sort of feature that could easily have been built into the OS. But by offering it as a standalone application, Google was able to easily offer Gesture Search to Android 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1 users. As far as I know, it’s still not available for Android 1.5 — which suggests that there are still some minimum requirements for this application.

With that in mind, Engadget suggests that Google will focus on unbundling some of its core apps in the next few versions of Android — which means existing Android users might not reap all the benefits. But if you buy a phone running the Froyo or Gingerbread flavors of Google Android in the future, you might not have to worry so much about whether your wireless carrier will offer timely software updates — because if Google pushes out a new software keyboard, an updated version of the phone dialer, or Google Earth, you may just be able to download them from the Android Market.