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been a true open source project, a public mailing list archive would exist where all this
information, or pointers to it, would be available.
That being said, it's important to remember how significant a contribution Google is
making by distributing Android under an open source license. Despite its awkward
development model from an open source community perspective, it remains that Goo-
gle's work on Android is a godsend for a large number of developers. Plus, it has ac-
complished one thing no other open source projects was ever able to: create a massively
successful Linux distribution. It would, therefore, be hard to fault Android's develop-
ment team for their work.
Furthermore, it can easily be argued that from a business and go-to-market perspective
a community-driven process would definitely knock the wind out of any product an-
nouncements Google would attempt to release, making it impossible to create "buzz"
around press announcements and the like since every new feature would be developed
in the open. That is to say nothing of the non-deterministic nature of community-driven
processes that can see a group of people take years to agree on the best way to implement
a given feature set. And, simply based on track record, Android's success has definitely
benefited from Google's ability to rapidly move it forward and generate press interest
based on releases of cool new products.
Feature Inclusion, Roadmaps, and New Releases
In brief, there is no publicly available roadmap for features and capabilities in future
Android releases. At best, Google will announce ahead of time the name and approx-
imate release date of the next version. Usually, you can expect a new Android release
to be made in time for the Google I/O conference, which is typically held in May, and
another release by year end. What will be in that release, though, is anyone's guess.
Typically, however, Google will choose a single manufacturer to work with on the next
Android release. During that period, Google will work very closely with that single
manufacturer's engineers to ready up the next Android version to work on a targeted
upcoming flagship device. During that period, the manufacturer's team is reported to
have access to the tip of the development branch. Once the device is put on the market,
the corresponding source code dump is made to the public repositories. For the next
release, they choose another manufacturer and start over.
There is one notable exception to that cycle: Android 3.x/Honeycomb. In that specific
case, Google has not released the source code to the corresponding flagship product,
the Motorola Xoom, and all indications suggest that that code may never be publicly
available. The rationale in this case seems to be that the Android development team
essentially forked the Android code-base at some point in time in order to start working
on getting a tablet-ready version of Android out ASAP based on market timing prerog-
atives. Hence, in that version, very little regard was made to preserving backward com-
patibility with the phone form-factor. And given that, Google did not wish to make the
code available to avoid fragmentation of its platform. Instead, at the time of this writing,
6 | Chapter 1: Introduction