Google offers Android updates only to contest winners
A Google employee working on the Android mobile phone operating system made a gaffe that has some developers saying they've had enough and plan to focus their efforts on the iPhone, instead of Android.
David McLaughlin, Android advocate at Google, apologized on an online forum for accidentally sending a note intended for winners of a developers' contest to a wider list of developers. The note implies that Google has been privately offering updates to the SDK (software development kit) only to a subset of developers, even while the broader developer community has been complaining about a lack of updates to the SDK.
"Ahhhh, now it makes sense," one developer wrote on the Android forum. "So they've been making private SDK releases while the rest of us suffer with the pile of bugs from the 4+ month old release."
The incident comes just a couple of weeks after one developer began circulating an online petition asking Google for updates or at least information about when updates to the SDK might become available.
Google risks losing developers just as competition for their attention is heating up. Developers can now build applications for Apple's popular iPhone. While Google's Android attracted considerable excitement when it was launched, it has more recently been criticized for a slow development process.
"Personally, I'm heading over to iPhone development," one person wrote on the Android forum.
Some of the developers say that Google required winners of the first round of the competition to sign a nondisclosure agreement in order to receive the latest revisions to the SDK. "The e-mail you all received was an accident, but is essentially an admission of this policy," Josh Guilfoyle, an Android developer wrote on the forum.
Google did not reply to a request for comment about the incident.
IDG News Service
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
Enterprise 2.0 Implementation
By Aaron C. Newman, Jeremy Thomas
Published by McGraw-Hill
Learn more!
Deploying Cisco Wide Area Application Services
By Zach Seils, Joel Christner
Published by Cisco Press
Learn more!
You might be interested in
You might be interested in reading this. It seems like a lot of sites have picked up on the story and have been reporting it half correctly.http://androidguys.com/2008/07/16/as-usual-some-tech-bloggers-are-getting-it-wrong/