Android Joins the Party: Mobile Won't Belong to One Company

For months, the mobile conversation has orbited one device from one company. On November 5, Google reframed it. Android is not a phone, pointedly. It is an open-source mobile operating system, backed by an Open Handset Alliance of thirty-four companies. Handset makers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and LG. Carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint. Chip makers too.

First devices are promised for the second half of 2008. The press spent the week asking where the ‘gPhone’ was. We think the absence of a gPhone is the story, and it settles the strategic question the iPhone opened in January.

What was actually announced

Precision first, since vapor deserves labeling. No hardware exists for consumers today. What shipped is a software development kit and a Linux-based open-source platform any manufacturer may use without licensing fees. At its center sits a WebKit-based browser. That is the same rendering engine family behind Safari, desktop and iPhone.

The browser detail matters most for our purposes. Whatever else Android becomes, its web story starts from a modern engine that renders standards-based sites properly, not from the WAP-era compromises that made ‘mobile internet’ a punchline.

Google’s motive requires no squinting. The company’s business is web usage. More capable browsers in more pockets means more searches, more pages, more ads. An open, free platform spreads capable browsing everywhere. The web, where Google wins, becomes the mobile platform rather than any single vendor’s walled garden. Whether a thirty-four-company alliance can execute is the open question. Alliances that size have historically excelled mainly at press releases. But the logic is sound, and Google’s resources are patient.

The planning assumption this changes

Here is the sentence to carry out of this post: the mobile future is now officially multi-vendor, multi-size, and multi-price. January’s iPhone announcement proved premium demand for real browsing. November’s answer means that capability will not stay premium or singular.

Android handsets will arrive from many makers at many prices, each with its own screen size. They will sit alongside Apple’s device and whatever Nokia and the others ship in response. Nokia, remember, put WebKit in its S60 browser before either of these announcements. The capable-browser pocket web is coming from every direction at once.

Which means the tempting strategy was just revealed as a trap. That strategy is building for the iPhone specifically, because it is the device your board members carry. Anyone who builds an iPhone-shaped experience in 2008 will meet Android’s screen diversity in 2009 with a site optimized for exactly one rectangle.

We watched this movie during the browser wars. Sites ‘best viewed in’ one vendor’s product aged into maintenance burdens as the market diversified. Device-specific optimization is the same bet with smaller screens.

What compounds instead

The strategy that survives every vendor’s announcement is the one we have advised all year, so we will be brief and unapologetic about the repetition. Standards-based markup that modern engines render properly. Both announced platforms run WebKit, so clea sites are largely ready by construction. Light pages, because cell networks will lag device abilities for years. And layouts that avoid rigid assumptions about width, hover, and input precision.

Every one of these costs nothing extra during normal work and pays on every device, announced and unannounced. That is what a foundation is: the thing you do not rebuild per gadget.

The timing signal remains yours, not the industry’s. Mobile-capable browsers are a measurable segment, and we have been adding that segmentation to client reviews all year. Today the numbers are small nearly everywhere. The quarter they are not is the quarter device-conscious investment earns its business case. For a university with gadget-forward applicants, that may come startlingly soon. For an industrial B2B firm, later. Both timelines are fine. Both are decisions with data under them, which beats decisions with keynotes under them.

What ‘open source’ means here, and the risk it imports

The licensing choice deserves a closer look than the coverage gave it. Android is offered under a permissive license. Manufacturers can take it, modify it, and ship it without fees or any obligation to contribute changes back.

That is rocket fuel for adoption, since free is a compelling price to a handset maker watching margins. It is also the seed of this platform’s predictable problem: fragmentation. Nothing in a permissive license stops every manufacturer and carrier from shipping its own variant. Different screens, different browser builds, different bundled meddling. Eventually ‘runs Android’ describes a family of cousins rather than a platform.

The Java world spent a decade fighting exactly this on phones. Open source does not repeal the incentives. It removes the licensing brake on them. For web teams the implication is mercifully simple, and it is the one we keep arriving at: test against standards and reasonable ranges, not against any single ‘Android device,’ because there will be no single Android device.

The carriers are the other wildcard, and the alliance’s most interesting internal tension. American carriers have historically treated handsets as vehicles for their own portals and fees. Crippled Bluetooth, walled browsing, the whole sorry catalog. An open platform threatens precisely that control. Two of them signed the alliance anyway. Watch what T-Mobile’s first device actually allows in 2008. It will say more than any press release about whether ‘open’ survives contact with a subsidy model.

Our bet, updated

In January we guessed at several credible pocket browsers within a couple of years, from several vendors, at several prices. November obliged faster than expected, on paper. The 2008 questions we will track: whether Android handsets ship on schedule and render as promised. Whether the alliance holds when members’ interests diverge. And whether anyone besides Apple can make the touch web feel good rather than merely function.

Meanwhile the advice stands, cheaper than ever to follow. Build for the web, not for any one gadget. Including, now especially, the gadget everyone is watching. The market just promised there will be many. Believe it, and build accordingly.

One closing thought for the strategy file. The two biggest mobile announcements of the past year came from companies whose core businesses are not phones. A computer maker and a search company are dragging an entire industry toward the open web, because the open web is where their interests live. When outsiders with better incentives enter a stagnant market, the incumbents’ roadmaps stop mattering rather quickly. Keep that pattern in mind well beyond mobile.