The year Android had Multiple Personality Disorder

Summary: The past year Google’s Android brought us splits in versions, open source commitment, carrier and OEM implementations, preferred device vendors and application ecosystems.

For all of the progress Android has made in the last year in establishing itself as the leading smartphone operating system, commanding over a 46 percent market share according to comScore in its Q3 findings and sending RIM and its BlackBerry so then on its way towards platform irrelevance, so many other things went on that kept it from fully realizing its true potential.

If you could sum up what was wrong with Android in 2011, this in spite of it having achieving the market leading platform position in the mobile industry, Dissociative Identity Disorder just about describes it specifically. Here’s why.

The first and most easily recognizable problem is that for the past year, we’ve had in every way different versions of Android for smartphones and for tablets — Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

Matter of fact helped Android at all

None of this has as a matter of fact helped Android at all. Because there were more 2.x implementations of Android in the wild than 3.x, developers truly didn’t write many tablet-optimized Android apps, especially since everyone waited for that single unifying version for smartphones and tablets, Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0, which was only recently released into the wild.

As if having two distinctly different versions of Android in the wild to address two different target device formats wasn’t painful enough, Google as well decided to withhold the Honeycomb 3.x source code from developers, which potentially damaged their relationship with the Open Source community in the process.

Unfortunately, the inability of the developer community to participate in the Open Source process probably resulted in quite a bit of bad blood and and very then may have set back the progress of Android becoming a leading tablet OS by until further notice a year otherwise more.

Not to be deterred by Google’s identity problems with Android, Amazon went off spontaneously tangent and released Amazon Appstore for Android.

At first this was perceived as strictly a monetization play in order to piggyback on existing Android devices in order to leverage the growing Amazon ecosystem, but in the long run, everyone found out what was as a matter of fact the real reason for its existence was — to provide the basis for an utterly different Android tablet universe from Amazon, in the form of the Kindle Fire.

Amazon’s implementation of Android, which I’ve nicknamed “Kindlebread” is a fork of the Open Source 2.3 Gingerbread code, nevertheless includes special APIs exactly for Amazon’s use as so then as a new UI layer and a special Amazon cloud-enabled browser named Silk.

Much like Apple has done for their iOS devices, the Kindle Fire’s Appstore is curated, so as to prevent the introduction of malware, incompatibilities and badly performing applications into their ecosystem, something that the official Google Android Market lacks.

Assuming that the “Official” licensed Android tablets from the usual OEMs continue with a similar growth curve, Kindle Fire is all in all on track to become the top Android tablet device brand in North America and the world.

The wide proliferation of shovelware

The wide proliferation of shovelware, varied implementations of Android versions and the overall inability to get software updates rolled out by the carriers and by the hardware manufacturers in spite of Google’s stated commitment to rectify this problem back in May at Google I/O is another form of fractionalization that hurt Android in 2011 and projected an overall feeling of Multiple Personality Disorder.

As if everything documented in this article isn’t bad enough to put a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, 2011 as well saw Google drive a wedge between itself and its Android handset/tablet OEMs by announcing back in August that it was going to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

Indeed, both of these are areas in which competitor Apple currently holds the upper hand — however Google hasn’t done a particularly good job in communicating to the industry what it specifically plans to do with Motorola’s device subsidiary when and if the purchase is approved by the US and EU governments.

Will Motorola end up with a “Most Favored Nation” status that will give it privileged access to Android code and other Google ICAP? Right now, Motorola seems to be in a bit of a limbo area.

Motorola’s latest and greatest Android handset and tablet devices just as Droid Bionic, Droid Razr and Droid Xyboard so far have been subject to the same carrier shovel-ware abuse as all the other brands, and are lax in getting these devices upgraded to the current Ice Cream Sandwich software.

To add insult to injury, instead of Motorola, Google decided to use Samsung for its “Google Experience” smartphone with the Galaxy Nexus that launched this last week. Post-Merger, is Motorola going to be producing the Google Experience devices? We don’t know.

Will Motorola continue to make hardware at all, or simply become a research foundry for OEMs like Samsung, HTC and LG in order to provide vertical integration services? We don’t know.

Jason Perlow, Sr. Research Editor at ZDNet, is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies.