Exclusive Q&A: Google's Andy Rubin Talks Android

SAN FRANCISCO—Androids are marching across the land. Google's Android smartphone OS has been making huge gains in U.S. market share according to recent surveys, with high-profile phones like Motorola's Droid X and Samsung's Galaxy S leading the charge. At this week's CTIA Wireless trade show, Android dominated the field - more than a dozen new Android phones have appeared this week alone. (Check out our slideshow to see some of the Android phones shown at CTIA.)

I had a chance to quiz Rubin this week on some hot-button Android issues, including the number of Android versions available, whether carriers can ruin phones, the upcoming Android 3.0 and whether he thinks Windows Phone 7 is a threat.

PCMag.com: We have all these [Android] versions out there, people are still releasing phones on 1.6 … how can you guys give developers and consumers a consistent experience when there are all of these different versions and different overlays going out there?

Operating system that I claimed

If I were to release an operating system that I claimed was open and that forced everybody to make [phones] all look the same and all support very narrow features and functionality, the platform wouldn't win. It wouldn't win because the OEMs have a lot of value to bring and the carriers have a lot of value to bring, and they need a vehicle by which to put their interesting differentiating features on these things. Every phone shouldn't look like every other phone. If that was the case there would just be one SKU, right? The whole idea here is just to figure out what consumers want, build phones and tailor them to what consumers want.

Well, it's tough to draw the line, and we think about that a lot. First of all, we don't like drawing lines. We like making exceptions, and we learn a lot in the process. … The point of being open is that I've given up control of what can be put on phones, and put it in the hands of everybody in the community.

Yes and no. It's always going to be like that. I'm not trying to be a wireless carrier, I'm not trying to assert authority over the wireless operators, but I think it's kind of like that 1.5 and 1.6 versus 2.2 scenario. I think over time they'll learn what is good business and what is bad business. Google is a big believer in openness and openness means customization. There's a difference between customization and personalization. Personalization is something the consumer does, customization is something an OEM or operator does. And they have to find the right balance there.

Back in January, I had this really interesting talk with Erick Tseng about the Nexus One, which was supposed to offer an alternative retail model by which Americans could pick their phone and technology and carrier independently. But that doesn't seem to have panned out.

Making unlocked phones available in the U.S. is still a possibility. Whether that's simply acquired only online or through traditional retail channels - that's what got canceled. So we have to decide how to make unlocked phones available in the U.S.

The system is the blending of the Web

Another cool architectural feature of the system is the blending of the Web and a native app. So we have this notion of mashups where a developer that develops an application for the phone can have the same freedom as developers that develop Web applications. And the thing that fascinated me about Web applications was the pace at which they iterate. You could develop a Web application and do six releases a day and the user wouldn't even know. All he'd get is more stability, faster with more features during the day.

Well, it's a good question. Today what Google Voice is, it's a front end for your existing phone number, and it's also an optimized voicemail system … whether we actually become a voice service provider, that's probably a question for the Google Voice team, but also I'd have to think carefully about what that means for the wireless operators, who are our partners. You wouldn't expect us to be a voice service provider for wireless.

More forms of communication. I think social media is a form of communication. I think you would just talk about general improvements to the platform and make it faster and more robust. I think gaming is an area that I think is underserved right now. We're actually going through a reinvention of casual gaming. If you look at a console game like an XBOX or a PlayStation or a Nintendo, I think it's very, "sit down and try to get to the maximum level possible." On cell phones and devices that are battery operated, I think there's more kind of "what do you do in between the times when you're doing something?" It's more about running a game to fill time rather than running a game to be a dedicated event.

What new features

If we were to carefully look at what new features and functionalities in the platform that we would need to support all forms of gaming across the entire spectrum, I think that would probably be an interesting thing to pay attention to. I think that more blending of the Web and native is probably interesting. If you look at things like HTML5 support, more features, more functionality, our browser right now is probably one of the best performing browsers on a mobile phone. It's the fastest, it's the smallest. We'll be adding more functionality to the browser to give it an updated user experience as well.

The back end part of that, the services that the actual cloud offers, Google has been in that business since day zero. Search was the first thing, and then Gmail, and YouTube, and Google Talk and everything else. So those cloud-enabled services actually give the device a better experience because the cloud is doing the heavy lifting. The cloud is humming away with unlimited bandwidth, acting on your behalf.