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
Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world
On Twitter now
Linux
Powered by Twitter
jfruh
Apple syncing patent can't come soon enough
pasmith
New Twitter features borrow from 3rd party clients
Esther Schindler
Open Source Changes the Software Acquisition Process
mikelgan
How to set up continuous podcast play on the new iTunes
David Strom
Five important Windows 7 mobility features
sjvn
Guard your Wi-Fi for your own sake
Sandra Henry-Stocker
Grepping on Whole Words
Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
Join the conversation here
Quick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.
Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.
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/