Steve Jobs is not making any new friends in the Android community today. The Apple chief executive criticized the Google-owned mobile OS as fragmented during Apple's Monday earnings call, prompting a brief Twitter response from Google's Andy Rubin, and now, a similar message from TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth.
"Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't," Dodsworth tweeted.
Jobs said Monday that Android is "very, very fragmented," and that TweetDeck, which he accidentally called TwitterDeck, "had to contend with more than a hundred different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets."
TweetDeck recently released an Android version of its mobile app. The company also released a list of the various Android versions its 36,000 beta testers used throughout the testing process. The vast majority - or 18,268 people - were running Android 2.2 Froyo, followed by 11,768 people running Android 2.1, update 1, but there were many other variations of Android represented.
Jobs said these "multiple hardware/software iterations presents developers with a daunting challenge."
Toby Padilla, head of mobile at TweetDeck, however, said last week that "it's pretty cool to have our app work on such a wide variety of devices and Android OS variations."
Dodsworth also tweeted that TweetDeck only has two staffers working on the Android version of its product, "so that shows how small an issue fragmentation is."
Jobs, meanwhile, expressed skepticism that Android was truly open.
"Google loves to characterize Android as 'open' and iOS and iPhone as 'closed.' We find this a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches," Jobs said. "The first thing that most of think about when we hear the word 'open' is Windows, which is available on a variety of devices. Unlike Windows, however, where most PCs have the same user interface and run the same apps, Android is very fragmented."
Rubin, who serves as vice president of engineering at Google, responded with a tweet that included the commands needed to start compiling a copy of Android on a home Linux machine. Translation: anyone can develop for, hack, or even create a version of Android.
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