Last years 12.5 Billion dollar purchase of Motorola by Google kind of came out of the blue and shocked everyone. Eurpoean and US regulators approved the purchase earlier this year but the Chinese have been more hesitant however they have finally approved the deal with the stipulation that Google keeps Android free for a minimum of 5 years and with the approval by China means that the sale could be finalised as early as next week.
Google has always supplied the Android source code via AOSP(Android Open Source Project) to anyone who wants to compile the source code, by doing so Google gets their services onto as many devices as possible which is in the end what makes them money. Google has maintained throughout the sale process that they would be building a so called ‘firewall’ between the two companies and they would continue to operate independently of each other meaning that Motorola would have no early access to the source code of the latest Android OS nor would they receive preferential treatment.
According to the Wall Street Journal recently, in order to further nullify concerns from OEMs, Google will be looking to offer early access to the latest Android OS source code to multiple OEMs possibly paving the way for multiple ‘Nexus’ devices or at the very least devices running vanilla versions of Android, which would see manufacturers competing with each other on hardware design and specs rather than the ‘skins’ they currently use to differntiate their handsets.
I like the idea of vanilla Android devices but personally don`t see it happening. The OEMs are way to invested in their skins to give them up completely, they truly believe they give value to their devices. What I see happening is rather than waiting 6 months for devices to start appearing running the latest version of the OS we may see them a lot sooner after Google does their big announcement which is a bit of a win. But all this is speculation, we’ll have to wait and see what happens, it does mean we could see some cooler stuff at Google IO next month but it’s probably a bit early yet. What are your thoughts on what we could see out of the Google – Motorola purchase?
