According to the Wall Street Journal (which charges $90 per year to access full articles), Google’s Android plans aren’t moving quite as fast as the company had hoped.
Android chief Andy Rubin told the Wall Street Journal, “This is where the pain happens. We are very, very close.”
The slowdown appears to be a result of copious reams of red tape from carriers coupled with constant changes to the Android platform frustrating developers.
GigaOM reports some of the main problems being…
— T-Mobile USA is taking up all of Google’s attention, since the company wants to launch a device in the 4th quarter. This is diverting attention away from other partners.
— Executive reshuffle at Sprint is causing some delays. Sprint now wants to develop an Android phone for its 4G network instead of 3G network. Sprint as we know, is like a dancer with two left feet.
— China Mobile’s equipment partner is having a tough time translating Android into Chinese characters.
— Developers are finding it hard to write apps for Android because Google keeps making changes to the Android.
Electronista reports that T-Mobile’s Android phone will supposedly still ship in late 2008 but that Sprint apparently won’t be seeing the handsets until early next year now because “it wants to put its own services on the device rather than sell it with Google’s default software alone.” This is an area where the platform can run into trouble; service providers wanting to install a bunch of default software onto the otherwise open source devices.