Google explains why it dropped GTalk and Bluetooth from first round Android


In its developers’ blog, Dan Morrill, Google’s ‘Developer Advocate’ explained why the company is not including GTalkService and Bluetooth in Android 1.0 SDK. In a nutshell, Google: “plain ran out of time.”

Specifically GTalkService was postponed due to security concerns that the company felt “placed a significant burden on the application developer to avoid security flaws and perform user and relationship management.”

While the Bluetooth was far enough along to be included in beta releases of the SDK, it “needed some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK…Rather than ship a broken API that we knew was going to change a lot, we chose not to include it.”

Google assures us that Bluetooth headsets will still work with the first round of Android-based handsets and that the company “absolutely intends to support a Bluetooth API in a future release,” though no specifics on when that will be.

Via the Android Developers Blog