Google to Hide Android 3.0 Honeycomb Source Code from Developers

Google has decided not to reveal the source code of the new Android 3.0 Honeycomb to outside developers yet.

Honeycomb was developed especially for the tablets from scratch, and looks like Google isn’t ready to entrust the codes to anyone other than big manufacturers like HTC , Samsung, LG and Motorola.

“To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs,” Andy Rubin, Head of Android and vice-president for engineering at Google, says. “We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extend our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut.”

The source codes of older versions of Android were made public by Google, and any developer could play around with them and put them on different devices. But Honeycomb has to be kept away from developers and users yet, since Google isn’t sure it will work on smartphones and other mobile devices, if installed there. Rubin says he knows there are many users who will want to have Honeycomb on their phones, but he notes that Google has “no idea if it will even work on phones.”

So, looks like the developers will have to wait a bit before they get the chance to put Honeycomb on anything other than tablets. I guess they won’t have to wait for too long though. After all, as Google has noted, Android remains an open-source project, and sooner or later the developers will get the Android 3.0 source codes.

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