Google Keeping Android 3.0 Honeycomb Closed For Now

Google has decided not to release the source code for Honeycomb to outside developers anytime in the near future. Honeycomb was developed from the ground up specifically for tablets and Google isn't quite ready to let developers besides big manufacturers like Samsung, LG, HTC, and Motorola to play around with it yet.

"To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs," says Andy Rubin, Head of Android and vice-president for engineering at Google. "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."

Google has made the source code of earlier versions of Android public so that developers can customize them and load them onto whatever devices they can. Rubin wanted to restate that Google hasn't changed its stance on Android being an open-source project, but they're afraid that if they released Honeycomb to the masses right now it would lead to "really bad user experience." He knows that plenty of users want to put Honeycomb on their phone, but warns that "we have no idea if it will even work on phones." Looks like developers will have to wait just a little longer before they can put Honeycomb on any other device besides tablets for the time being.

[via Android Community]