Android 2.3 was announced a few days ago. The previous day, CyanogenMod 6.1, the most popular community mod was released, based on Froyo (2.2). And today, just a short two weeks after the announcement, the source code for the latest version of Android is being released!

The release marks the end of the 2.x era, with Google, most definitely, working hard on the 3.x series aimed for release in the first quarter of 2011 and — hopefully — taking the fight with iOS up a notch. Just an hour ago cyanogen posted this on twitter:

If you need me, I’ll be locked in my room for the next 3 days. #gingerbread

I feel that right now that’s precisely what makes Android sell, and by extension the popularity and characteristics of such projects give many clues on the demographics of those buying Android devices.

In other words, the ‘magic’ of the platform is its rapid evolution and by extension its community (a community that is largely technology oriented), something not to be found in HTC’s or Samsung’s wanna-be iPhone devices (or their mediocre software), Sony Ericsson’s lifestyle apps or Motorola’s ‘macho’ Droid phone and its seriously bad Motoblur. These are commercial parts of a nascent platform that — until now — enthuse few outside the technology community.

Stuff like CyanogenMod are exciting because they evolve extremely fast and at the same time let your imagination run wild with features that half-baked commercial Android ‘flavours’ couldn’t never have. A combination — and even the ‘controlled’, sterile in a way, yet amazingly polished environments like iOS lacks.

And this is, sadly, something that most major Android device manufacturers don’t get, judging by the effort they put in locking their products down, the amount of crapware they bundle with them and the restrictions they place to their customers.

By the way, if you’re using a supported device, like e.g. the HTC Desire, I recommend you get rid of Sense right now, get CyanogenMod, or another mod if so you prefer, and turn the damn thing into a usable gadget. You won’t regret it*.

*If you do, I won’t be held responsible for any damage you may cause to your device.

Still watching the Google Chrome Team Livestream. Google is on a massive release streak that clarifies their strategic outlook for the next two years. In two days we’ve had: Android 2.3 and a short Android 3.0 sneak-peek, the eBook store, (V8) Crankshaft, Chrome Webstore and Chrome OS.

The Store.

With the Chrome Web store, Google is attempting to replicate the AppStore model on the Web. From the point of view of a Web user, I find it useless, or in other words a glorified bookmarking system, coupled with a payment processing system and proprietary functionality that ties everything to Google; most of the things that the Chrome Web store offers are already here, although they are not offered by a single company. Payments, for example, take place all the time through trusted third-party payment processors, including Google. Discovery of new sites/apps happens daily through social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, a number of trusted publications, word of mouth etc. There’s no doubt that a web site/application directory, or a fancier way to ‘bookmark’ web apps might be useful, but that would be a much more noble proposition to what Google talked about today and it would need to be done in a cross-browser way that would be inclusive to other browser developers and the community as a whole.

The apps. The Web. Openness and Google.

The NY Times Chrome application is just a modern website I visited while the presentation was taking place. Amazon’s WindowShop is a Flash client for their store. A flash game could reside behind a third-party game portal. None of those things have anything to do with the ‘Store’.

The Chrome ‘Webstore’ makes things ‘easier’ and more streamlined for Chrome users and developers, but flies in the face of the openness and independence of the Web. It introduces a new dependency, Google Chrome for its proprietary functionality and Google, for its payment processing services and at the same time raises barriers to entry to other browsers that might very well be standards compliant, but lacking the ‘Web store’ functionality. It ties web applications, their users and developers to Google, even if that’s in the form of the additional work that developers will have to do to provide versions of their applications for the Chrome Web store, the ‘Web’ or even other ‘Stores’, if and when they appear.

There’s no need for any new ‘dependencies’, no need for web apps making use of ‘proprietary’ functionality found in any one browser; we’ve had that nightmare with IE for many years late in the 20th century and for several years the web was the domain of IE.

Google’s intention with the Web store, however, is not at all limited to the Web. It might be that the reasons for the Webstore’s existence fail to convince, but the company’s desire clearly goes far beyond that: Google aims to provide a single place for Applications that fits their upcoming Chrome OS strategy, which, by extension, aims to centralise everything in their own data centres.
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There is an untold general, cross-platform, inter-device rule regarding versioning: Major versions are major because they expose significant improvements and functional upgrades to the user whereas minor versions are typically either minor feature upgrades or bugfix releases.

Many projects, corporations and communities deviate from that loosely defined rule, but none do so more than Google has with Chrome. A browser that adopted the best of breed open source technology available at the time and pair it with newly developed, open source components managed to become the sweetheart of the tech community in less than two years. I started using Chrome when the first Mac and Linux versions came out, and since this spring it’s my main browser.

The other day, Update Manager on Ubuntu prompted me that Chrome 8 beta was available. Arguably, eight ‘major’ versions in two years sounds like a huge feat, but as of late I fail to see the point. Chrome 8 beta has little — if any — user-visible improvements or functional upgrades. It has none of the speed improvements that users experienced before in major-version upgrades. On my 64bit linux workstation, the only obvious difference is that they fixed some major SVG bugs that troubled me while coding the GEO|ADS analytics engine.

It seems that Google aims to exceed Version 9 before IE does, but at this rate the versioning scheme adopted by Google will become cumbersome before the end of 2011:

“Hey, I installed Chrome 26 yesterday. 1% faster Javascript execution, some obscure bug fix and a minimally redesigned arrow on the back button! yay!”