Android will be updated once a year

Andy Rubin, head of the Android project at Google, spoke in  an interview with Mercury News about further plans for the development of the operating system. In particular, the question was raised about  too frequent updates , because of which developers are experiencing great difficulties.

Since the fall of 2008, when the first version of Android was released, four major updates have been released (1.5 Cupcake, 1.6 Donut, 2.0 / 2.1 Eclair and 2.2 Froyo). And each time, developers had to redo their applications for compatibility.

According to Andy Rubin, after the release of Android 2.2, the company plans to slow down such a high rate of release of updates. First, they will appear every six months, and over time, no more than once a year:

Awe've gone through a lot of product iterations because we had to bring the product up to market spec. Quite honestly, the product when we launched it, it didn't really feel like a 1.0, it felt like kind of an 0.8, but it was a window of opportunity and the market needed an entrant at the holiday season.

So we launched it, and from our internal 0.8, we got to 1.0 pretty quickly, and we went through this iteration cycle. You've noticed, probably, that that's slowed down a little bit. Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end up up being once a year when things start settling down, because a platform that's moving - it's hard for developers to keep up. I want developers to basically leverage the innovation. I don't want developers to have to predict the innovation.