Android Updates Will Slow to Once a Year says Andy Rubin

One of our biggest gripes about Android is that it has been evolving too rapidly. In just a little over a year and a half, it went from version 1.0 to 2.2 and developers and manufacturers have been struggling to keep up. Fragmentation has been Android’s curse, and when you have hardware and applications that don’t play nicely with different versions of Android, you have a problem. Andy Rubin, the mastermind and head of Android, says that as Android matures, updates will slow down to about once a year.

“Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end 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,” said Rubin.

As Android becomes more polished and mature, it only makes sense that updates will be less frequent. The upside is that more handsets can catch up and run the same version of software, and custom user interfaces like Motoblur and Sense UI will have time to adapt to these updates. Now, can we just get 2.2 onto the Droid a little sooner, please? And maybe the newer Sense UI devices shortly after that?

via TechCrunch