We’ve been hearing rumors about it for awhile now, but in an interview with the New York Times, Google’s Vice President for engineering, Andy Rubin, has confirmed that the new Android 2.2 OS will feature full support of Adobe’s Flash.
Rubin confirmed that Flash support will be standard in the new Android OS that has been circulating under the codename Froyo. In what is no doubt a dig at Apple (who have been at odds with Adobe to the point that both companies have decided to not do business), Rubin told the paper that sometimes being open “means not being militant about the things consumers are actually enjoying.”
When jokingly asked what he would do if he left a prototype Android phone sitting around, Rubin said, “I’d be happy if that happened and someone wrote about it. With openness comes less secrets.”
But it isn’t just Apple that Google has its eye on. The search engine uber-company is planning an all out assault on the smartphone market, and the Android OS is the lynchpin to it designs. Rubin believes that the openness of the Android OS will help Google win the market as more companies are allowed to develop apps without restriction.
“It’s a numbers game,” he said when asked if he thought Android phones outsold both the iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry phones. “When you have multiple O.E.M.’s building multiple products in multiple product categories, it’s just a matter of time.”
According to Comscore, Google currently holds 9 percent of the market share as of February, putting it in fourth place. Microsoft is third with 15 percent, Apple is second with 25 percent, and RIM is in first with 42 percent of the market share. Google saw an increase of 5 percent since November, and of the four it grew the most. Currently smartphones account for 19 percent of the cell phones in the U.S.
Rubin didn’t have much to say on the Google tablet yet, but you can expect more comments to be directed towards Apple’s OS very soon. In the meantime, Rubin is betting that the open nature of the Android OS will make Google the winner in the smartphone market.
“I don’t know when it’s might be, but I’m confident it will happen. Open usually wins.”
