Google’s VP Of Engineering Confirms Full Flash Support In Android 2.2 Froyo, Compares Apple To North Korea

Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google, recently gave an interview to the New York Times, touching on topics ranging from Flash to North Korea. With Google vying for top place in the smartphone market, Rubin seemed confident that Android devices can overtake the number of iPhones, saying

I don’t know when it might be, but I’m confident it will happen. Open usually wins.

When commenting on the number of Android devices that are currently on the market, Rubin said that the driving force behind Android taking off is the fact that it’s open and available to so many manufacturers, commenting on how

It’s a numbers game. When you have multiple O.E.M.’s building multiple products in multiple product categories, it’s just a matter of time.

Putting to rest any questions about the compatibility of Flash with Android 2.2, Rubin promised full support for the platform in Froyo, saying how being open “means not being militant about the things consumer are actually enjoying”.
Hopefully, there won’t be any issues with Flash implementation, and resource management will remain efficient with the plethora of Flash content scattered across the web.
One question put forward to Google’s VP during the interview was whether consumers actually care whether or not the software they use is ‘open’, to which he responded

When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea.

He was also quick to point out how Google use the same SDK that they give to developers when creating applications for the platform, and don’t have private API’s that aren’t available to developers outside of Google.

We use the same tools we expect our third-party developers to. We have an SDK we give to developers and when we write our Gmail app, we use the same SDK. A lot of guys have private APIs. We don’t. That’s on policy and on technology.
If there’s a secret API to hook into billing system we open up that billing system to third parties.
If there’s a secret API to allow application multitasking, we open it up.
There are no secret APIs. That is important to highlight for Android sake. Open is open and we live by our own implementations.

Responding to a question asked about how Android and Chrome were being viewed at Google, Rubin said how the platforms represented “two different ambitions”, although he didn’t go in to detail about the possibility of the two platforms merging together at some point in the future, which has been suggested in the past by some people at Google and would certainly make sense to me.