No, I’m not talking about Alice Cooper’s hit. This article refers to Google’s behaviour regarding Android and Standards. More concretely, about the fact of XMPP being banished from Android in favor of Google’s own protocol for Instant Messaging.
In order to put you in context, please, read the following lines:
“The com.google.android.xmppService package has been replaced by the com.google.android.gtalkservice package. This was done to better reflect the fact that this is a Google-specific service, and not part of the Android core.
This service has two goals: to provide a convenient way for developers to send peer-to-peer messages from their applications between handsets, and to provide an API for sending and receiving instant messages from Google’s Talk servers. Since it is not intended to be a generic XMPP API or gateway, and since in the future it will likely move to a binary protocol that will not be compatible with XMPP, we have renamed the Service to avoid confusion.
Developers who need standards-compliant XMPP functionality are encouraged to use a third-party library that provides that functionality.”
I’ve taken this lines from the Android SDK Milestone 5 Release - API Changes overview information. It’s not secret that Google has lately abandon their late “Don’t be evil” slogan for a more commercial one. But it’s old slogan was more than commercial: it reflected Google behaviour in terms of standards usage and support.
Android is a brand-new Java mobile flavor, not compatible with standard J2ME in any way. This means one thing: fragmentation in the Java Platform. And now, Google removes XMPP, the de-facto standard in internet instant-messaging and presence services, for their own Google Talk service. Google suggest ussing and external API in order to obtain such functionality. But, taking into account that Google is designing ANDROID as an open Mobile Operating System, What’s the point in substituting XMPP for a single purpose- single service protocol like Google Talk? Why don’t keep both options?
In my opinion, Google movement is clearly directed to encourage their own services’ usage in opposition to a more standards based approach. This strategy is not well received by the development community, which bet on open standards, and it will hamper wide adoption of instant messaging services in ANDROID applications.
Bad news for mobile developers. Very bad news.
