Android - Is It All Down To The Browser?

[Rand5]

Here's an interesting article on Android that touch's on the possible control some carriers and handset manufacturers could have over the Android OS.

What Google is less keen to highlight, however, is how Android’s openness could potentially lead to the platform becoming fragmented, resulting in a mishmash of incompatible flavors or implementations. That’s because, notes The Register, Google plans on open sourcing Android “under a freewheelin’ Apache license” in which carriers and handset makers will be able to make any modifications they like. These could be as innocuous as cosmetic changes to the UI, such as replacing icons with the networks’ own branding, to something more significant like swapping which default applications and services are installed, including the option to remove Google’s own wares and, say, replace them with Yahoo’s or a carrier’s own.

The article then goes on to highlight that the most important application for the Android platform will be the WebKit based browser.

Besides, Google is really banking on there being at least one application that the carriers and handset makers leave well alone, regardless of how else they tinker with the OS. And for Google’s purposes that application far exceeds the importance of any other, and offers the best hope of giving developers, including Google themselves, the unified mobile platform they crave.

That application is of course Android’s mobile Web browser, built on the same WebKit source code as Apple’s version of Safari for the iPhone. Nokia also utilizes WebKit in its own browser, albeit one built on older code.

Read the full article here:
http://www.last100.com/2008/06/01/an...browser-stupi/

What do you guys think? Will the Android's browser be paramount to the success of the open source platform, or merely just paramount for Google's mobile Ad platform?