Antonio Rodriguez was very skeptical in his last blog post about the future of Android and predicts that it will die in the next two years:

The dream of a common Android that developers can write/deploy apps to and users can become familiar with is burning. More specifically, three events in 2011 burned it and we’re now holding on to a charred corpse that is quite different: an Android so splintered that it will make the glass on your Galaxy Nexus S2 Prime Pie dropped on concrete look like an ice skating rink.

The three events:

1.  Google buying Motorola and alienating all of the tier one handset makers (none of which to this day have the spine to state it publicly but all of which have now come up with their “plan B”), 
2.  Microsoft extracting licensing fees from these same handset makers in the form of IP indemnification and 
3.  Amazon shipping a wildly successful, yet unidentifiable, version of an old Android build over the holiday… and making it a wild success. 

Of the the three, #1 was completely avoidable but the other two may just have been the name of the game when there is so much at stake in the fight of who paints the interface for the next generation of computing.

Om Malik wrote on Gigaom about that same topic (http://gigaom.com/2012/01/10/apple-vs-samsung-and-the-reality-of-the-android-ecosystem ^[1]/):

These changes mean challenges for the developers who now need to make some tough choices. Over the holidays a developer friend asked me which Android should his startup focus its energies on? Since his company is making apps focused primarily on the U.S. and European market, it makes no sense for him to start obsessing about Huawei or ZTE at least in the near term. Motorola and HTC are slipsliding away.

My answer to him was to go for Amazon Kindle Fire for tablets and Samsung for the phones. Samsung and Amazon both are spending an incredible amount of advertising dollars to promote their platforms and it makes perfect sense for small startups (depending on their regional focus) to tie their lot with them. Between those two platforms, he would be backing winners that would bring the highest return on investment for his little company.

That is, and will be, the reality of the Android ecosystem.

For full details, please click here ^[2]