Google will abandon Android  

Charlie Kindel talks about why Google will ditch Android.

I’m not sure if Google will abandon it entirely, but I could absolutely see them forking it and that fork becoming the most popular version. Such a fork would continue to be made available at a delayed rate to OEMs, but it would allow Google to have tighter controls over hardware specifications and to build proprietary features into it.

It would involve a significant amount of lost face, but they have to do something, the current state of Android is ridiculous.

The fragmentation of Android will only get worse and I think that Google realized that it needs its own channel of hardware and software if it’s ever going to fix it. This is why it has been a bad deal for Android OEMs from the start. This was the inevitable outcome.

I doubt it will be called the ‘Google Play’, but an upcoming tablet running an in-house fork of Android and built by Motorola doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.