Nothing is more important to the success of Google's mobile future that its ability to sell Android phones, according to the company's "open source guru" Chris DiBona. "This is going to sound really
cynical, but the only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship -- how many Android phones," DiBona said on Web TV show Cranky Geeks. "There is a linear relationship between the number of
phones you ship and the number of developers."
Still, DiBona acknowledges that the company's approach to building a mobile operating system has caused difficulties for developers, with
unfamiliar versions of its Android OS appearing on new phones with little warning. For example, when Google unveiled the Nexus One on Tuesday morning, it also unveiled a new version of Android -- 2.1
-- which had not yet been open-sourced. By contrast, rivals like Microsoft and Apple have NDA programs that let developers test a new platform before it ships.
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